Art is about bringing people together

I don’t know if I’m a people person or not. I start with genuine love and respect for people .. like when I campaigned for Corbyn most of my comrades viscerally hated the Tories. I understand, but also I was interested in collaboration. Obama talked about finding common ground to take one step forward and that being better than just fighting, that’s how Obamacare happened. So I’m like, OK, I want good healthcare and tories want good healthcare we just differ on how to do it so let’s talk because we both want the same goal. I’m not sure I think that about Tories now, but there’s still got to be something we agree on, and that’s my approach. So in that sense I’m respectful and interested in differences and working stuff out.

But I think I have a gene missing where, if I think about nephews and cousins, I never know the difference and have to work it out from first principles every time. I come from a really simple family structure .. mum, dad, me, my sister, grandmas and grandads. No-one in my whole family has ever upped and left and gone with someone else. So when I meet a modern family and they’re like oh, this is my half sister and he’s my dad but not my biological dad .. I mean, I love it in the sense of human soup, but there’s no way on earth I’m going to model that in my head. And I can never remember names. So no big surprise that I got my lowest exam score ever (14%) in history, which is all names and relationships.

I’ve seen an arch connector operate. In the band I was in was a teacher, so they knew every kid they’d ever taught in the small town, every family that kid came from. One time another band member’s son visited from out of town and the band member I’m talking about, I could see, absolutely needed to introduce himself to connect. The son said he’d been helping a friend locally do some building alterations and .. this blows my mind, he was being deliberately vague because it wasn’t his information to reveal but band-dude asked “oh, do I know him?” and extracted the name. That’s a compulsion to connect and it’s a strength for networking for his business. I don’t have that.

I do love 1-1 conversation but bigger groups faze me a little. My thing is compassionate understanding and hopefully gentle honesty and an unshakable belief in regular people. I think the filters that allow some people success and keep others down are royally fucked up. Like racist, sexist, ableist the full works all day every day. The cure for cancer might be in the head of that kid who’s not getting what they need to flourish. That’s my thing, but not kids, just people in general.

So given all that, it’s taken a long time for the artists I work with to persuade me that group coaching is something that has worth over anything else I offer. But I finally got shown the way forward and I’m running group coaching now and I have to say it’s taxing, I have to shake out the energy afterwards with exercise and drumming. But I see it .. everyone’s turning up, everyone’s there for the whole session, people are learning from everyone else and the range of solutions coming out is bonkers. So group coaching is here to stay, I can see the evidence of it working even if it’s not how I would want to learn myself.