Of all the roles in the British armed forces, what is the role of the military chaplain?
It's a very important role. Chaplains work with people who have work in demanding situations - sometimes even taking life. We want them to behave in ways that reflect the values of our society, in ways that are morally responsible, even under the pressures of armed conflict. As well as their responsibilities in communicating and maintaining those values, chaplains also perform other vital roles, working with others to maintain morale and resilience among serving personnel and their families.
In this podcast I continue my May 2025 conversation with Dr Chris Mackel who, as part of his work with the British army, was coaching people in the chaplaincy role. The role is multi-faceted and nuanced, and in it we explore the relationships between chaplains, senior officers, and others who provide spiritual support to service personnel. We explore the different pressures a chaplain works under - to what extent is their role a career or a vocation? How does coaching support the people performing these roles? Chris also shares his own approach to working with other people of the Christian faith.
If you also work in a sector where you have to wrestle with the tensions between vocation and career, or are just interested in getting deeper insights into our armed forces, listen to this follow-up to my previous conversation with Chris about coaching in the forces.
Resources
180 degree feedback in the UK military
The nature of modern warfare is changing rapidly. Whether its deterrence, peacekeeping, or active combat, service personnel need, more than ever, to be adaptable, insightful, skilful and able to recover quickly from set-backs.
Thank you for joining me again as I speak to a fellow traveller in life, and the world of coaching, Dr Chris Mackel. Chris is a highly experienced coach with a deep business background. I discuss with Chris his coaching work with senior officers in the British Army. I learn about their career paths, their expertise and their responsibilities - to their troops and their families, to civilian support staff and - when deployed - to the wider communities where they are situated.
Recorded in May 2025, we explore the challenges of modern military leadership - from motivation, to adaptability, to responding to failure, and explore two approaches Chris uses in his work. Chris describes the DISC personality profiler for particular use in his one-to-one coaching work, and the Connect 4 model for use in teams - which focuses on trust, constructive conflict, commitment and accountability.
We conclude with reflections on what this work with the British military has given to Chris, and how his work and wider life is shaped by his Christian faith.
Resources
How many CVs do you have? If you’ve applied for a variety of jobs you probably have several, tailored to your prospective employers. I expect you put them in different formats - chronological, skills based, or a hybrid. What they all have in common is what you can do.
But what’s on the CV that other people have on you - the one that reflects who you are - your character CV?
It’s the combination of evidence on these two records of your life impact that will give us the focus of the last facet of a thriving life - a life of impact.
A great way to bring the two together is through my version of the popular and well-known Ikigai concept. Whilst the general shape of Ikigai is tried and trusted, I found that aspects of it didn’t resonate that well with some of my clients. So I re-worked the concept to meet my own audience - Hereditas. I wonder how you would re-frame it for yours.
The four areas I chose around which to explore life direction and impact are these - passions, partners, powers and persistence. The first three of these are focused on what we do - our achievement CV - and the fourth brings into clearer focus the people we are (and are becoming) - our character CV.
Building our character CV requires particular strengths. In my last podcast I explored the cardinal virtues (strengths) of fortitude, temperance, justice, wisdom. Here I complete the set with the theological virtues of faith, hope and love.
Hereditas provides a framework for giving shape to a thriving life, starting with us. There is an alternative. That is to adopt an existing vision of a thriving life and to make that as your centre.
To where are you looking to build your own centre for a life which can go well, feel good, be lived well, and make an impact?
In all my work, these are the most foundational of all the questions I confront. I wish you every success in finding answers which lead to a credible, sustainable, and universally applicable vision of a life worth living.
Resources
For the Life of the World: Theology that makes a difference Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun
The Gospel of Happiness, How Secular Psychology Points to the Wisdom of Christian Practice Christopher Kazcor
One of the more demanding areas to explore in coaching, and in life in general, is how we live out our values. Values don’t just deal with questions of pragmatism - what’s useful or effective - they reflect what we stand for. And to stand for something, usually means that you will find yourself standing against something else. Your values are likely to rub up against other people’s. In short, there is a cost to living out our values consistently.
There are plenty of ways you can identify your values, such as through on-line assessments, working through values card decks, by observing your heroes, or in conversation with a coach or mentor. That’s the easy bit - the challenges arise when it comes to putting your values into practice.
How about this one. What do you do with the challenge of when two of your values rub up against each other? You stand for justice - fairness for everyone - and you stand for loyalty - you privilege certain close relations, be they to friends, family or your team.
What do you do when your values, each of which are good in themselves, clash with each other? There are ways of adjudicating between values when they clash and it makes sense for you to have worked out your own principles for how you will do this before any values challenge arises.
I'd like to offer you some clues. To start with, it’s helpful to explore where your values come from. You can follow your heart, follow your family, follow the crowd, follow the rules or follow the One. When you are clear about from where you are drawing your values, you may well be able to find a defining value around which the others revolve. I provide a worked illustration - a values clash - and six different suggestions about how you could resolve it.
And I share some straightforward and intuitive coaching questions anyone can use to get a better handle on these issues.
The third facet of a thriving life is living it well. I hope that, through your own exploration of these insights, you will be able to live it better.
On a scale of 1 - 10, how happy were you yesterday?
