Ep.6 Boundaryless Change Part 2: The Coaching Industry

In part 2 of this 3-part mini-series on boundaryless change, Katie speaks with CRR Global co-founder Marita Fridjhon about how boundaryless change is impacting the coaching industry. Across this conversation, we discuss: 

• How can coaches respond to an increasing awareness of boundaryless change
• Ways we can hold the complexity surrounding boundaryless change
• Some of the impacts on the coaching industry at large
• The most essential skills to help coaches and their clients work with boundaryless change

If you haven’t listened to it already, we would highly recommend listening to Boundaryless Change Part 1: The Meta View first.

 
Marita Fridjhon is a co-founder of CRR Global and mentor to an ever-growing community of practitioners in the field of Relationship Systems work. She designs curriculum and operates training programs in Relationship Systems Work for coaches, executives and teams. She came to this work from an extensive background in Clinical Social Work, Community Development, Process Work, Family Systems Therapy, Business Consulting and Alternative Dispute Resolution. She has an international mentor coaching practice of individuals, partnerships and teams. Her primary focus in coaching is on systemic change, leveraging diversity, creative communication, deep democracy in conflict management and the development of Learning Organizations.


For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time

We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.

Transcript

Key 

KC – Katie Churchman

MF - Marita Fridjhon

[Intro 00:00 – 00:06] 

KC – Hello and welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe relationship matters, from humanity, to nature, to the larger whole. I’m your host, Katie Churchman, and in part two of this three-part mini-series on boundaryless change I’m talking again with CRR Global co-founder Marita Fridjhon about how boundaryless change is impacting the coaching industry. Across this conversation we discuss how can coaches respond to an increasing awareness of boundaryless change; ways we can hold the complexity surrounding boundaryless change; some of the impacts on the coaching industry at large; and the most essential skills to help coaches and their clients work with change that’s without boundaries or borders. If you haven’t listened to it already we would highly recommend listening to boundaryless change part one: the metaview first. So, I bring you Marita Fridjon talking about boundaryless change and its impact on the coaching industry. 

KC – Marita, welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. As always, it’s such a delight to have you on the show. 

MF – Thank you Katie, you took the words, as always, out of my vocabulary, I was just going to say what a pleasure as always to sit here with you. 

KC – I wanted to reflect on our previous conversation we had together. We spoke about boundaryless change and an increasing awareness of the impact of ever wider systems. We often talk about the idea in systems work that no person is an island and the idea of boundaryless change very much embraces this – no system is an island. So, I wonder for today if we can talk about how this applies to us as coaches. How can we hold this boundaryless change? 

MF – I notice myself giggling because we are working and speaking in different complexities but also a complexity that’s always been there. So, I think that the boundaryless that we are talking about and have talked about last time has always been there. I think in humanity and with AI and… you know Covid kicked so much of humanity over the edge of going beyond the boundary of the physical connection into, now increasingly the connection is not in person, physical, but it is across the ether in multiple different locations globally. So already you could see that there is a boundaryless ability to connect in the past, but Covid opened the door to that in a very different way. So, you’re sitting in the UK, I’m sitting here, can we fly across to one another? Yeah. But the possibility now to cross geographical borders and boundaries has always been there but we as humanity are invited into and enrolled more and more into the experience of what we thought to be a boundary has always been without a boundary, and with that comes a whole different sense of responsibility and awareness that I think we need to have as coaches. 

KC – You’re right because there have always been, at least for the past 50 years, multicultural teams to a certain degree. But now there is an explosion because we don’t have to be in the same country to work together and that’s both very exciting, but it also brings challenges too. 

MF – Yeah and it’s one of the things that we see in our trainings, where in the past training and even coaching engagements happen in person, there was a frequency of – let’s go to training first because it’s a little bit easier to see it there – so with people sitting in a course room somewhere, 90%+ of them know the culture they’re sitting in, know the habits and the environments that they are together in because they come together, physically, from closer distances. What we see now when we are in a training course there are people from India, there are people from South Africa, there are people from the US… fill in the blanks. What you have is the boundarylessness across cultures that now need to sit together on the same screen, but our perception of it is different because we can’t touch it and we are not aware of the ever-increasing rippling effect of impact. 

