Three insights I gained from this weekend

It's been a busy couple of weeks, hence no newsletter last week. I feel like I am spinning plates at the moment. Luckily I'm off to Cornwall tomorrow to take it easy with some good friends. In the meantime, here are three insights I have taken from this weekend's wild adventure.

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The weekend started with a flight to Madrid, on Thursday evening, for an AECOP conference - AECOP is the Spanish association of business coaches. I have never met a business coach before, but a member of AECOP, Winni Schindler, reads this blog and was kind enough to invite me to give a key-note. On Friday morning, I gave a talk about how we can use ancient Greek philosophy in modern life, to a room full of 150 business coaches. An interpreter translated my talk as I went along, but I was a bit over-caffeinated up so the poor lady was exhausted by the end of the hour!

The coaches really liked the talk, I think. For the last question, a lady asked me 'how can we learn about your approach, where do you do courses, and how much do they cost?' I replied 'well...you can just read the books of ancient philosophy, they're all free and easy to read!' Then I sat down at my table, and this Israeli business coach shook her head at me in wonder and said 'you just missed a huge opportunity'. It turns out I should have had a Philosophy for Life training workshop ready to pitch to the room of business coaches, and lots of them would have signed up. I realized then: I need a business coach to tell me how to make money!

I honestly hadn't imagined that coaches offer coaching to other coaches! I wasn't even sure what coaches did - do they offer one-on-one coaching lessons or do big workshops or what? It turns out that business coaches do all these things. You can hire them one-on-one, or go to a workshop of say 10 to 100 people, or sign up for one of their online courses. All of which I can do, and I could actually get paid decent money for it.

This is a remarkable discovery. I'm so used to giving book talks for free, in the hope I'll sell perhaps 20 copies of my book, and get 7% royalties for each copy (which means perhaps 50p a book). It's quite a slog, as any writer will tell you.

Yes, but...would it be selling out to offer philosophy life-coaching or business-coaching? Wouldn't this be like Michael Sandel, who charges $30,000 to do talks about his book, What Money Can't Buy? Perhaps one should offer this stuff for no money, simply in the service of humanity (while living in a cardboard box under the Hammersmith Flyover). I think it depends how you do it. Many is the philosopher who teaches life-wisdom but has absolutely no idea about how to make ends meet. It's important to me that I can make a living, otherwise I end up asking for handouts from relatives or needing to churn out books every year. So I have no problem with making money for what I do.

Ryan Holiday, Stoic business guru

On the other hand, it's important to remember that ancient philosophies were not simply about 'getting ahead'. They were counter-cultural spiritual philosophies.  An entrepreneur called Ryan Holiday has just brought out a 'Stoicism for Entrepreneurs' book called The Obstacle is the Way . He comes from PR - his last book was a Machiavellian guide to PR called Trust Me I'm Lying - and his latest book has been well-promoted and is selling great. Ryan's success shows both the opportunity and the risk of taking Stoicism into business coaching -  Stoicism is not really about being successful in a conventional sense, it's about being a good person. All of us doing 'Stoicism for modern life' need to be clear that the ancients didn't think of this philosophy as a formula for conventional success.

So, here is the first of this weekend's three insights:

I could do philosophy life-coaching for organisations and individuals, as long as I used the profits to subsidize work with less rich and more disadvantaged groups.

I think it's OK to offer workshops on wisdom and philosophy within organizations - in fact, there's a noble tradition of adult education within companies, like my ancestors the Rowntrees used to do. But philosophers have a moral obligation not just to cater to the affluent or the elite. And we need to be clear about the end or goal of the education. We should never teach wisdom with the end of 'getting rich' or 'being a success' - that would be misusing the ancients' advice. We should only use it with the end they had in mind, of helping people build good characters. Even at Saracens rugby club, even the week before a big final, we still focused not on 'winning at all costs', but on building good characters. Which brings me to my next insight.

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After the conference in Madrid, I went to the Premiership final at Twickenham, where the Northampton Saints were playing Saracens. I've been running a philosophy club at Saracens this month, which the Saracens coaches were kind enough to big up in a piece in the Telegraph last week. Alas, the team lost the final in the last second of extra time, having put their bodies through a brutal ordeal for 80 minutes. And this was just a week after they lost a similarly brutal European cup final. So having led the Premiership league for the entire season, and won the most points, they came away with nothing for the second consecutive season.

The players coped with the defeat with great integrity, applauding the fans and shaking the hands of the opposition. They didn't even complain to the referee, although he awarded the match-winning try despite not being able to see if the ball had touched the ground. That's admirable - to show character in the face of galling defeat. They had done everything right, all season, and they still lost. This gave me my second insight of the weekend:

Sport is cruel.

Unlike pretty much every other profession, there is a tiny margin between victory and euphoria, and defeat and heartbreak. All season, we have been practicing philosophy and the idea that it's not just about externals, it's about integrity, values and character. Which it is. But in sport, it's also, inevitably, about externals - the external of winning or losing. This makes me glad I'm not a professional sportsperson - though I hugely admire these people who can take such a physical and emotional battering, and get up and do it again a few days later.

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OK, final insight. On Sunday I did a talk at Sunday Assembly, the 'atheist church', on ancient philosophy and how wisdom can help us transform our emotions and improve our lives. It went well - in general I think humanism can be a bit shiny happy optimistic, and philosophies like Stoicism offer it something a bit grittier, which is all to the good. I wanted to offer a similar talk in the church I sometimes go to in Kings Cross, but the vicar basically stymied the idea. I'm not sure if he (a) doesn't trust me (sensible fellow) or (b) doesn't trust Greek philosophy because he sees it as a rival to Christ and St Paul. What a pity if Christianity has become so existentially threatened, like modern Islam, that it sees every other philosophy as a threat, even one that did so much to influence Christian culture. If that's the case, it's destined to become a cultural ghetto, and to disappear entirely.

After the Sunday Assembly, I went to a Christian service at a church in West London. The sermon was by a visiting New York pastor called Pete Scazzero, about how he had set up a church in Queens, only to suffer a breakdown. He'd decided that he was utterly emotionally illiterate, and it was holding back his church. So he read widely, from Thomas Merton to Henri Nouwen (two psychologically-literate Christian writers), and studied contemplation techniques from Christian monasticism. And he eventually wrote a book, Emotionally Intelligent Spirituality, summing up some of his ideas. It is ancient wisdom served up for evangelicals - and is precisely what born-again Christianity needs.

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It seems to me that evangelical / charismatic Christianity does some things well. It does worship and music well - although its music tends to be really upbeat, unlike the Psalms, which are two-thirds lament. It does community well, although its communities tend to be full of people saying 'amazing!' and 'awesome!' and 'Jesus!' rather than honestly talking about their difficulties. It does evangelism and mission well, although it focuses intently on the 'moment I came to Christ and everything got better' rather than talking honestly about the continued difficulties of the spiritual life after finding Christ. And it does passion / ecstasy / encounters with the Holy Spirit well, but unfortunately ends up over-relying on such full-on encounters, and desperately imploring the Holy Spirit to do more, more, more.

Well, we have our reason as well, don't we? That's a gift too! And we have the centuries of tradition of Christian prayer and contemplation. That's a gift too. So why not use them, instead of relying totally on outpourings of the Holy Spirit to do all your healing needs.

So this is my third insight of the weekend:

The extravert thrills and spills of charismatic Christianity needs to be balanced by a revival of the interior stillness and silence of contemplative Christianity.