Existential Perspectives on Coaching: A Conversation with Prof. Emmy van Deurzen

Welcome to "Coaching Uncaged" by Animas, the podcast that explores the art, science, and career of coaching. And now, introducing your host and interviewer, Yanik Jacob. I've been looking forward to this, um, maybe more than others—no disrespect to our wonderful guests—but we’re very connected, not just philosophically, but also, uh, personally in many ways, because, uh, we’ve spent some time together. What can I say about you, Emmy? First of all, welcome to the podcast! I'm so happy that you've made time for this. Maybe let's start with this: every time I hear you speak—almost every time I

hear you speak, whether that's at a conference, a talk, or as part of the lectures that you give—there's this genuine passion and zest, not just for existential philosophy and existential practice, but for life and living. There's so much you have done, but you bring this energy to the spaces that you're in that is just really inspiring. And I think not just because I found a home in existential philosophy, which you've basically facilitated and created with the New School of Existential Counseling and Psychotherapy, but because you open up spaces for people to think more deeply about

life and living. You've created the Master's in Existential Coaching with Monica Henway together. You've written, what, 20 books now? Amongst those, "Existential Perspectives on Coaching" and many books on existential therapy, but also other existential topics. Most recently, "Rising from Existential Crisis." What you offer to that world is special. You've done many things for many decades; you have many letters to your name. You've been a visiting professor, honorary professor, and professor at a number of universities. You've established existential therapy in the UK; you were one of the figureheads for that movement. The existential movement you're bringing

out to a lot more people, not just practitioners, creates a pathway for diving deep into the philosophy, working therapeutically, and then opening that up into the coaching space before bringing it out to the world. I've also seen you be quite political, really taking a stance, as so many existential thinkers have been political. Now that you've retired from principal of the New School, there's a new chapter beginning, H, and that's quite exciting as well. So, I think I'll pause there and see if you wanted to add anything to it. There's a lot more that I could

mention, but just to say that you really got the measure of me because you're presenting this not as a sort of series of things, but as a movement forward. You're showing how I've gone from one thing to another and expanded things, seeing what I think is needed in the world. You can see where I'm going with it. I can feel that, not many people sort of see this whole picture. So, thank you for doing it like that. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think it's important because there are a lot of coaches—certainly, I meet in supervision

and in the training rooms—that start coaching as a technical skill. Then, when they’ve been coaching for some time, they blossom; they flourish into something else. Some are leaving coaching spaces and are becoming more political or more directional, guiding people and creating other spaces, opening it up to a broader audience than just coaching clients. So, I think here's an example of how this could be done. This is absolutely correct; it's a kind of whole field, and we can explore it from so many different angles. However, we can't stop ourselves once we've opened the door and stepped

inside of that way of living. We are going to find new angles, and we are going to get more and more curious. We are going to realize that there is so much more to know and so much more to do, and there are so many people who are in need of that clarity, of that space that you mentioned—opening up a space for other people to dive in and discover that they can learn how to live better rather than be at the mercy of life. That’s what it’s all about, and there’s no end to that. We

can always do it better; it’s an infinite game, especially around clarity. Part of me would love to pick you up on clarity in the face of general uncertainty and the impossibility of really gaining clarity for longer periods of time, which I think is always coming into the coaching space but is so much needed now, given that it feels almost as if there are people who are darkening things rather than shining a light on what’s going on in fear. I think before we go deeper into that—and in a way, with the question I’m asking, we’re already

going deeper into it—because in this season, as our audience may or may not know, we're diving deeper to explore what coaching stands on, what different approaches to coaching stand on. So, let’s take a couple of steps back and, at the same time, also forward. Could you, in your own words, give us a bit of a framework? What is existentialism? Someone might wonder, “I’ve never heard of it,” or “Maybe I’ve heard the term existential crisis or existential threats.” The existential philosophy is a bit different from how it’s often used in common language. So, could you give

us a kind of brief overview of what existential philosophy is, what existentialism is, H, and why? Is it so helpful in your client work? Okay, so what I like to foreground is that any existential approach—be it coaching, counseling, therapy, management consultancy, or education—you name it; any existential approach basically focuses in on human existence. It is an approach that looks at life in the round, from every aspect possible, and takes under the microscope every facet that is problematic in a person's life. So, it is a very broad range, and the only other discipline that has this

kind of broad range is philosophy. Consequently, any existential approach is necessarily based in a philosophical way of looking at the world. What that means is that in order to really get a hold of this, rather than doing it at the surface of life, we need to truly study what we can deeply understand about human existence. It’s about enabling people to explore that for themselves and get in the habit of being much more curious about how they are in the world, how the world relates to them at many different levels, and how those interactions can be

shifted, changed, and transformed into an experience that is much more satisfying to them. There are so many different layers to doing that; I'm sure we'll come to some of those. But it is always about having a deeper engagement, understanding what stops you from having that deeper engagement, and then learning about life—learning how you can do it better and how you can deal with all these problems in your path. Beginning to see that the more you face these problems and the more ways you learn to look at them—to deal with them, sometimes to avoid them or

