Hello again, and welcome back to my world as a professional coach, mentor, podcaster, and occasional spiritual director. Now I need to explain something I didn't mention in my last podcast, which is the name of the show. Why have I called this the Pilgrim Coach? Well, the idea was inspired by a reflection. I think it was from theologian and scientist Alastair McGrath about the difference between a pilgrim and a tourist.
Whereas a tourist may visit a place looking for an experience or a memory or perhaps a souvenir, the pilgrim sees his or her journey as a search for transformation. When you leave a place of pilgrimage, something of the place stays with you, becomes part of you, and continues to live itself out through you. Even after sixty odd years on the planet, I continue to see myself on a journey of personal transformation. My life rests on the firm foundation of Jesus Christ and his love, but any foundations are there so you can build on them. In my last podcast, I shared with you my core convictions as a coach and a little of my professional and personal journey into coaching.
And today, I'd like to complete this personal introduction by sharing about my commitments as a coach. As I'll explain in a minute, there was a point in my life where I really liked the idea of becoming something of an expert in a particular area. In describing that journey, I've been helped by an article I read by New York Times columnist and author David Brooks. And in the show notes, you'll find a link to his March 2025 article, which catalysed this reflection. So thank you for joining me as I explore this thought, the road to mastery is through curiosity and discrepancy.
You'll find the concept of mastery in many professions and walks of life. There are master craftsman and women, chess masters and grandmasters, and even a few super grandmasters. In academia, you can attain master's level degrees, and there are master's events in sports such as snooker, golf, and tennis. People can be recognised as masters of their craft even if they don't use the descriptor. And attaining mastery doesn't mean you've reached some pinnacle beyond which there's nowhere to go.
Chess grandmasters are constantly looking to expand the knowledge and theory of the game. There are higher degrees than master's degrees. Master's events in tennis are less prestigious than grand slams, and many who are masters in their craft apprentice others in the hope that the apprentice will develop skills beyond their own. The deep desire of such masters is to be eclipsed by their apprentices. But what's the path to mastery?
Malcolm Gladwell, that fascinating author of stimulating and provocative ideas, articulates what has been called the ten thousand hour rule. In his book, Outliers, he proposed the idea that to become the master of or expert in any subject, you need to invest at least ten thousand hours of deep study. And since, according to Malcolm, the brain can only really take three to five hours of deep study a day, we're looking here at around a decade to develop such mastery. Well, we can debate the precise figures and timetable, but the general proposition is sound. In terms of time, there is no shortcut to mastery.
When I worked in the civil service, I coined the following running joke. If you knew one more thing than the person you were speaking to, that made you an expert. I did most of my later public service working with people outside of government. Businesses, large and small, charities, local authorities, sector representation groups, think tanks, universities, and others. And whilst the wheels of change within the civil service often ground slowly, that wasn't the case in the complex interactions of the wider world with which I engaged.
So underneath the humour of my joke about expertise, there was a key truth. In a fast changing environment, there was a certain and valuable skill which I found was needed. Faced with the need to keep up with the pace of change set by others, essential if I wanted to stay relevant and be able to add value. The essential skill that someone had to master in that environment was the skill of being able to adapt to new ideas, new challenges, and new situations, and to integrate them into new realities. In response to that challenge, I discovered I had the blessing and restriction of being versatile.
Versatility meant I was able competently to fullfill a range of duties, management of people, of teams, of internal and external relationships, the analysis of data, of trends, analysis and evaluation of ideas, delivery of targets, delivery of projects, and the sustainability of programs. The restriction of being versatile was that whilst I worked out how to become quickly competent when faced with a new challenge, I never really did anything for long enough to become what I would describe as an expert. And whilst there were plenty of situations I walked away from confident that someone's world was at least slightly better for my having been involved in it, I also had the frequent nagging sense that I could have offered more if only I knew what more looked like and how to discover it. So if I wanted to experience that deeper sense of satisfaction from having provided a fuller contribution to a situation, I needed to be an expert in something.
I had options.There were some niche areas where I was able to make a particular impact, but what I wanted to develop was a high level of expertise in something that would enable me to respond to the kinds of challenges that regularly seem to come my way in life. Going back to my previous episode, I wanted to be able - for other people - to be a source of perspective, practical wisdom, and trust. And for me, coaching was the means of providing that something. Coaching gives me the expertise to see emerge through creative participation, with my clients, profound and sustainable impacts.
If a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, a journey of ten thousand hours starts with a single commitment to action. But to keep either kind of journey for that length of time, the journeyman or woman needs to be sustained by a driving passion. I have several of those, but for the purpose of this podcast, I'll mention one which seems particularly relevant since I find it recurring again and again in every expert coach I know, and that passion is curiosity. For coaches, the road to mastery begins with and is sustained by curiosity.
