What Is Coaching? Part 1: Creative Emergence

“When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.”

-Eric Dolphy

One of the best parts of high school for me was playing music, specifically the upright bass in various classical and jazz ensembles. Classical music is typically what Bobby McFerrin calls “paper music,” meaning you play the notes on the page – notes already composed (almost always by someone else), and that’s it. While I loved learning classical music and was surprised many times by the profound creative vitality I experienced while performing it, jazz captured my heart in a fuller way. Jazz, unlike classical, prominently features improvisation, meaning it’s largely made up in the moment by the people performing it. The great jazz bassist Ron Carter summarized his musical quest as “finding the right notes.” The amazing thing is that the possible combinations of “right notes” are limitless.

Harmonizing Structure and Freedom

There were moments while performing jazz that I noticed myself falling into an experience of ecstatic flow where my playing seemed to arise on its own, unencumbered by thought or doubt and exquisitely synced up with what my bandmates were playing – a kind of collective creative emergence. I also noticed over time that these peak moments arose less often while playing music with no built-in structure (such as “free jazz”), which to me tended to feel “like playing tennis with the net down,” as Robert Frost described writing poetry with no meter. Nor did I frequently experience peak moments while playing music that was mostly or entirely pre-composed (McFerrin’s “paper music”). Rather, I found these ecstatic moments arose most readily when supported by a balance of structure and freedom, offering the creative energy somewhere to go without stifling its natural flow.

Excesses of both freedom and structure can lead to stagnation in our lives, but for different reasons – with too much freedom, we can find ourselves adrift, our energies diffused; with too much structure, we can find ourselves trapped in the familiar, like a horse with blinders on, cut off from awareness of the true possibilities around and within us. Yet sometimes structure provides boundaries that nourish freedom while freedom gives creative life to structure. Each can support the other in a mutually enhancing synergy.

I invite you to take a few minutes to reflect on the relationship between structure and freedom in your own life, including where and how you might be experiencing excesses or deficiencies of each, and where and how you might be experiencing synergy between the two. How do each of these configurations impact your mindset, your moods and emotions, your choices and behaviors, and the outcomes you experience?

How Is Coaching Like Jazz?

Some jazz tunes, like “Watermelon Man,” by pianist Herbie Hancock, provide a relatively simple and easy structure for beginners to improvise with. Others, like “Giant Steps,” by saxophonist John Coltrane, which I never dared play, are highly complex and require mastery to improvise well on. [Note: see the Additional Resources section for a link to a video of pianist Joey Alexander playing Giant Steps, in one of my favorite jazz performances, made even more remarkable by the fact that he was only eleven years old at the time of the recording.]

Coaching, like jazz, involves a lot of improvisation and, thankfully for us, its structure is relatively simple and, even more importantly, quite flexible, supporting creativity with ease. A coaching conversation is a bit like a jazz performance in that it usually starts with a theme, “composed” by the client, which leads to improvisation using that theme as a kind of organizing home base. However, unlike jazz tunes, which usually end with a restatement of the initial theme, coaching conversations can end in an entirely different way than they began, including transforming the initial theme or creating entirely new ones along the way. This is where creative emergence comes into play (and I’m using the word “play” here intentionally).

When structure and freedom are working well together, creative emergence unfolds naturally. When coaching, I offer a scaffolding of structure to my clients, drawing on my training and experience, while inviting them to explore freely within that structure. However, when I notice clients accessing their unique wholeness (a topic I will explore more in upcoming posts) and entering into a flow state, I privilege and prioritize whatever movements arise naturally from them and between us within that emergent space. In a way, this is my whole aim as a coach: to help clients enter, explore, and become familiar with their own process of creative emergence, arising out of and as an expression of wholeness. In my experience, this is where the richest insights, breakthroughs, healing, clarity, and wise direction emerge through coaching. With practice, clients can learn to access this space outside of coaching sessions and increasingly coach themselves from creative emergence and manifest its wonders in their lives.

Finding Inspiration

If you want to listen to an exceptional musical example of creative emergence, check out the album The Koln Concert by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. As described by Tim Harford on the Cautionary Tales podcast (see Additional Resources below), Jarrett’s performance occurred at the meeting point of extreme forced structure, in that he was playing a deeply flawed piano (undersized, with silent keys, a malfunctioning sustain pedal, and a harsh upper register), and extreme freedom, in that his playing was entirely improvised. By fully embracing the limitations of a piano well below his standards, Jarrett opened to the freedom of new musical possibilities and delivered a performance bursting with creativity. A concert that he and his manager almost didn’t bother to record because they expected it to be such a disaster became the best-selling piano album in history. That’s the power of creative emergence.

If you’ve benefitted from reading this post and would like to explore your unique creative emergence and how it might enrich your life, please schedule a free 55-minute conversation here. I look forward to speaking with you.

Additional Resources

Joey Alexander Trio performing “Giant Steps,” composed by John Coltrane (10 min video)

Cautionary Tales Episode 7: Bowie, Jazz, and the Unplayable Piano (30 min podcast)