prevent them, and sometimes to resolve them—is crucial. And to do this, not just on your own, but in your relationships with other people, at many different levels: the very close, intimate relationships, the medium ones, and the further away relationships with your culture, society, or politics. All those layers of life together make up the framework that you live with, and this is something that, to some extent, is given to you by circumstances. When we come into life, all of that is already there, but it’s like an empty framework, which is like a steel framework that you

cannot move. Some of those things are given, and you cannot move them; we call that facticity—they're the facts of life. But what we do is that in between those structures, we weave our own lives. We create a kind of world within those structures, and those worlds change according to what happens to us and what we decide to do. There are many different influences that can change that world, so we need to learn to be in that change, learn to relish that change, and see that it is a source of our transformation. Living is an art,

and if we go to the art of living in a messy way—where we haven’t really understood what we’re doing—we’re likely to make a mess of the picture we are creating of the life that we are creating. We do a bit of this and a bit of that, and the colors get mixed up, and everything ends up a bit gray and depressing. That’s what we see a lot: people get discouraged, they give up because they feel it’s too messy out there, and it’s too messy in here, and they have no idea where to start. So, we

have to come to it in a quite systematic way, and we have lots of ways of doing that from an existential perspective—leaning into the existential philosophers and especially into the phenomenological method they have given us. But there are many other methods too. Yes, there are quite a few things I would like to pick you up on. First of all, just to underline that central element of opening up choice for people. Yes, in the face of facticity, we can't choose where we are born or what the language is that we learn when we’re young. There’s a

lot of facticity we don’t have any influence over, but there’s a lot, I think, that people don’t often recognize as choices. Coaching, as a profession, I think one of its central tenets is to open up more choice for people, and I think existentialism goes to the heart of that matter—totally. That philosophical framework is something I’m really trying to put myself into—a beginner's mind again, right? Because I’ve studied this a lot as well. So, I want to make it available to the audience and help them get a hold of some of this existential work and begin

to explore it more. So, you talked about philosophy, and I wonder if you could say a bit more about a philosophical way of thinking. How does philosophy come into it? What does philosophy teach you about how to engage with people? Now, there are lots of different elements in philosophy that are helpful in coaching. One is the fact that philosophers investigate ontology; they investigate theories of being. There are many different ways of looking at what a human life is, and it helps enormously to get a feel for different life philosophies and how they inform a person’s

choices. If you have a totally materialistic outlook, for instance, you’re likely to let your life be guided by scientific facts and to narrow it down to things that you can measure and know for sure. But if you do that, you’re going to be missing out on massive amounts of important experiences. For instance... When I work with people who are like that, which I have done quite a few times, who work, you know, in universities, or who work in professions where their rationality is first and foremost, you find that they have completely lost touch with all

these different forces in nature—the vital energy of our embodiment, being an animal, being part of nature, having desires. Even if they might suppress something as obvious as sexual desire, they may be completely out of touch with their own capacity for awe and wonder and mystical experiences. They may even deny—and I've often found this—they may deny, even deep inside of themselves, that they could ever be loved, because they've come to the conclusion that their relationships have gone wrong twice or three times or four times, and that all these people have let them down. That is because

nobody will ever understand them and will ever love them. That seems a very irrational thing to say, but when you stick to the facts and observe those facts, it's very easy to come to that conclusion. So the worldview that a person has dictates the number of choices available to them, and one of the things I begin with is to enlarge the number of choices available to a person rather than sticking with the narrow choices that they think are available to them. It's about freeing a person's mind, helping them to challenge for themselves how they have

come to think about the world and how they have come to live, lean into the world, and vote with their feet—many being very unaware of that. Yeah, and this opening up of choice can be quite anxiety-provoking because Kiko talks about the dizziness of freedom, and how when we have more choices, we now have to choose. This responsibility is such a major theme in existential work, and so I think it's important for us to be aware that opening up choice is great, but there is anxiety that comes with choice because of that responsibility. Could you talk

a bit more about the existential perspective on anxiety? This is so vital and so crucial. In our cultures, we have come to see anxiety as the enemy; we have come to run away from anxiety because we see it almost as a medical emergency. We medicalize anxiety. Now, it is true, of course, when we work in psychotherapy, we may sometimes work with people who have generalized anxiety disorder, and really, their whole lives are taken over by anxiety—they cannot move, they cannot leave their home, they cannot work. But in coaching, that's not what we are talking about;

we're talking about people who do jobs but who feel paralyzed by their anxiety because anxiety has become the enemy. It has become a signal to them of their failing, of their deficiency. It reminds them that they're alive; it reminds them that the energy is going through their system and that maybe sometimes they're a bit overwhelmed by that energy. They're not quite sure how they can employ that energy, how they can take authorship of that energy, how they can relish that feeling of the rising energy that says to you, "You are alive. You can feel. You