Curiosity means you don't rush to a solution when presented with a scenario. Curiosity means you default to asking another question before forming an opinion. Curiosity means you want to uncover as much as possible of the picture of the person's life that's being shared with you before focusing too deeply on a single aspect of it. But on the journey to mastery, curiosity becomes more than a skill to develop. It becomes more like an approach to life. In his March 2025 article entitled A Surprising Route to the Best Possible Life, New York Times columnist and author David Brooks reflects more deeply on ways to develop curiosity as a path to mastery. I was fascinated reading it since it seemed to describe so much of what I see in myself and other coaches who aspire to high levels of competence in what they do.
David observes that, as with other passions, curiosity has to be transformed from a raw instinct to a methodological skill. He draws the parallel with teachers in schools and universities. Teachers arouse curiosity in their students, a skill in itself, and then show their students how to take their curiosity and to focus and discipline it in the search for and application of knowledge. Perhaps you had teachers like that in your education. I can think of several.
And here's the first of David's insights that struck me. There is a world of difference between being curious and being effectively curious. An effectively curious person exhibits what I might call three-dimensional curiosity. David describes this in terms of the following three cognitive characteristics.
An effectively curious person will have cognitive enthusiasm. They like to explore mysteries and think about new things. They will have cognitive confidence. They are brave enough to tackle hard problems, and they will demonstrate cognitive complexity. They don't settle for simple stereotypes. One dimensional curiosity, channeling your enthusiasm into exploring mysteries and thinking about new things, isn't enough if you want to complete the journey to mastery.
With that in mind, David takes us beyond cognitive enthusiasm to that second dimension of effective curiosity that he calls cognitive confidence, courage, if you like. Because you and people you work with may end up in having to face some uncomfortable realities. One that I've repeatedly come across in my career is what you might call the “Nevers.” For me, I just have to come to terms with the fact that I'll never fullfill my childhood dream to become chancellor of the Exchequer. For others, it's the realisation that their career ambitions in their chosen company or institutions will never be fulfilled.
And that's not necessarily because the individual concerned doesn't have the aptitude for further growth and development. Sometimes it's the wider context that's changed. I know of someone who became an expert in a particular computer program, which for a while made him the most valuable asset in his workplace. But when a new program was introduced, to replace his area of expertise, he was faced with the reality that there were others in his orbit who were more competent in this new environment than he was. Sometimes the Nevers are not down to skills, but to changes in the organisation.
I have a more than one occasion coach people who came to recognise that the job that was now available to them wasn't the kind of work that they had sought employment to do. As one
ex-colleague put it, it's not the club I joined. Curiosity may lead you to a place where you have to make a choice. You could, if you will forgive the rather provocative verb, conspire with someone to dream about an illusory future that will never materialise, or courageously face the realities of this life stage with them and together, take on the opportunity of exploring one or more alternative futures to find the one which may not only give birth to the possibility of bringing great personal fullfillment, but which also has advantage of being one that could in practice be realised.
Okay. Back to the article. What's next? Well, in addition to buttressing your cognitive enthusiasm with cognitive confidence, you'll need to make sure you have the skills to deal with what David Brooks describes as his third dimension of curiosity, cognitive complexity. And David talks about this in terms of not settling for simple stereotypes. Stereotypes and categorisations of people by preference and inclination can be immensely useful as a starting point in coaching, but it's a lousy end point. Categories turn persons into people and individuals into sets. In coaching, we work with the person, their context, their culture, their network, and their history.
If I want to get serious about curiosity, I need to gear up to address complexity. To that end, I found Gestalt psychology a great conceptual framework to work from. In Gestalt theory, a thing can only be really understood when seen in environments. So to take an example, when a client talks to me about working with a colleague, that issue can only really be fully understood in the context of the wider organisation they both work in, their respective values and interests, how they both communicate, what they want from each other, and a host of other factors. The issue, working with a colleague, is described in gestalt terms as “a figure”, and the rest of it is the ground or the background. As coaching relationships develop, more and more of the background becomes visible, which throws more and more lights on whatever issue presents itself at any moment in the coaching conversation. A nice visual way of getting into this is through gestalt pictures, artwork in which several images are combined in a single picture with one or more of them becoming visible depending on how you shift your perspective. When I said earlier that curiosity means you don't rush to a solution when presented with a scenario, that it defaults to asking another question before forming an opinion, and seeks to uncover as much as possible of the emerging picture of someone's life before focusing too deeply on a single aspect of it. Well, that's why.
Which takes us, very nicely, to the next stage on the journey to mastery, which David Brooks describes as the discrepancy. David writes, “The seeker notices the fast discrepancy between what she knows about some subject and what she'd like to know. How good she is at some activity and how good she wants to be. Whether it's ballet, engineering, or painting, the seeker is humble enough to see where she falls short, inspired enough to set a high ideal, and confident in her ability to close the gap.”
Okay. Here's a thought. Have you ever noticed that most people seem to have a desire to get at least a little better at even the most ostensibly trivial acts? The most effective way to stack the dishwasher to finding a way of cutting two or three minutes off the daily commute. I wonder what yours is.
