Spotlight on Kieran Duignan

The serious stuff

Why did you decide to become a coach / mentor?

Looking back, I feel coaching/mentoring crept up on me gradually. It has become part of expressing my own "inner game", as I went through several cycles of professional formation in roles where "coaching" is one way of framing interaction with clients...

How did you get into coaching / mentoring?

I've moved into it from several roles.

As a teacher in a lively, supportive comprehensive school in Merseyside in the early 70s, I was very aware of an important gap in its standard provisions. Before youth employment became a serious social problem, I observed how many of our capable highly-motivated youngsters were drifting into the next stage of their lives or were making misinformed choices which resulted in falling off the early rungs of career ladders (there were career ladders for young people then!). I proposed to the headteacher setting up a lunchtime club with talks and films open to youngsters at any stage in the school life; "Fine!", he said. "There's no money available but go ahead!". So, I went ahead. This experience prompted me to do a postgraduate diploma in career guidance at the College of Guidance Studies and to spend some years working as a local authority careers officer in villages across west Kent. Despite very tight resource constraints of the role, it was often satisfying to propose connections that could offer options to clients. Eagerness to work behind the scenes on a larger stage, I became self-employed in the early 80s, combining career counselling and adult education with writing and photojournalism too. As my counselling work gradually broadened into the area of personal development, I undertook formal training in several modes and completed a diploma through the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology.

My own development as a counsellor was supported by a coach, Ken Powell, a Celt of the Welsh variety - Ken was short for 'Kenwyn'. I experienced our contact as invariably encouraging and, while he could at times be a little curt, his practicality, upbeat outlook and quiet humour marked out a new kind of working relationship. In passing, I learned how he had created his own mid-career path into a role of psychologist through the Open University and I followed it, gingerly and first and with more self-belief the further I went on. Progression to become a "chartered" psychologist involved three years' supervision from a more experienced practitioner. By this time, Ken had died and again, I worked under the direction of a psychologist of Welsh ancestry. From working in a relatively structured setting, I was developing towards facilitative roles and in that sense, "coaching" was coming to me.

Parallel with this professional development, my counselling work had broadened from working in the public sector and with "private" clients into working in companies, charities and housing associations. Initially, the focus was on career questions - about motivation, coping with crises of redundancy and workplace accidents - but over time, I was asked to work with people about difficulties in performance and in workplace relationships. As the foci of helping work broadened and became more varied, I came to describe it more as helping conversations": my role was becoming one of enabling clients to experiment with their experience as a way of discover meaning in areas of their lives that presented concerns. Along with this, a theme I am increasingly aware of is the "parallel process" between my own development - relationships affected by information and communications technology, health from holistic perspectives, aging as a biological process and as a set of social stereotypes - and kinds of issues with which I support clients.

What is your greatest coaching / mentoring achievement (or should we ask what's the greatest achievement of one of your clients?)

"Great achievement" doesn't really chime for me in a conversation about coaching yet if I had to rank a premier achievement, I think it would be a project, funded by the European Social Fund and what was then the Manpower Services Commission, that I created and ran for 40 months in the mid-eighties. It supported a very heterogeneous mix of men and women including company directors and managers, many professionals, some women returners, who needed coaching and other help in their careers. I managed it on a shoestring thanks to a remarkable bunch of associates who worked on a freelance basis at a fraction of the rates they often earned. It was "great" for me personally in that sense of experience of professional leadership about a coaching role that we were defining as we did it. It was also "great" in the sense that I recall how afraid, literally, I was as we started: how would I cope? From a community relations standpoint, it was satisfying that, at one point in the project's lifecycle, it was shortlisted for the Education for Capability Award of the Royal Society of Arts: I remember an innovative guru called Tyrell Burgess and another assessor evaluating the process in dialogue with a group of clients. We didn't achieve the award but I cherish this experience because of the quality of involvement in a community project.

How would your clients describe you?

Oh, that varies greatly amongst clients and their circumstances.

I realise that, as an introvert fellow, I need to be aware how extravert people need more interaction that I immediately engage in; when they get to know me, they are likely to say something like, "You really make me think!". Or sometimes, to be honest, they may feel frustrated by lack of directiveness on my part and see me as the source of their confusion. (Perhaps I should add in brackets, so to speak, that I'm using the words introvert and extravert as Jung minted them to account for his falling out with Freud, as ways of managing personal energy, not as synonyms for less and more socially skilled.)

Again, when clients feel energised and upbeat, they express appreciation for support and challenge. Or, if they are going through a difficult phase of stagnation, some may be inclined to attribute it to me. What in some societies, let's say French or parts of Irish, might be a compliment, "Intellectual. Thoughtful. A well of knowledge", can in British society be expressed as "Academic.". What I'm getting at here is that I need to be aware how my tendency to want to encourage a client to see problems in relationships and so on from a variety of angles can be interpreted as "Impractical. Too complex". I'm continuing to work - no! beginning to play! - at finding simpler styles of conversation that come across as down-to-earth, yet avoid being prescriptive, trivial or heavily judgmental.

What are your core values and principles?

"To thine own self be true!", immediately comes to mind. Yet, for me, there's a paradox about being true to values and being principled. For, unless I'm relaxed, it is easy to come across to others as stern even dogmatic. And I myself have been horrified by behaviour of some professionals - and of people who should know better in leadership roles in professional societies - who profess "clear and strong values" while behaving in ways that have appeared to me as astonishingly manipulative and at odds with reality. You know, Hitler and Cromwell were guys of clear and strong values, which impelled them to slaughter those in the way of realising their values!