are ready," because your whole system is now geared up for a new challenge. There are people who say this is not appropriate because that kind of anxiety was there to deal with lions and tigers, and so we don't need it anymore. What nonsense! We've got huge lions and tigers in our lives. Life, at the moment, is more challenging than it's ever been before. We are dealing with many layers of complexity; every which way you turn, there are threats and difficulties and new things to learn, and people who are up to no good—people who might want

to do you down. None of it is obvious; they're not lions and tigers, but by Jo, there are traps everywhere! How can we not live with constant anxiety? Because our bodies and our minds know that we bloody well need that amount of energy to deal with it—to learn, to get more insight. But what we need to learn is that anxiety also raises our capacity for courage. So let's speak about the existential courage that we learn when we face our challenges and we learn that we can get better at it and we don't have to be

afraid. Before we do, I just want to underline another point here that was so beautifully illustrated, because somebody might listen to this and think, “Well surely the world got better! You know, people are not dying; I haven't seen a dead body.” Depending on where you live, you might be quite privileged. Yes, there are still bodies in the streets in the world, but like life has arguably protected us more—longevity, we have more longevity; we live longer; we're healthier; babies are not dying so much anymore. I mean, you know, I have a positive psychology lens as well,

and there's good data that life got better. But I think this illustrates quite well the difference between an existential threat that causes fear because our life is threatened, our existence is threatened, by a lion or a tiger or somebody who’s up to no good and wants to kill us and take our tools, versus this anxiety that doesn't have a clear object. You might still be alive, but there are threats everywhere because of the complexity of the kind of threat; it's at a different level—it's a philosophical threat. Yeah, so two points I want to make about

this before I get into the detail: one is... That the people who are privileged enough to be protected by civilization as it is, are actually few. There are many more people in the world who are not that privileged, not that protected, and who are exposed to very dire conditions. On the one hand, and on the other hand, the people who are privileged without realizing it have also created new threats for themselves. When I work, I work at both ends of that spectrum. In our low-cost clinic, I get to see a lot of younger people who

are really struggling with hunger sometimes, or homelessness, and they do really struggle with life threats and with a sense that they're not safe in the world. Of course, if you work with refugees, which I also do quite a bit, you get to see a very dark underbelly of humanity. There are multiple hostile threats in the world that create immense amounts of trouble and difficulty for many, many people. So that's that end of the spectrum. But when I work with privileged people who have found themselves at the head of organizations or companies, or who have become

famous for certain things they do, I am amazed at how that privilege doesn't at all protect them, but actually exposes them to other layers of challenge and confrontation with very dark sides of humanity. They encounter hostile forces that they dare not even talk about when you speak to people who are actually threatened by governments or who get threatened by Mafia practices; that is quite, quite scary. When you begin to realize that some people, maybe in politics, maybe in organizations, make certain decisions in fear because they have been told that if they don't do that, then

they will have to deal with X, Y, or Z, and X, Y, and Z are lions, tigers, and leopards in my book. So the world has improved in many ways, and I am with you on that positive psychology side, but we have also lost track of that needing to apply to everyone, and we have lost track of all the things we have given up and lost. We are not always aware of the new threats we have created. Yeah, so it's no time for resting on our laurels and congratulating ourselves for what we have achieved. There’s

a lot more work to be done. Oh yeah, and I think when people hear that, I think that's sometimes where existential work on existential thinking gets a bit of a dark reputation. It never seemed like that to me. It seemed like a very real perspective on the world with eyes perhaps more open than some of my positive psychology colleagues. There wasn't acknowledgment of how difficult and challenging life often is, and essentially is. Just being alive is a courageous act. Kamu was philosophizing why people don't really kill themselves—it would make perfect sense. So, I want to

kind of counteract that kind of darkness that people often perceive because I know your view on the philosophy is a very positive one, essentially, even though you just spent quite some time probably scaring the bejesus out of some people. It's like, "Oh, oh yeah, oh, she's right! Oh yes, there are tigers and lions and the modern equivalent of that everywhere." They hadn’t really paid attention. But tell us, most people who come already know this. They come to get help because they know that things are not rosy, and they know that we are dealing with some

real worldwide problems. You know, in the next 50 years, Yanique, you know this as well as I do, this world is going to get confronted with climate change, the lack of biodiversity, which will lead to incredible amounts of migration across the globe, to an extent we haven't even begun to think about how we're going to deal with it. This is going to create all kinds of mayhem and difficulties, and we need to prepare ourselves for this. Quite frankly, we need to have our eyes wide open, and we need to see how we can help everyone

in this world work together to make this a good transformation, which is possible, rather than a catastrophic one, which is also possible. So I do think we stand at a nodal point where we need the tools of everything we can gather: the philosophies and also positive psychology as well. We need all of that. Yeah, so here are the tools again. And you mentioned methodologies, methods. I know there's a lot of work being done in how we could systematically help people navigate these kinds of challenges. Could you tell us a bit more about what sort of

approaches, practical approaches, came out of existential work? Well, first, existential work is spread all around the globe, so it has become differentiated into many different ways of working. If you look at the World Handbook for Existential Therapy, you will see that there is an existential humanistic trend, there is a design analytic trend, there is a logo therapeutic trend, and there's an existential phenomenological trend. So these different schools have developed, but over and above that, in each country, people have developed their own take on it. That is most especially important when you start looking at what