Curious, isn't it, how even small improvements in areas like this give us that built in thrill of accomplishment every time we do them better. It's widely recognised that we derive psychological well-being from the desire for autonomy, for belonging, for meaning, and for competence. We get a kick out of doing things well and a bigger kick out of doing things even better. And a positive driver to competence is discrepancy. Now you can experience the value of discrepancy in the day to day, nudging you to small improvements in what you do in the world. But more than that, you can allow it to become a significant driver in the journey to mastery.
And if you want that to happen, you need to allow that sense of discrepancy to take you further, to put you on the edge, the very edge of your abilities. On the journey to mastery, discrepancy is a crossroad, a literal crisis point, at which you decide whether you've gone far enough, whether you're happy to stay in the territory with which you're familiar, or to press on to new discoveries. One of the great sustaining drivers in my own decade long journey of professional development is leveraging the desire, the wanting, that flows from a sense of discrepancy and using that to fuel my commitment to improve my competency. Being very grateful for the resources I have available to meet the personal challenge of discrepancy, here's three ways I've navigated the various discrepancy crossroads when I've got to them.
So I'll give you one example by way of illustration. In recent years, I've become increasingly aware of challenges people face around mental health and in the need to understand various kinds of what's been called neurodiversity. When faced with a new challenge in coaching practice, it helps me to have a conceptual framework to work from. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a straightforward intuitive and evidence based approach to navigating mental health challenges. And studying this has given me greater confidence in recognising, understanding and responding to such challenges.
But study alone isn't enough since, to quote my colleague David Britton, we coaches can sometimes find ourselves in territory for which we have neither a passport nor travel insurance. David is one of a number of colleagues who are dual trained as coaches and therapists, who have been immensely helpful in enabling me to identify the limits of my expertise, when to refer clients to other people better qualified to provide the support they need. In fact, being part of a collegiate coaching group, in my case Coaching York, has been invaluable. I have a network of generous colleagues who are very happy to share experiences and expertise and to explore together common issues we encounter in our practice. For me, discrepancy has a natural outflow into collegiate relationships.
And thirdly, I've had some invaluable opportunities to work with people in safe environments, which have improved my knowledge in these areas. I remember in particular doing some work with a local charity in which I was able to spend some time with someone with an autism diagnosis. I am to this day grateful for the way he describes so vividly what happens in his mind in any moment, what makes different environments more or less difficult for him, and the kinds of conversations he finds helpful and unhelpful. So I find myself agreeing with David Brooks here. If you really want to get full value from pursuing curiosity, you'll have to be prepared to face up to discrepancy. Because only by wrestling with discrepancy will you ever attain to mastery.
Now all this raises the question, what then does mastery look like? It's a natural question, but I'd like to ask another one. When someone attains to mastery, what does the world look like to them? Well, if any of the following is true of you, I would hazard a guess that you have obtained mastery in some aspect of your life.
If what you used to see as obstacles you now see as opportunities, you are probably well on the road to mastery. I would also suggest that's true if you're drawn more by the thrill of potential success than by the fear of failure. In fact, if you love not just the outcomes you deliver, but also the time consuming, remorseless, ongoing, and disciplined work you need to put into achieving those outcomes, then you're probably starting to demonstrate the clearest evidence of all that you have obtained to mastery. When mastery becomes a way of living in the world, for me it is a way of living that never stops learning.
As I mentioned earlier, you find mastery in all kinds of places and being demonstrated by all commanded people. And I'd like to close with an anecdote about someone I know whose expertise really is indistinguishable from his way of life. This someone, I know, had for many years been employed in a pastoral role in a number of churches. But for him pastoring - guiding people towards Christ as a shepherd guides sheep to a safe pasture - is far more than a job if it ever was a job in the first place. Pasturing is what he does.
He does it at his golf club. He's the person people go to when they have questions about life and about spirituality. He runs services for golf club members on Remembrance Day and other times of the year. For people who don't like the idea of going to church, he brings church to them. He hates flying, but nonetheless, he sees himself as a pastor to the passengers on any flight he's on. Passengers that may be even more uncomfortable to be there than he is.
If he had no title, no career history, and no records on his CVR, as you may, he would still be a pastor. It's what he's invested his life in. And any time you spend with him is time you will enjoy a return on that investment.
So what will you take from this podcast? Where, for example, would you say that your own curiosity is taking you? How has curiosity got you to where you are now? How far would you say you have developed David Brooks' three-dimensional cognitive characteristics, cognitive enthusiasm, cognitive confidence, and cognitive complexity? What happens for you at the crossroads where curiosity brings you face to face with discrepancy? And can you see your own crossroads coming up in the distance? Are you about to step into one?
Are you at one now trying to decide whether to go back, to press on? And if pressing on is the way to go, which route will you take? And what ways of living are true of you? Ways of living that are evidence of a significant investment of your one life in something that - perhaps you may now be coming to recognise as demonstrating mastery. Thanks for taking the time to join me on this reflection.
Please carry on this journey with me, and in my next episode, I'll start to explore the fourfold shape of a thriving life. Goodbye for now, and go well.