KC – You made me think for the first time actually that when we’re online we’re sort of in a neutral our land in some ways and often we’re not seizing that opportunity, but if we were say, running a training in Amsterdam there would be that dominant culture of The Netherlands as opposed to if the training was in the UK. Yet, when we’re online it is sort of this strange in-between space, a no-man’s land, and yet I don’t always think we always see that is an opportunity but there really is that space to create something new together. 

MF – I think so and I sometimes wonder whether the amount of aggression and conflict that we see in our world at the moment, and we’ll come back to coaching because it’s boundaryless because it impacts us in coaching, but if I see the global increase in conflict resulting into wars and different counts of aggressions, I think some of it has to do with the threat that is experienced by so many when they are thrown into situations where they are across from something that they absolutely cannot understand or comprehend or are threatened by. And then when we think about what Gottman institute talks about is the four horsemen of the apocalypse, if we then think about blame. Blaming comes from a place, underneath the blame is something that wants to be protected because there’s a fear that something bad will happen to me, that’s why I’m blaming somebody else. But I think that humanity and us in the coaching industry are thrown more and more into needing to navigate in coaching those kinds of responses, where people are together or just from a systemic equity perspective occupy such different seats, that’s absolutely not the understanding or the expression of inequity that now sits in front of you and I think that’s why we see the increasing interest in explosion of team coaching in the coaching industry, where, how do we work with that system that is the team made up of such complexity. You know, when you think about that principle that the system relies on roles for the execution of its functions, that actually is a really good example of being boundaryless because the role for you as the podcast host and the role for me as the guest, those are clearly defined but the podcast content is arising from the inner roles that belong to both of us. So there’s  a moment where you take the lead and I need to sit back, and then there’s a moment where what I say impacts on you. You can see how in the complexity of our relationship we can just look at the role – the, ok this is your podcast, you ask the question, or now you be quiet, now it’s my turn to speak. Those are the outer roles, but the inner complexity is part of what we’re talking about when we think of the third entity. Because the third entity is a very different boundaried experience, but it also is boundaryless because this conversation in this third entity will impact multitudes who will then listen to it. So, there’s so much complexity and beauty. 

KC – Yeah, and it’s fascinating because it makes me think that when we’re working online I don’t think we’re aware of those differences so clearly, whereas if we were to have flown to Dubai for a team coaching workshop there’s that physical transition, whereas when we’re just signing online and there’s 10 different countries represented, I don’t think there’s often an awareness that we’re not all from the same place and so then maybe people just come with their way of doing things, as opposed to seeing that opportunity for our land. 

MF – I think you’re absolutely correct, I think that there’s something there that when we think of neurodivergence, when we think about trauma, when we think about any form of diversity, you and me sitting in two chairs, looking at one another where we only see one another’s faces and a part of the upper body. If I didn’t know I wouldn’t know you’re pregnant because I can’t see you fully. 

KC – Yeah that’s true! 

MF – If we walked into the same room there would be a very different connectivity, you could see how it’s shaken up our entire perception in humanity. 

KC – I wonder how we as coaches then, when we’re working with groups of people, say, a multicultural team, how can we help to raise their awareness of this boundarylessness because it seems that so often, we’re just assuming that yeah we’re online but we’re all from the same space and there’s a presumed DTA in a way, and that might not be serving the system. 

MF – Well that’s a question that we can go in 500 different directions with and there is no right answer. I think it really is where when we talk about the three phases that are integrative, our systemic evolution, I think it really relates to that first phase that’s about meeting. If I just think about, before we went into this conversation that now we call the podcast, the two of us had 10 minutes of a conversation and that conversation really didn’t have much to do with what we’re going to be talking about, it really was reaching across what can be seen as the boundary of physicality, but it actually is in the boundaryless space that we’re sitting in that’s virtual. We could still make the connection that is about where are you at the moment and how are you. So that’s the piece that is and always has been boundaryless, but we got so used to the boundary of physicality and I think from that perspective, when you’re talking about a team, we cannot assume that what we see in the physical world is where we need to meet people because we don’t know what’s happening below the screen and we don’t know what is happening behind the screen. So, that meeting place, that really is about the pause and the curiosity of not knowing that I think is one of the most important pieces for us as team coaches and as humanity, to really pause and to rehearse the boundaryless conversation we’re going to walk into, because I don’t know who I’m going to meet and I don’t know how they’re going to meet one another, and I don’t know what is the crisis that this team is sitting in that there’s the blaming of he, she and it because there is no boundary between he, she and it. It’s boundaryless and it won’t come across, the no boundary that is us in communication. So there really is that pause because we have no idea what we’re walking into. Ever. 