they have done with it in Latin America, for instance, or in China, or in Israel, or in Iran, or in Russia, or in Scandinavia, or in Australia. It’s all slightly different, adjusted to the local ways of thinking and working and living, and also to the beliefs people have, so there’s often an influence from a kind of more religious or spiritual background. Existential work that is very atheistic and very much based in this sort of factual approach, but which also includes much more Christian types of existential work, presents various forms. There are also kinds of forms

that seek to go beyond that. Therefore, my own approach is always philosophical rather than either atheistic or theistic. It's philosophical in that I'm open to any kind of worldview, but I know that working with a person's worldview is going to be central to any progress made. Because if I cannot work with the depth of what a person believes, and the depth of what they hope for and what they fear is not possible, then I will not have much of an impact on that person's improvement. For a person to really improve, they've got to be able

to resonate with the work at a deep level, and they've got to be able to make sense of it and see how it fits in with what they already know, what they have experienced, and what they yearn for and what they want to achieve. So, it's very much about going to that central point of the very inner sense of spirit in the person—the thing that inspires them the most—because then you will attach the new thinking at the core of their being. Yeah, um, what a beautiful link to positive psychology as well! Funny that came in

again, because really focusing on what lights somebody up and what inspires them rather than what's the problem and where's the pain leads us to the things that are important—the things that are central and core to us. Yeah, but the two go together, though. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. I have been arguing for years because something is troubling you; actually, it's hiding something in you that offends your intelligence or that deeply goes against what you believe. So if you work, um, as a coach with people in an organization where they're being told to follow a particular practice

that goes against their own beliefs and their own purpose in life, they become very unhappy. They may be obedient about it for a while, but something really goes, it's like pain—it's like physical pain inside of them. So sometimes, it starts with the deepest point of pain, but that deepest point of pain is only this painful because there is something they do want. There is something they believe is right, and they believe that what they are now doing is wrong. This is something I found, you know, some of my students have done work with um, people

who have been survivors of big crises or of, um, for instance, Susan Yakov's work on um, guys that were in the army and that survived the sinking of HMS Sheffield. What she found was that a lot of them had very long-term terrible PTSD and it was that bad because some of them saw so many of their mates dying, and they started to question whether that was warranted—whether this was right or whether it was wrong what they had done. That made their pain and their trauma so much more complex and so much more difficult. That is

something we really need to be aware of: the way in which a human being is always a moral person and they need to be able to act in the world in line with their inner sense of right and wrong. That is so essential. Yeah, and that's why I think people often, uh, are so attracted to simple solutions and simple narratives. Because sometimes when things get more complex, this pain really surfaces and people start questioning things. Exactly right, and that's very uncomfortable, because when you start questioning things, that creates more pain. Because then there is the

issue of: do you say something? Do you act on that? Or do you go into hiding? Or do you disappear? What is the right way to act when you think that your life is no longer aligned with your own principles, with your own sense of what you feel you should be living for? Yeah, so it might be easier for some time to look the other way and ignore it, ignore some of the facticity that things are ENT or that there are threats out there. But sooner or later, it will hit us in the face. That's

why I always appreciated existential coaching as contrasted to existential therapy, because most people will enter therapy when it's beyond that threshold and things start to collapse. I really appreciate people coming to coaching with this courage to question and explore, knowing that what they might find might be uncomfortable. Because I think they're building resilience towards future such scenarios. That's a very interesting, uh, distinctive definition between existential therapy and existential coaching, by the way, Yanique, which I've never heard before—that if people come with an existential courage and a desire to question things, then they're ready for coaching.

If they come in despair and they're beyond the point of feeling they can keep their own life in balance, then they should be going to existential therapy. Yeah, I wish more people... road markers, yeah. I wish more people would enter therapy when things are reasonably well. And I know some people do, but most people don't. And that's always been a question, right? What's the difference between existential coaching and therapy? Because as you're practicing it, it might look exactly the same. It depends maybe where the person is at, or are there other markers of difference? Because

you talked about severe pain quite a lot, and I know most of your work is in therapy, but I also know you've done your fair share of coaching work. Yeah, yeah, and I often find it a relief to do a bit of each. So during the week, I might see some people for long-term therapy who are really working on very deep-seated and long-term issues that make them very fragile. Then, I might see somebody who I only see monthly and who is working out something for themselves about their life, really wanting to be challenged, where I

can be much stronger in my, you know, pointing things out or maybe even sometimes doing a little bit of education, even, and things like that. Did you notice that what you are discovering is that when you do X, Y happens, but when you do A, B happens? Have you noticed that you do have a choice as to which road you go on? Then we can do these explorations of different things they’ve done, and it becomes alive to them. They start to see the landscape in a different way. Now, I might come to that with a