My own way of thinking about values now is to observe the variety of "subpersonalities" I adopt - rebel, romantic, humorist, fair critic, wouldbe visionary and aspiring writer in my unfinished development - and to be attentive to how they are seen by others in "the real world"..

The lighter side of life

What do you do when you're not working - hobbies, interests, clubs etc?

I'm a comparatively voracious reader: I read in relation to earning, for professional development and to enrich my mind and spirit. I also exercise daily, partly under the benign spell of a sister-in-law whom I visit a couple of times a year - she's a nurse and chants horrible warnings about the endemic of heart disease I'll take part in unless I'm careful about a degree of fitness. I used to enjoy swimming but recurrent tendonitis in an arm and shoulder has obliged me to do so much less. I like listening to instrumental music and enjoy occasional folk singing. Recently, I've been stimulated to start drawing and painting - my family are watching to see whether I'll continue with either! - as a way of seeing what happens when I take time to create something simply because I imagine it would be beautiful.

Who / what makes you laugh?

I laugh at social satire, in all its forms: novels, short stories, poems, songs, cartoons, television and radio shows, even talks by a minority of politicians, religious and business leaders. By social satire, I mean intelligent portrayal of mannerisms, and of assumptions, expressed wittily.

Although I’ve adopted British nationality (while retaining my Irish nationality), there’s a mischievous part of me that enjoys how the Celts have fun sending up the English. Dave Allen's stories and mimicry were marvellous - he could express in a few words and gestures the kinds of insights that Anthony Clare might convey in a more highbrow way. Both useful contributions in their own way but probably more people can recall more of what Dave Allen said than friend Clare.

The Welsh folk singer from south Wales, Max Boyce, was great at that - he could afford to be then at a time when Wales could field a top class rugby team every year! There have also been some very amusing Irish folk singers, and I’ve known some, for example, I played on a rugby team, of great spirit, at school with Christy (‘Christo’) Moore, who was a well-known character in the British and Irish folk scene from the 70s through the 90s.

How would your friends and/or family describe you?

A funny bloke.

What else do want to achieve in your life or work?

I'd like to play a leading part in creating a place where people of all ages, both genders, all ethnic groups and from every level of society, can learn skills and strategies of influencing. This is about much more than "assertiveness" or "social skills" in the sense of compliance. I mean it both in the sense of "personal power" as Carl Rogers intended it, and also as an necessary element of a culture of participation and responsibility in both workplaces and family life. I mentioned earlier that for about 8 years, I worked with young people in career guidance and in adult education; and my wife has worked for most of her career with multiply-deprived teenagers in one of Britain's poorest spots. The point is that, while I'm all for the New Labour thrust on pressing people to exercise responsibility, I think there's an enormous need to educate people in the skills of influencing that can make such a difference in how they relate, in their lives at home and beyond. The need, as I see it, is about educating people to emotional awareness - about themselves and about others. I associate this with what used to be called 'cultural democracy', which seems to me to have advanced very little in Britain in the last couple of generations.

Any claims to fame?

No. But I recall Tony Benn's cheerful retort to a rather hectoring interviewer on Radio 4's "Desert Island Discs", who put to him that he would have to live without achieving many of his aspirations. The likely "lad" of 70+ chirpily replied, "How do you know? The truth is nobody really knows just what our future holds. I am content just to do the best I can today!"

What's the most challenging thing you've ever done?

From a "whole life" perspective, probably facing up to realities about the quality of family relationships, which I find emotionally much harder than a more obvious challenge, like starting to earn a living self-employed or an Open University degree in mid-life. Possibly because it also requires me to be attentive to my own weaknesses and vulnerability, I also find selling dauntingly challenging.

What's the funniest thing that's ever happened to you?

Probably writing and acting a sketch I did for my parents' Golden Wedding, when they were accompanied by their living brother and sister, all six of their own offspring and a score of grandchildren. What worked was a simple storyline that arose from recalling my dad's pre-occupation with school reports as we grew up - perhaps a form of socially sanctioned sadism in the Irish Catholic suburban culture of the 50s and 60s. My parents very much enjoyed the account of memories of our growing up, in the format of a school report on family episodes by me acting the part of a junior school teacher. We weren't an emotionally expressive family, and it would have been embarrassing and hollow for everyone to have started then. But the satire was benign and went down well.

Who would you like to be stuck in a lift with - and why?

If it's for up to 5 minutes or more than 2 hours 1 minute, I'll say my wife, because she really is very calm, practical and patient. For between 6 minutes and 2 hours, and provided I have a flask of coffee and two cups, any of the good teachers or coaches from whose support I have benefited in the past. I have wonderful memories of them and would enjoy meeting them again, for a while, even in a stuck lift.

What makes you who you are?

Nurture - my families of origin and my current family - and nature ("The Tao") and my own choices.

That's not as glib as it may seem. For I've only recently begun to learn from some horrendous experiences - very serious abuses of trust by people in authority, and on one occasion by a client - that would once have made my blood boil. I still feel annoyed for a while, but now attend to data and intuitions that reveal patterns of thinking, feeling or behaviour on my own part that contributed to my own error of judgment, a slip or a lapse. In this way, I'm learning to concentrate better on facilitating problem-management and to move on mentally, emotionally and spiritually rather than stay engaged with energy-draining muddle.

For more information about Kieran use our database NameSearch or contact kieran@enablingspace.co.uk

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