If the first facet of our gem of the thriving life is a life going well, the second is a life feeling good. But what does the good life feel like, and in what should we invest in order to get it?
Since "happiness" is a very flexible term that could encompass anything from joviality, to delight, to love and host of other ideas, I'd like to suggest four ways we could think about this. When you're enjoying the thriving life, what are you feeling? Are you feeling lucky, are you feeling pleasure, are you feeling contentment, or are you feeling joy?
And if you think these are just four different ways of talking about the same thing, think again. According to those among history's greatest influencers who think you should pursue contentment, the pursuit of pleasure will give you the opposite.
Find somewhere comfortable to relax, and join me as we explore together the key insights of some people - recent and not so recent - who have contributed massively to what we can do about discovering the life which is feeling as it should.
Other things you might find interesting
The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Jonathan Haidt
A Broad Place, Jurgen Moltmann
Paul's Letter to the Philippians
A Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most
Finding Happiness, A Monk's Guide to a Fulfilling Life, Abbot Christopher Jamison
How are you today? And how do you know?
In their book, ‘A Life Worth Living, a guide to what matters most’, Miroslav Volf, Matthew Crausman and Ryan Mckinally-Linz give us three facets that are almost universally held to be important elements of a thriving life. If your life is going well with desirable circumstances, feels good, and is lived well (out of your values) it is likely to be well on the road to thriving.
To these three I added a fourth. A thriving life is a life of impact beyond ourselves - perhaps as part of a bigger cause, or by leaving a legacy in a phase of life, a particular location, with particular people, or at the end of our mortal existence.
In this podcast we explore the first of these facets of a thriving life - a life going well - through the lens of gratitude. I share an exercise you can use to identify not just what you’re grateful for, but also what makes those objects of gratitude important for you. Create your own gratitude inventory as you identify what you are always, especially, unusually and surprisingly grateful for.
Once we start thinking about gratitude we find ourselves guided to explore wider issues - who and what contributed to those circumstances for which we are grateful. After all, we did nothing to create the world we were born into, and many of the circumstances that we enjoy are because of the actions of other people - actions that we didn’t, and in fact couldn’t, influence.
On this multi-layered journey of discovery, we consider where gratitude might take us, in the company of three fellow-travellers in life - a literal fellow-traveller on the UK railways, a cosmologist, and a fourteenth century English mystic.
Some helpful links
A Life Worth Living : A guide to what matters most
Revelations of Divine Love : Julian of Norwich
How to read Julian of Norwich : Podcast - Ryan Mckinally-Linz
What’s the different between a pilgrim and a tourist? I think it was theologian and scientist Alister McGrath who mused that whilst a tourist may visit a place looking for an experience, or a memory, or perhaps a souvenir, the pilgrim sees his or her journey as a search for transformation.
My own journey to develop a high level of expertise in coaching as certainly been transformational for me personally. Some of my clients have said it was transformational for them. Transformational journeys take time and perseverance, and in this podcast - which completes my personal introduction - I share how a particular driving passion has sustained me on my own journey.
That passion is curiosity.
With the help of an article A Surprising Route to the Best Possible Life, by New York Times columnist David Brooks, I reflect on a particular kind of curiosity that goes beyond interest in new ideas and experiences - a curiosity which is strengthened by courage and by the willingness to grapple with complexity. I reflect on how to deal with the various significant cross-roads in life that can mark the end of a journey, or which can be an opportunity to press on into new territory.
In summary, this is a swift overview of the journey from curiosity to mastery, through the cross-roads of discrepancy. I hope you find this as valuable and as insightful as I have.
I’ve added links to two further resources mentioned in the podcast.
What makes you want to do what you do? How much of it is down to natural skills you possess? Have you been shaped by experiences that have opened up possibilities that you previously didn’t recognise as available to you? Do you have a driving inner conviction about your place in the world, or the kind of world you want to live in?
I’m Geoff Ashton, a professional coach, podcaster, and occasional spiritual director. The idea for the title of the podcast The Pilgrim Coach was inspired by a thought - I think it was from theologian and scientist Alister McGrath - about the difference between a pilgrim and a tourist. Whereas a tourist may visit a place looking for an experience, or a memory, or perhaps a souvenir, the pilgrim sees his or her journey as a search for transformation. When you leave a place of pilgrimage, something of the place stays with you, becomes part of you and continues to live itself out through you.
Two areas of expertise that have shaped my work in world are theology and coaching. Theology - particularly Christian theology - has provided me with visions for what you might call the good, or the thriving life. Coaching has given me ways to introduce ways of bringing those visions to life in someone's personal experience.
A major inspiration for these podcasts is Misoslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun and Ryan Mcannally-Linz from the Centre for Faith and Culture at Yale University in Connecticut, and their book: Life Worth Living, a Guide to What Matters Most. The book provides a wonderful journey of discovery. Come and join me on my own journey of reflections on life and see what discoveries you make yourself.
For this particular episode I am indebted to another work by the same stable - For the Life of the World, Theology that Makes a Difference -which has helped me shape my six convictions which underpin my approach to my work.
If you want to explore further any of the subjects I cover, please contact me at Geoff.ashton21@gmail.com. You can find out more about my professional work on Linkedin.