therapy client too at some point, so I might do bits of coaching with a therapy client, but I feel more free to do that with a coaching client who I know is basically sound and, you know, earning their keep and on a path of self-affirmation and not fragile in their inner existence—yeah, a bit more robust, a bit more resourceful, so you can challenge a bit more. You can—yeah, exactly that. But then again, of course, with a coaching client, you might find that there is a breakdown at some point, and they do get to that point

of existential crisis where they then need a little bit more care and a little bit more pacing, slowing down time. That's one of the big differences, isn't it? In existential coaching, you can be louder and faster; in existential therapy, you have to create more space and be more receptive and more in the background often. I loved how you just embodied that. I'm not sure if it comes across in the audio; if not, jump over to YouTube for a moment because you just kind of slightly leaned back, your tonality changed, you know, your body just calmed

down, and I could so feel it. It just felt so much gentler all of a sudden. In therapy, you will do that much more—leaning back, sitting there, taking it in, holding space. In coaching, you will lean forward sometimes and really get there with the person. MH, yeah, and I enjoy both those things, you know, and I like to have the freedom to do both things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and at my age, you know, at my level of work, I can actually get away with that. I do bits of therapy with coaching clients, and I do

bits of coaching with therapy clients too. Well, that's the wonderful advantage of a coach who's also a trained therapist; they can allow that space to go there, whereas coaches without appropriate training can only go so far. The question of how far am I willing and able to go with a client, and at what point does it maybe become unethical or dangerous, risky—that's an important question people often take to supervision. Yes, and the irony is that you need to know a bit about therapy before you start recognizing when your person is going into a space where

they need that kind of more supportive work and more investigative, exploratory work than trying to find solutions or trying to find ways forward or a stepwise approach towards a purpose or something like that. Yeah, you mentioned another couple of key words; I feel I’m catching up, but I also feel that flows really nicely. So, that bit around possibly doing some education or offering some knowledge—you mentioned it's an art of living, and I know that you’ve given many workshops and trainings, so to speak, in The Art of Living, which is the title of those. To what

extent is that? You know, many coaches say, “Well, you cannot educate or put opinions in the room, or you need to be neutral.” I think an existential approach seems to be a bit more directional rather than directive, as you heard once. Yeah, that's exactly what I like to say about that, Janique. Well remembered! Yes, so in that debate about should I be directive or nondirective, my approach has always been you are directional. You are aware that your client needs to find their own direction, so you're not going to direct them, but you are aware that

if you're just nondirective, it may take a very long time for them to find the different exits when actually it might be a good time sometimes to make them aware of the exits. So, if a person is struggling with something quite basic, like self-deception, for instance—if they're becoming aware that maybe they've been fooling themselves about something—they bring that into the room and they say, “Well, you know, for all these years I just followed my manager because I admired them so much, and they did this and they did that, and I wanted this and I wanted

that. I thought if I just go along with it and I follow in your footsteps, I'm going to be okay. And now I'm thinking maybe that was wrong. Maybe he just kept me going, and it was really good to have me on his shirt tails. Maybe I should have done X. Maybe I should have said at that point, ‘I disagree,’ and I should have gone to the boss and I should have said, ‘I would do it this way.’ If I had done that, maybe now I would be in this position or that position. I really

fooled myself.” About this, when that happens, I think the time has come to start helping this person to think around that. Why do we do that? Why do we fool ourselves? And we all do it; of course, we do. We all create a smaller way of looking at the world than is possible. We all focus; we all direct our own intentionality in certain ways. Sometimes, we do just take on other people's opinions, and we do just go along with what the world expects. If that gets us into a trap, then it's a very good thing

to have somebody there who can help you see that you're not just imagining this, that you weren't just a fool who went along with things. This is what we do for a long time, but then we come to a fork in the road, and we know what the cost would be for continuing to fool ourselves any further. So then we're ready to open our eyes, but are we ready to understand what then will be required? Because that is taking responsibility, and with that responsibility come costs, and maybe some damage. You may, you know, lose friends,

or you may even lose your job, or you may have to retrain yourself, or you may have to be prepared to question some of the things you're doing or have done in the past. There are many, many things that come with that, so we might explore that a little bit so that it isn't just about, "Am I a fool, or am I not a fool? Or have I fooled myself, or have I not fooled myself?" No, you've been living; you've been doing what we do. You've been in the role, and that role was okay. So

we might talk a little bit about bad faith at some point and how necessary it is to believe in what we do. But sometimes, if you believe in what we do, we exclude lots of realities and possibilities. That's necessary; we can't do everything, we have to choose. Just to frame bad faith for people who haven't heard the term: bad faith is when you make yourself believe that you're only this when actually you are potentially this much, because you are choosing. So, Sartre gives that famous example of the waiter who pretends to be a waiter and

does all the gestures so perfectly that we know when we sit in the café that this waiter is a waiter, and we can just relate to that person as a waiter. But if you begin to believe that you are only a waiter and you're no longer Yanique or Emmy, then you are starting to reduce your world, and it becomes so reduced that your mind begins to believe that you were born a waiter and that you can never be anything else. Yeah, there's a comfort, I think, for people to have defined their identity in such clear