KC – Yeah, and I think that’s the thing about relationship which keeps us on our toes, is it’s always boundarylessness. We’ve definitely taken on that word now, boundarylessness, and I think the thing with team coaching is that often we have a time frame. 

MF -Yes. 

KC – And what I’m hearing more and more from people going through the trainings is clients are asking for half days and so time is even more compressed, or three-hour sessions. And so then how do you allow for relationship? I think sometimes we go in and we’re like ok we’ll do a 10-minute check in, and you can’t contain relationship within 10 minutes, but I think ultimately we have to plan to a certain degree and so it’s quite hard to sometimes hold a team coaching plan with also, at the same time, holding that boundarylessness. 

MF – I think you’ve really summarized the problem and the challenge that we’re facing at the moment. When we could hold boundaries clearly as boundaries, we could have different followership of the boundaries. But now when it becomes without a boundary, we have to dance with it in a very different way. 

KC – Yeah. 

MF – And I think that that’s the place where if we stay in that meeting place too long we can’t get to the true understanding of what it is that we have around us, in front of us and inside us that is without boundary. Those are the pieces that needs to be revealed in that second intro to sayings and I think just knowing and just being able to speak that I have no idea what is sitting in front of me and around me, and if you just ask that question without giving people the space to sit with it and to feel how they are with boundary, because we need to get safety there first. 

KC – Well, I wonder, you mention team coaching and how there’s been an explosion of team coaching and why do you feel the coaching industry at large is moving in this direction? It’s not that induvial coaching is going away at any time soon but there seems to be a real push for team coaching and systems coaching. 

MF – I do think that when we go in the direction of team coaching and using a systems inspired approach, we are practicing our own ability without boundary. Without losing integrity. Again, are we shaping what is happening around us or are we being shaped by what is happening around us? I think that humanity is being shaped by what is happening around it, whether it is what’s happening in nature, whether it’s what’s happening corporate wise, you can see how all of those impacts have no boundary. In the past we could hold them separately because that was easier for us to navigate within each one of those complexities. Now as coaches, team coaches thinking more and more systemically, I think this is what is trying to evolve, our ability to be more aware and to sit with this which not necessarily has boundaries that we can see, how do we navigate that with safety? What about that can we navigate in a safe way? And every single topic that we’re thinking about, that we’ve mentioned here, whether we’re thinking about a team that’s working in protecting nature and working with climate crisis, or whether we’re working with a team that’s an engineer team or we’re working with a team that’s in government, those teams work and experience their own what’s happening within the boundary of that team, and I think that that’s what we get contracted to do. But there’s a place where more and more I think in team and the kind of coaching that we describe, we need to be able to sit with the localized within this system that I’m working with, within the boundary that we are having the conversation in, we need sit and work with what can be solved and what needs to be negotiated there. I think the increasing invitation for us as team and enterprise transformation coaches is to at the same time help and suggest that those teams lift the gaze to see what is happening here is a parallel process to also what is happening out there. Because the perceived boundary doesn’t actually exist, the conversation, the struggle that we sit with in this team also plays out somewhere else in multiple ways. Where and how does it play out in the complexity of our entire organization? So, I think that there is, so often I see it when I do mentoring or even supervision for team coaches how there’s such a focus on what needs to be solved and managed in the goals of the teams that we’re working with and that we are appointed to contractually. I think that there is more and more the need for us to see the boundary and work within the boundary that is this team that is mine to coach. But then part of the agenda also needs to be an awakening of how they are boundaried in one way but there also is the rest of the organization and from the organizational management perspective there is the same thing, the look it’s not just our organization but how is this happening somewhere else? Because from the moment we can look up and can look out and can see the emergence of same and similar things elsewhere, there’s a different motivation to make change within our own boundary where we have more locus of control. 

