Alpamayo Coaching on Tour meeting up with Amanda Blatch-Jones

I took Alpamayo Coaching on Tour back to the organisation where I was employed before Alpamayo Coaching came into being.  It was called the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) at the time, and I returned there to meet Amanda Blatch Jones, a colleague, coachee, and friend.  We talked about the challenges and rewards that had been influential in her life and we also reflected on our coaching partnership, something that we both learned a good deal from. 

Going back to meet Amanda had a feel of tracing a river back to its source, for both of us.  For her it was revisiting some of the stories we had talked about in our coaching partnership.  For me it was about recognising the influence of that period on my evolution as a coach as well.

The feeling of returning to a river’s source is quite fitting as Alpamayo means ‘earth river’ in Quechan.  The notion of ‘earth river’ is not something that I have fully understood, yet I am always curious about it.  There is something of that truth in Amanda too, and this is what lies behind me thinking of her as something of an enigma, which I think of as a compliment.  To find out more read on….

Amanda and I first met shortly after I started work on a short-term contract with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), as it was back then.  The business of the organisation with which I was involved ensured the effective distribution of clinical research funding to researchers in hospital and university settings across the UK and beyond.  We were both based on the University of Southampton Science Park but in different buildings.  My base was in one of the main two buildings where much of the day to day was transacted.  Amanda was in a separate building, something of an outpost, where the occupants were separated in terms of location and in relation to the sort of work they did. 

Amanda was part of a group of researchers looking into the minutiae of how effective our research funding processes were; on the actual business of supporting research work that eventually led to improvements in the healthcare system.  She led a group looking into what the rest of the organisation was doing, and did so by going deep into the detail.  Her group was called Research on Research (RoR), a title that much the same as Ronseal products ‘does what is says on the tin’.  It might be slightly fanciful looking back but the detail of work going on in her group, what they did and how they did it, was something of a mystery to the rest of the organisation! 

One of my better composed selfies! Happily for Amanda she was only pinned into the corner of the booth for the picture. No one told me I needed to go to make up before the photo shoot did they?!

I remember seeing Amanda in meetings and finding her something of an enigma.  She was quiet yet authoritative, self-contained yet strong in her opinions, approachable and remote, progressive and traditional.  She was an enthusiastic learner and in the early days I met her in workshops run that I delivered, talking about various aspects of managing change and process improvement.  These workshops were part of the change programme that I created and ran, a programme with the rather pompous name of Growing Adaptability and Responsiveness (GAR).  My employer was an organisation that loved acronyms and having a programme called GAR did have the unforeseen consequence of a lot of people enjoying talking about it in piratical accents and language.  In some workshops I found various elements of pirate costume featuring among the participants.  You know the sort of thing, eye patches, seafaring hats, skull and crossbones paraphernalia and the like!  There might have been a stuffed parrot too although that could be a creative embellishment on my part.  Anyway, back to the point!  The point being that in our first period of knowing each other, Amanda was enigmatic in both personality and in relation to my understanding of the work she led.

Our working connection was abruptly severed when Amanda became ill.  The affection and respect that people had for her was clear from the response of her close colleagues and even as someone that did not know her well, I was immediately aware of the impact of her not being around.  Her illness, treatment and recovery occurred over a period of time during which there was a great deal of change in our part of NIHR;  the contract from the Department of Health was renewed after a competitive tender; the RoR outpost was gone with the team now located alongside the rest of the staff, and a whole range of different circumstances meant that there had been a lot of staff changes in the RoR team.  So, on the day that Amanda returned to work for a phased return she was met by the delight of her colleagues and a very different organisation from the one she needed to step away from for a while.

One of those changes was that I had been asked to lead the RoR team through a period of change as it realigned its purpose and practice, and grew once again to full strength.  I was a little unsure about how Amanda might take this but found out a good deal about her in how she responded.  There was no sense of being put out, no ill feeling at all.  She took it in her stride as a pragmatic solution to getting the job done in a way that allowed her to manage her own resources effectively.  At the same time, Amanda was open to exploring how coaching might provide her space and time to reflect on her recent personal and professional journey.  She approached the opportunity with enthusiasm.  What’s more she was keen that the two of us work together in a coaching partnership.

I need to back track a little here as there are a number of gaping holes in the narrative thus far that might make it distinctly weird for Amanda to be enthusiastic about being coached by me!!  At the time I joined NIHR I was already an experienced coach.  I had been coaching for years, and I was part of the internal coaching group at the University of Southampton.

Even so, change was afoot!  Up until joining the NIHR my career has always been in permanent roles.  The fixed term nature of my contract with the NIHR was a new experience for me, but one that supported my longer-term objective of establishing and then working full time for my own independent coaching practice.  I had already set up my business, Alpamayo Coaching Ltd, and my intention was to move to full time coaching once my NIHR contract was over.  The GAR programme that I was managing in the NIHR was a great way of building coaching competency, working with individuals and groups in settings, that were not formally coaching but which definitely involved the sophisticated use of coaching competencies.  Without losing sight of my primary responsibilities, I was able to build a reputation as a coach which at least in part explains why Amanda might have been happy to work with me.