terms, and it feels good. It can work for some time, right? We used to get our sense of identity from our family or from our parents. We used to do what our dad does, and we used to do what our mom does. Absolutely, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if it becomes more exclusive, then you're trapped. Yeah, and I think that's what's happening. To make reference to what we talked about earlier, the whole world is connected, and we can see all of the potentiality that we have as human beings just by switching on YouTube

or social media. We see all these different lives being lived, and we have all these opportunities. But that's difficult because realizing such opportunities and potentialities requires taking responsibility for choosing a different path. There's comfort in a predefined path, but there's also a lot of anxiety, especially when we're being faced with other people not doing that, and that used to not be the case. Absolutely right, absolutely right. And what worries me is that a lot of the young people seem to feel overwhelmed by this immense amount of choice that is now being displayed to them, and

not only that, they're also faced by the negativity of all of that. So, you know, I do a lot of YouTube videos, and some of them have attracted a lot of young people. There is one that's called "Hating Humanity and Wanting to Give Up." Well, what was I thinking doing a video with that title? I get nothing but young American kids who are about ready to shoot everybody in their school or everybody in the world because they feel that the world is totally unfair, that they don't stand a chance, that people are mean, that there

is no morality, that you cannot expect love, that nothing is good about the world. It's absolutely amazing how they get attracted to certain movies, to certain video games. They end up actually maneuvering themselves into a very negative, dark part of the world where they feel they know everything about life, but actually they have not been introduced to the beauty of the world. They have not been taught that you can make a difference as a person. They have not been shown the amazing amount of learning that is available in the world, or the good people who

are doing amazing things in the world. They're blinded by all this nastiness that they're constantly exposed to and that they're seeking out. They are also in a kind of bad faith position, yeah, and we really need to do something about this, Yanique, in the world. Yeah, and here's this image that came up for me again when you mentioned exits earlier, in the context of, well, is it psycho-education? Is there something... Well, if you're going on the motorway and... Somebody's driving at 150 miles an hour, and they're just so focused on what's in front of them

that they may not see what's obvious to a person in the passenger seat. We might say, "Did you notice that exit?" You know, is that directive? Well, we're not saying you must take this exit, or you should; we just say, "I see something here. What do you see?" If somebody's so focused on what's ahead of them, that might be revelational. Some might say that's not being neutral, but it's so helpful in the context of what you're describing. Well, I like to talk about the helicopter view. You say the passenger seat, and it's right. So in

the passenger seat, you can see that there are options; there are different destinations possible. We don't have to rush along and be in this terrible traffic and despair, thinking that the only way is to crash the car into a wall because you can't stand it anymore. But you can also, in the coaching session, enable a person to take a view from above and start getting more of an overview of the whole landscape—to get a sense of what's available in the world, an idea of the options that are actually available to them, and to be able

to explore around a bit. As you say, take it down a bit; not be at 150 miles an hour on the motorway, and not constantly follow that same path, but take some time to try some other things. That's what I tend to say to these kids. I tend to say, "Have you traveled, or have you always lived in your neck of the woods in the USA? Have you been to Europe? Have you been to Latin America? Have you been to New Zealand? Have you been to Africa? Have you explored the world?" One. Two: have you

ever done anything for other people? Have you ever felt the need to join in with the groups of people who try to do right by other people and who are actually planting the trees or who are actually feeding the hungry? Have you discovered that there is another way—that it isn't all crap, as you are describing it? It's amazing; they don't know. They believe that everyone is just going to exploit them, and everyone is a bad guy. They truly end up believing that. Yeah, and in that way, I actually appreciate a lot of what's happening on

social media. It's toxic in many, many ways, but it does give people insight into other people's lives, and it seems to have become a bit more real, rather than polished like it used to be. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully. And there are a lot of people who do try to engage with people who are despairing on social media. It's somewhere that people come sometimes in the hope of discovering that they're not on their own. The trouble is they might get sucked into the rabbit hole rather than finding a more constructive environment. But there are possibilities there definitely;

there's stuff we can do more with social media, definitely. But let's veer back from the political into the coaching again. How else can you do this? Can you achieve this invitation to a helicopter view? This might be a good moment to talk about phenomenology. You mentioned it earlier; arguably, it's the main tool that we have as existential coaches. There are some others, but could you describe a little bit? It's always difficult to explain phenomenology in a nutshell. It is, it is. Yes, but it isn't that difficult. So, phenomenology is an approach that brings together a

scientific investigation in an objective way with a subjective understanding of things. That's the revolution of phenomenology. People often wrongly believe that it is an opposition to the exact sciences and is a subjective approach, but the objective of Husserl's phenomenology is very clearly to put science on a better basis of people actually checking the facts with their own intuition and their life experience. So, the trick is to enable people to do this thing called self-reflection—to learn to taste things, to ask themselves, "Does this have a smell? Does this seem wrong to me? Do I feel like