KC – Yeah. Because now we see where that comes from, or at least we have a greater awareness of where we perceive it to come from. I was working with a team and I was doing interviews and what came up was that there was a real email culture, ‘oh we have a real email culture, we can’t stop sending emails’, and then over time you start to hear that actually this is the company at large, there’s a real email culture and then you only have to look a little, you lift the gaze a little higher and suddenly you see we’re a real email world actually, we’re very driven by emails, and often we’re CCing way too many people on emails and so it was sort of fascinating for them to see actually it’s not just their team or their department, actually it’s the whole company but it’s also the world, we have this sort of urgency to reply and to respond and I think productivity is sometimes pushing us towards that, which is fascinating for them to, I think, see that it’s not just them. 

MF – Exactly because I think that then it removes the threat a little bit because I can see it’s not just us. Because then we can also get curious about if we drop our own boundary and just look over there at how they try to solve it, what of that can we bring across to us? And if you now think about the boundarylessness - that word is just something else - that social media that brings us and some of the disinformation that happens there, but it is an expression of the larger system. If I want to have information about something I can go and Google it and I can get more information from everybody else that have written, experienced or solved the same problem and you can, again, you can see are their boundaries that are the unique situations and unique solutions – yes. But the solutions and how to apply them doesn’t have boundaries come across. So, it actually takes us closer as team coaches, it takes us closer to you know, the thing we’re talking about as parallel process, what’s happening here is also happening out there, and that quantum reality that if we change one molecule or one thing in one place it’s already different somewhere else. Once we can get to sit with that, we can have a very different sense of locus of control in how we can participate in the evolution of humanity, not only efficacy in business. 

KC – Yeah, well that’s what’s interesting about this because you hear boundarylessness and you think oh well there’s nothing I can do and actually it’s not often the case. So, in this example I asked them sort of what is causing this individual desire to reply to emails, and it came from productivity. Productivity was driving this, and yet what happens is if person is really productive and clears their inbox, it fills up someone else’s inbox! So, there’s this chain reaction and actually what it came back too is we need to redefine what productivity means to us. 

 MF – And we need to play more and more as team coaches with one solution doesn’t fit all. 

KC – No. 

MF – So, I’ve seen in work with teams where AI plays a huge role in all of this because AI knows no boundary. It just doesn’t. Well, that’s not quite true. But for example there’s one team I worked with where they have shifted from filling email boxes with multiple emails to using Loom and there are other apps that you can use as well, that you can create a short video and people can watch the video and provided it’s not too long they can watch the video and have all the information that they in the past they would have combed through their emails for. So that was one of the solutions. Except, one of the things that came back was, because now there’s in many places less of a boundary between my personal life and my role as an employee because I’m now sitting in my own house in front of my own computer and the rest of my life is happening behind my door. So, somebody came back, actually there’s a couple of team members that came back and said I really like Loom, it’s faster and it’s more effective than email, however I can sit and watch TV with my wife and I can have my iPad or my phone next to me and I can see a message coming in and I can check the message without interrupting some of what we share together here because I can continue to watch and there’s silence between me and my partner. However, if I don’t have my earbuds with me, I cannot listen to that little message because I can look at an email whilst still being present in the silence of watching the movie to my wife. The moment I turn the sound on to listen to that Loom that I’m looking at, I’m interrupting that. 

KC – That’s a really good point. 

MF – You can see how one answer just never fits all and I think that if we can play with… there are boundaries but then how do we work as if there were no boundaries and become ever more creative? And how can creativity have enough diversity so that everybody can participate in that? 

KC – I think as coaches we have to hold that there is this reality that ever-wider systems are impacting us, and we have to hold this for our clients because if we go in and meet the system and presume ah we’ve met them before, we know this problem, then we’re not holding that truth. 

