Deepa Shankar
ThreeFish Consulting
Edited By Wendy-Ann Smith, Jonathan Passmore, Eve Turner, Yi-Ling Lai, David Clutterbuck
Increasingly, as I reflect on what is happening in the world and how I may play a part in contributing towards a sustainable planet, my interests have lured me into the wonderful world of ethics. Ethics is a playground of ways to understand why we act with such colorful variation and how we go about evaluating such actions.
Thus, I would like to recommend the book, The Ethical Coaches’ Handbook, A Guide to Developing Ethical Maturity in Practice. It is focused on coaches, but I hope the rich information can be enjoyed by a wider audience and profession, because:
- much is written from the point of view of the relationships we have with others, and this happens to us all, and
- are we all not coaches (or do coaching) at some point in our lives and professions?
In the book, there are descriptions & points of views, frameworks, carefully crafted questions and discussion points which we can use to find our own answers to ethical perspectives. Hence, a playground of input and output (reflection). There is no ultimate or one all-encompassing right answer, but a multitude of possibilities in coming to an answer. Indeed, “a range of solutions within an ethical dilemma, where the acceptability of each choice depends on the weight given to the various conflicting values. ” Pg22.
As practicing professionals, we have a duty of care towards our clients, society at large and lest we forget, to ourselves. How can we be actionable with our duty of care? How can we delve into the inquiry, “what is ethics, what is society asking of us when it comes to being ethical, what is my definition of ethics and how do I want to put ethics into my practice and ways of being?” As W.B. Yeats penned, “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” Indeed, the world of ethics is full of magic things too.