it's icky, like it's, you know, not right? Is it like a gluey thing? I get stuck in it." To help people focus in on these sensory experiences and on their emotionality, on their effectivity, on their understanding that if they feel cross with somebody, it is for a reason, and that they then learn to go into the detail of that. Give themselves the time and the space to not say, "I have an anger problem," but to say, "I have an angry understanding of something in the world that feels wrong to me." These people are not collaborating

with me; they are standing in my way. What am I doing that gets me angry, rather than finding a way to get back into a collaborative mode? So they can learn to use their feelings and their senses and their thinking process—all of those things—and their sense of value too, so all four dimensions—to make sense of what is ailing in their lives and what seems bad and wrong and to see how they actually are capable of approaching that—not in a frightened way or in a way that says, "I have a problem with anger," or "I am

depressed," or "I am anxious all the time," or "I think I'm just very jealous," or "I'm very envious" and blaming themselves. Take away that blame, look at it again, investigate it. Give yourself a moment. Give yourself some credit; you probably are perceiving something, sensing something, feeling something. That matters deeply, and let's understand it together. It's that feeling—into the experience, into the sensing, into the phenomenon. Right? That's where it comes from exactly. Let new meanings emerge. Don't access pre-established ways of interpreting what is this that I'm experiencing? Yes, Yanique, and thank you for bringing the word

"meaning," because we haven't hit that one yet, I realize; and meaning is so crucial. We make meaning in the world when we can put the pieces of the puzzle together, or when we can weave the different threads of what's happening in our life and make a pattern that holds together. That is when we feel there's meaning. So often, what's happening is that people's meanings are becoming unraveled because they're no longer appropriate for where they are in their growing-up process, or in their development, or in the part of the world they're in, or what's happening out

there. So there is no longer a match between their past meanings and the current situation. We have to help them see that that is the case, unravel it a little bit. And here, my feminine knitting ability comes in: sometimes you need to, you know, just undo a little bit of the knitting because there is a fault in it, and then you can knit it appropriately. But sometimes, you've just been knitting the wrong thing altogether, and you don't want to do the knitting; you want to construct a garage instead, or you want to make a tool

instead. You want to do something completely different. So together we come to see either what you're doing wrong in that particular process or how you may need to shift into a different way of being altogether. Oh my God, I love the knitting metaphor! I got to say, I have not done any knitting for about 30 years. I'm 40 now. I did, at some point, knit something with my mom, I remember, and we had to knit something for school. I remember being very upset because my friend's mom did all the knitting for him, and he was

coming back with a shining lifestyle. This is so beautiful, because isn't that true? People come to you saying the same thing: "It's not fair; that person isn't doing their own knitting, but they are doing better than I am." And you can help them reclaim their ability to actually do their own knitting. Yeah. Oh, it was much richer than I thought. I had just thought about that—you're missing a spot, and then you're building what you've done on, you know, on a mistake. Sometimes, as you say, you just have to undo a few stitches, and sometimes you

have to really unravel the whole thing and start all over again. You have to be brave enough to do it, and then when you knit it, no, you did the right thing! Yeah, and how many people hold on to, "Oh no, but I'm so invested in this now, so I'm just going to have to keep going." And then, at some point, maybe it works, maybe it's just this one loop, and maybe it's okay to be imperfect. What happens then is that they finish this and they don't like it and they set it aside as a

mistake. They then may either say, "Knitting's not for me," or they may try again, and then again they may get it wrong and have the same experience, or they may decide to look more carefully and to do it more precisely and to learn the pleasure of getting it right. Yeah. Oh, I love that! Thank you, Ammy, for bringing that experience back to me. I know we wanted to aim for an hour, but I can't let you go without framing your four worlds model because I think it's so helpful in grasping existential philosophy. I found it

so helpful in bringing together the existential that so many existential philosophers seem to agree on and not on a whole lot of other things. I always appreciated that about existentialists—that there isn't a Freud, there isn't a thought leader; everybody makes their own. But because life is like that; life is like that! You can't package it, and you can't say, "This is how it is." So my four worlds model is just one way of cutting the cake, but it is quite a sensible way of doing it, and it is based on lots of models that sort

of correspond to that. It's a helpful way to see that there are kind of like four basic layers to all of our days and all of our lives and all of our existence, which is that we are a body in a physical world, we have to build an ego in a social world, we have to create an internal safe world with ourself, and we have to find the spark inside of it that we call soul or spirit that relates to the bigger meanings and purposes in the world. So it's always about how there is something

about us that we can form and shape: a body, an ego, a self, a spirit. And we must do something about those four layers, and that's always in relation to something out there. But the thing that nobody else really talks about, and that I know you take to particularly well because of your combination of the darkness, the deepest darkness of the existential approach, and the most sunny and glorious aspects of positive psychology, is that life is always in polarities. The whole of what we call life is based on stuff that is in tension and sometimes

in contradiction and conflict, but is also... It’s paradoxical, and that’s a term that comes very much from the father of existentialism, S. Kierkegaard. Everything is paradoxical, and what that means is that you can’t thrive until you allow for both the polarities. Where people so often go wrong is that they think they need to go for the good stuff and get rid of the bad stuff, or they go wrong by thinking it’s all bad stuff and that they can’t cope—that nothing’s ever going to be better. So if you’re drowning at the positive end or at the