My involvement with the RoR group had another influence on my coaching too.  The team I led were mainly engaged in qualitative research and when I joined them I had rather less experience of this than even I realised!  My background was in chemistry and the research that I did was of a quantitative nature.  The results I generated were graphical, numerical, scalable.  They were real, absolute, interpretable.  Suddenly I found myself with researchers who were drawing conclusions on the back of engaging in conversation, listening to stories.  My first thought, which I kept to myself as best I could, was ‘how the hell can this be defendable and dependable research?!’ 

Happily, while my biases do drive my behaviours I have the same commitment to learning that Amanda does and by keeping an open mind and listening the huge expertise and knowledge around me I came to understand just how robust qualitative research can be.  Happily, I did so before I was able to make too big a fool of myself by questioning whether it could ever be of value.  What was intriguing for me about this awakening of understanding of qualitative research, were the parallels with the practice of coaching.  They are both the same and different, and reflecting on that contradiction is where the richness of the learning lies.  For example, in terms of ‘same’ they are both heavily reliant on conversational interaction, and have the objective of encouraging a participant to do their best thinking based on their unique lived experience.  In terms of ‘different’ the qualitative researcher will influence the agenda, while a coach should have no influence on the client’s chosen agenda.  I look back on working with Amanda and the rest of the qualitative researchers as a happy coincidence in my development as a coach.

Anyway, before embarking on a coaching partnership Amanda and I discussed whether we would be able to adhere to boundaries between the different ways we worked together.  I would not have agreed even to the prospect of coaching her if I had a line management relationship with her.  However, I did not, despite being the lead of the RoR team.  The care that we took over this discussion made it clear to both of us how it would be possible for us to work effectively in a coaching partnership without compromising our ability to work together in RoR. 

We set up our coaching partnership in 2017 and what we talked about remains necessarily confidential, an essential aspect of any coaching work.  I should say that if you are reading this it is because Amanda has agreed to it!  As in any coaching partnership there was a huge amount of learning on both sides as we shared thinking and feeling about how we were both navigating the world.

While the focus was on the workplace journey we followed a more holistic approach and our conversation touched on Amanda’s life outside work too.  She told me about being poorly and her recovery (which was ongoing), being a single Mum to her son, the complexity of family relationships; her love for cats (who often appeared in the virtual sessions we had from time to time).  We talked about her strongly held views, some of which moved her forward and some perhaps not!  She acknowledged being something of a rebel.

Throughout our work together I was always impressed by Amanda’s courage in trying out behaviours that were not in her immediate comfort zone, noticing the consequences and feeding them into our next discussion.  She applied her expertise as a qualitative researcher to the topic of herself, keeping a Onenote database of the thinking she did and the actions she took, arranged thematically.  Looking back, I think there was an evolution in our partnership from one that started out with a scientific, rational feel to something more nuanced and subtle.  Its outcomes changed from a cause and effect type relationship to one where there was a greater comfort in knowing that something of value would emerge, even if it did not always feel that way.

Our coaching partnership continued for two years, coming to an end in late 2019.  Our work together spanned another period of significant change for both of us.  Amanda’s recovery continued and I came to the end of my NIHR contract and started my own business, Alpamayo Coaching.  In effect Amanda became one of my first coachees as an independent practitioner.  Little did we know that a much bigger and global scale change was around the corner with COVID19 already lurking in the wings.

Partly because of the pandemic we did not meet for a long time, despite keeping in occasional email contact.  That’s why it was so great for me to meet up with Amanda in person in 2024, on one of my first trips back to the UoS Science Park since I left.  No surprise that there was plenty of change to notice around the park, not least in the café where we met which has undergone a complete remodelling.  It was fabulous to see Amanda being her strong (still enigmatic) self and to hear her news.  Her son, now 18, being a source of great pride; her wedding to Ben who she knew at school but whose paths had separated for such a long time; her happiness at strengthened relationships and sadness at close bereavement; her plans for a new home with cats and cars being well catered for, as well as people!

She talked about how the part of the NIHR she worked for was now embedded in the University of Southampton, as the School of Healthcare Enterprise and Innovation.  We talked about belonging and what this felt like given these changes with Amanda’s sense that it was a journey that was still ongoing, with challenges to be overcome.  It was great to hear her say ‘I love my job’, and about her involvement in understanding what a better research culture, a government supported, UK research community wide objective, actually looks and feels like.

Amanda talked about revisiting her coaching actions spreadsheet, the one she created five years ago.  She notices there are some outcomes from it that are still very much alive for her.  She focusses on what she can influence.  She minds her language, in terms of how she is describing herself and in her engagement with others.  A particular word which featured heavily when we first met is now virtually absent from her vocabulary is the word ‘but’.  She describes the sense that those around her have appreciated the adjustments she has made, which have been just as important for her at home as they have been at work.  And…………, she has not lost her inner rebel!

I have absolutely no idea where the telling of the story of my Alpamayo Coaching on Tour gig with Amanda was going to go.  I just let my intuition seek out connections and just followed them.  Having done so I see that I have a debt of gratitude to those that I shared my NIHR time with.  To the wider community there who helped me in the pirate influenced GAR change programme; notably to the RoR qualitative researchers for an education that enriched me as a coach as well as a scientist; and most particularly to Amanda for her courage and for the trust she placed in me.  Thanks to all of you.