Jack Boss Coaching

So said the French bad-boy poet Arthur Rimbaud.  He noted that, like last year’s picnic in the previous post, memories of language’s past usage eclipse the possibility of authentic self-expression.  We’ll call this the Foment-Effect, as everyone knows that the only thing you foment is revolution.  The two words might as well be one.  Given the verb, language speaks the object.  We have no voice in the matter.

So what if we extend this.  Whenever I say “gotcha” to indicate understanding, I feel possessed by my father, as it was something he said all the time.  Prefacing our random thoughts with “So…” has spread throughout my office like a virus.  Then there are words of the moment that possess our public imagination.  We’ll call this the Hanging Chad Effect, after the previously unknown, somewhat naughty sounding, pieces of paper that symbolize the chaos of the 2000 election recount.  These words evoke a shared set of thoughts that reveal how deeply our minds have been colonized by a groupthink more subtle and interesting than Orwell’s.

It’s interesting because it speaks to the presence of otherness within us.  Our memories, associations, syntax and vocabulary are foreign objects within us.  Like last year’s picnic, they can delimit our imagination of the future or author our words at a given moment.  Rimbaud’s poetics were meant to  free us from the tyranny of the expected, to jar language loose from its mooring in cliched usage.

Today, therapy, coaching and consultation are all tools that individuals and organizations utilize to perturb stuck systems and offer new ways of speaking and understanding.