MF – No. You know the other thing, it was one of our old team meetings starting this week and we had the team meeting, and it was one where it was a sort of a training but it was also where people were talking about their difficulties and a lot of space for people to ventilate in different things, so it’s a specific meeting where we don’t record things. Because even when there’s what seemingly can be gossip, the question always is in the ventilation, in an unskillful way, what is it from this that you can take directly to that team member to talk to them about rather than go and gossip with somebody else about what’s going on there, so we do that kind of rehearsal around things when we don’t record. But then at the end of the meeting I said to them if we, just for a moment, imagine that, forget about recordings but this conversation that we had, that nobody is listening too, how does that impact the rest of the organization? How does this conversation set us up in different senses with everybody else that we are working with? Because the conversation changed us within the boundary of this conversation, but the impact of it, on me, has no boundary, I will show up differently. Better, worse, the same, but something different is already happening across something that has no boundary. If we can begin to think more that way, and in the beginning it’s difficult because people struggle to grasp it, but I think it’s one of the places we need to look as team coaches. How does the change that we’re navigating here for this team, if we imagine then there is no boundary between what happened here in the emotional field, in the content, it will impact how you show up in the next meeting that you go to. What is the impact that we want to have rather than the unintended of ‘I didn’t even realize it was gonna make a difference to us in the next meeting’. 

KC – Well it points to the two-degree tiller shift and the idea that we can’t often see the change but it’s happening, it’s there, we just have to trust it and I think we can connect to this idea when we think about if this was our last day and we knew that we were gonna die tomorrow we would be hyper aware of our interactions. 

MF – That’s it, that’s a really good example Katie. That’s a really good example. 

KC – But that’s how we should be every day, really, because every interaction, not hyper aware, but every interaction is then having a ripple effect into someone’s life, it’s going out there whether we can see it or not and it’s also shaping us and our experience of life. I think maybe it’ll be useful for us to be more aware of that to a degree in every day. 

MF – I love the example that you brought because it makes me think of conversations that I’ve been in recently as well where you know there’s somebody, there’s a partner, there’s a colleague with a terminal disease and the difficulty of sitting in this knowing it’s going to happen but also the privilege of being able to process it. Because we know we all are gonna die. It doesn’t really take a terminal diagnosis to have us process how we want to be for the rest of our life because we don’t know from the place of just not knowing and how we don’t know where the boundaries are or what is our are. We know death is there but we have no idea in-between when and how it’s going to happen. What does that impact if we begin to think about that? What does that impact on what I do today? 

KC – Yeah, well I think it ultimately helps us to lift the gaze to conscious and intentional relationship - 

MF – Agree. 

KC - -and I think above everything else, particularly as systems coaches, that’s what we do, we help people become more aware of being conscious and intentional in relationship because relationship is there whether we’re aware of it or not, but when we’re aware we have more choice. 

MF – And that again, I think you know for me I’m still sitting in that team coaching chair and I think that the invitation really is for us to begin to look differently at boundaries and to begin to look differently at what is it that I think is boundaried? I’m not sitting in a place today where there is an earthquake. I am sitting in a place where they may be a fire that has us evacuated. I’m not sitting in a war zone. We see those things as separate, but they have very similar impacts via very different ways, so I think that there really is that place where as a team coach I need to be able to think about even the amount of preparation for sitting within the team that I’m going too. I need to begin to really get curious about what are the systems that they are impacted by? What are the systems that they impact? Given our coaching together. Because until in, whether it’s in supervision or in team coaching, until I can begin to sit in my own questions, I can’t begin to meet them in what the questions are that they might want to ask. Again, from that meeting place, I’m not going to meet them in the place where I sat before, I went through the session. And you can now make the initiation to where is that you are aware that what happens here and what you do here have impact. Because actually there is no boundary. What is the impact that you want to have? But can you feel how it literally is, if you think about how humanity and us got to the place where we are, whether it was people getting onto a boat and sailing to the end of the world because they thought there was… but there was no end of the world, there was no boundary, they’ll just keep going, and that’s how new territories and worlds were discovered. If we think that there’s a boundary between space and humanity here, well, I think that there’s a place where from the systems inspired team coaching perspective we need to get into the boat that is taking us to the end of what we think we know. 

