Unlikely Conversations and the Courage to Hold Two Truths

One reality of my new season is spending a lot of time drinking coffee. Coffee with old friends. Coffee with new introductions. And coffee with people others think I might like to meet. Including, earlier this week, Mark Prisk FRICS – former MP, minister, businessman.

On paper, we look an unlikely pairing: a former Conservative MP and a former inner-city parish priest: different tribes; different pathways; different instincts, perhaps.

And yet we discovered surprising crossover points. Both MPs and clergy are office-holders expected to be available to everyone on their patch. Both step into roles no training fully prepares you for. Both exercise skills – pastoral judgement, crisis response, ethical discernment, community leadership – that have no formal recognition as learning. And both carry the quiet weight of decisions made in public but processed in private.

Different worlds: shared patterns.

Much has been said and written about John Davidson and the moment at the BAFTAs when, because of Tourette’s, he involuntarily uttered a racial slur: hurt caused; anger expressed; communities wounded. A (so-called) debate that quickly hardened into camps.

But two things can be true at once: racism is real and devastating; Tourette’s is real and involuntary.

Harder and braver than choosing which truth to defend, is asking how they sit alongside one another. What connects them? Where do they intersect in lived experience? How do we acknowledge harm without denying condition? How do we honour condition without minimising harm?

Searching for connection is slower than outrage. It is less dramatic than defence. It asks us to stay in the tension long enough for something more human to emerge.

In coaching, that’s often the space we inhabit. The place where apparently opposite realities both need air. The place where we resist the pull to simplify too quickly. The place where curiosity does more work than certainty.

So where that leaves me is:

• where are you tempted to collapse rather than connect?

• what skill have you developed that's never been valued?

• who expects you to be endlessly available – and what does that cost?

• when have you experienced two conflicting truths in the same moment?

• what might change if you stayed with the tension a little longer?

  
  

For me this new season is about unlikely conversations and unexpected discoveries.