negative end, it’s not going to work very well. Let me take you through those four dimensions. If, at a physical end, you only think it’s all about death and pain and difficulty and struggle and illness and all of that, it’s not going to work very well for yourself. You also need to be aware that your physical existence brings you a capacity for pleasure, for exploration, for strength, for beauty, for improvement, and for enjoyment of your vitality. But if you cut out your awareness that sometimes it will hurt, and sometimes there’ll be a period where it

does seem dark, and one day you will actually die—until you allow for all of that, you will have a lot, lot of unlived life physically, and you will have a lot of reservoirs that remain unexploited. The same is true at the social dimension. If you get lost in the idea that everyone is a danger and that you will always be alone because you won’t be able to trust anybody, and they’re all out to get you, and it’s all about dominance and submission and competition in the world, oh my God, how can I ever hold my

own? It’s going to be painful. And if you think it’s all about growing your ego and going and getting and dominating the world and winning and profiting and all of that, it’s also going to end badly. But when you’re aware of both those ends and of the tensions between them, and how you can find your way around the obstacles, then it becomes much more interesting. You won’t be so bullied because people will recognize that you know your own way and you can hold your own. Nevertheless, you will generally be kind and human and supportive. Then

you get a very different picture of what is possible at that social dimension. Personally, the same thing applies. Are you a weak person and a failing person? Will you always be like that? Are you going to hide in shame because that’s who you are, or are you going to create this narcissistic sense of never having to challenge yourself, never having to look inwardly, and just live a life at the surface? If you can do a bit of both those things, you can create an understanding of your own experiences, your motivations, the choices you’ve taken, the

choices you haven’t taken, the choices you may still take, your dreams, your expectations—all of that stuff. It gets very interesting, and you can create an inner world that becomes bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger, where you build up a trust in yourself at the same time as a process of self-reflection and self-questioning. That takes us to the spiritual dimension, where you can either flounder in meaninglessness and a sense that there is no point and you might as well despair, or you can become fanatical about it and think it’s like this and we must obey

these laws and we must toe the line in this way, and these other people are bad because they don’t live in the right way. Then you’ve got a problem. Of course, the real way is to hold that tension and to figure out that everybody is trying to find meaning and purpose, and we can do this together rather than get in each other’s way. So it’s a kind of wide framework that holds together most of the problems that arise in people’s lives and gives you as the coach a feel for what they’re struggling with, where you

are with that, and also a feel for how you can make that paradox work in a person’s life rather than getting crushed by it. Yeah, that’s so beautiful, right? Because, Phil, existentialism is a philosophy of tension, really, but not in a way that is just acknowledging or tolerating the tension but seeing the potential in the tension. Something that you once put in a lecture really stuck with me—there was this image of a battery and an image of a lightning strike. That kind of energy always happens in the tension between a positive and a negative pole.

Exactly that! Yeah, inviting the potential and the energy—that's where life is happening. You know, that anxiety that creates the tension. As long as there’s a tension, you know you’re alive. It’s the same with what we are saying about anxiety. Anxiety is that energy that is generated between the negative pole of your self-doubt and the positive pole of what you know is possible, and the energy will help you get from not doing the thing to actually taking a step forward in your life. Or the energy can be switched off and turned inwards and lead to you

withdrawing because you’re too anxious. Yeah, yeah, it’s a no-brainer—it’s a brainer! What are you going to do? You’re going to learn to read your anxiety and feel it and use it and love it. You’re going to befriend that anxiety. Uh-huh, it’s a wonderful teacher. Thank you. I don’t know what better way we could end this podcast than on such a positive note. I can only encourage everybody... Who, uh, got inspired by listening to you? Uh, you mentioned your YouTube channel; there's so much just genuine and authentic content on there—very different from a lot of YouTube

content you see out there. So, uh, really, you're just sharing a lot of your wisdom from all these decades of experience in life and in work in an unthreatening, grandmotherly way rather than in a coaching way. Yes, exactly; it's not teachy, it's just—you know, that's lovely. So check that out. You wrote many books; uh, the existential movement is for anybody, not just coaches. So, uh, what else might you want to tell people about before we leave? Well, read, read lots of books, read philosophy, think about your own life, do new things, experiment—don't just stay small.

Open it up a bit, let some of the challenges into your life; that's usually the best possible thing to do. But recognize when it's too much, so learn to use that valve: open it up when you need more challenge and close it off a little bit when you need more safety. As always, we need to know how to work both ends and to be flexible in that process and adaptable. Lovely, Emy. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your work, you know? Um, great pleasure, Yanique. It's so nice to talk with you;

it's so lovely to hear you coming back with things I forgot to say and that you remember and, you know, make clear—very nice indeed. Thank you for the dialogue. Thank you, Emy. Speak soon. Bye! Thanks for listening; we hope you enjoyed the episode. To watch these episodes on video, make sure you also check out youtube.com/AnimasCoaching. See you back here soon!