KC – Mmm, I love that, that’s a great metaphor. I think what’s beautiful about it is that as soon as we start to look there, we look beyond the team, we all start to care a little bit more because it’s not just ah yeah, this is my work team, it’s this is your work team and everything you say to that person is having a ripple effect on their life and maybe how they go home to see their wife or how they feel when they’re interacting with their kids and suddenly we start to see the importance of relationship. 

MF – 100%. There’s a way in which as humanity individually, collectively, we grow and evolve through very similar stages, so there’s a place where, when we fell in love with our partner we see all the good things in a place where we’re so similar and in that place there’s no boundary. But then there comes a time when there’s a marriage and four, five years later suddenly it’s like you’re no longer the person I married, well I am but you just see more of me that you were boundaried away from because you didn’t chose to see that and it’s like that for us as humanity, it’s like that for us as team members, that there’s a gradual stepping through new awareness of what is happening around us and that what we thought was the inner core, actually there’s multiple versions of it. 

KC – Yeah, it’s hard not to care, I think, when we start to look there, it’s hard to not see relationship as the path of our evolution and that’s very powerful, and if we can bring that to our teams and organizations that we work with, and even couples, wow, the ripple effect is huge. 

MF – I agree. And again, that’s why, I don’t think it is, in the quantum field is a very different evolution from the evolution that brought us to where we are, where people were the explorers and the adventurers that were looking for different and new horizons. I think that’s a place where I would love for us as team coaches to begin to experience ourselves, not just the exploration of the team in terms of the way in which I used to think about a team, but what is the boat together? What is the ship that we need to board in order to go to the next horizon that we thought was a boundary, but it actually goes way beyond there, and it will impact because on the other side of what we thought was the boundary is where diversity will show up. We will find the people and the things that occupy that land before I got there. Now, how do I work with that? 

KC – Yeah. And suddenly it’s not about team performance, of course it’s still about that if that’s the team’s agenda, but it’s also about so much more than that and I think that’s quite beautiful for us to hold, that whatever the agenda is there’s also always these wider agendas for humanity at large. 

MF – I think so. And I think that’s where, more and more in team coaching what I see and experience and want to see, similar as with supervision, I think it’s fascinating for me that these two things in the coaching industry at the moment is driving so much, because I think it is both of those, when done in certain ways, brings us to that certain reflective space of not knowing and curiosity, and new territories and crossing old boundaries and wondering how, and I think that nature and the universe is calling us to do that at the moment, if you’re looking at what is happening in the economy, in nature, there’s a different challenge for us and a different speed with which we need to discover and go beyond the boundaries that we think exist. 

KC – That’s certainly a call to action, I think, to end on, encouraging everyone to step onto that boat and explore those new territories and to help their clients do the same, too. Marita, thank you for this conversation, so many lightbulbs are going off for me so lots to take away here. 

MF – Yeah, same here. Just again the evolution, what you do when you sit in the balcony view is exactly what we’re talking about. All of us need to go the balcony view, to the metaview, to the quantum field, to get curious. Let’s us as team coaches and as systems inspired changemakers, let’s explore new boundaries. 

KC – Well I think we crossed a few today, I definitely feel like that was a new territory Marita so thank you and I’ll speak to you soon, take care. 

 [Music outro begins 36:13] 

KC – Thanks to Marita Fridjhon for taking us to the balcony view around boundaryless change. Here are my key takeaways. When we’re working virtually we’re exposed to increasing complexity and conflict, thrown together in our diversity into an our land and in this space we can often be unconscious about what we bring to our relationships but we can also be conscious and intentional in order to create a new space that exists beyond the boundaries of our respective cultures. As systems coaches, being able to sit in a space of not knowing can help people to become aware of the various systems that exist beyond the immediate dynamics that are present in the session. For example, a team might be aware of the different family systems each person has had to navigate in order to be in the team coaching session. There is both a need for us to see and work within the boundary of the team in front of us, and at the same time an awakening of how they are also boundaryless. There is the organization, the wider industry and the world which are all having the impact on that team. Look out for boundaryless change part three where we’ll talk about how this can impact our everyday lives and what we can do about it. For over 20 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time. CRR Global’s unshakeable belief is that relationship matters, from humanity to nature to the larger whole. For more information please visit CRRGlobal.com. 

[Music outro 38:15 – end]