Why the old words

This site uses old words on purpose. It says maieutic where it could say Socratic, threshold where it could say transition, and the method page opens with a Hungarian village. This isn't decoration. A word carries its origin the way a person carries a family, and when you know where a word came from, it gives you an image to think with. Most of the words the coaching profession uses have had their images stripped. Here are five, with their images put back.

Coach

Kocs is a village in Hungary, on the road between Vienna and Budapest. Its wheelwrights built a light covered wagon that rode better than anything else on the road, and the kocsi szekér, the wagon of Kocs, became the thing every court in Europe wanted; the usual dating is the fifteenth century. The word travelled with the vehicle: German Kutsche, Italian cocchio, French coche, and in the 1550s, English coach. For three hundred years the word meant only that: a carriage that carries you somewhere.

Then, around 1830, Oxford undergraduates started using it as slang for the tutor who "carried" a student through an examination. And in 1861 sport took it, for the person who trains and drills an athlete. That's the whole etymology, and it contains the whole problem of the profession. In every sense of the word, the client is a passenger. Someone else supplies the motion.

The word is kept because everyone knows it and because the image underneath is, in one respect, exactly right. A carriage is a vessel for a passage. You get in at one place and out at another, and the carriage doesn't come with you into the house. But the passenger image is wrong about who does the work, and that's why a second word sits beside it.

Maieutic

Maieutic comes from the Greek maia, midwife, through maieuesthai, to act as a midwife. It entered English in the 1650s, and it's used for one thing only: the Socratic method, understood as helping someone bring to birth what's already in them.

The source is a passage in Plato's Theaetetus. Socrates is talking with a gifted young mathematician who can't say what knowledge is, and he tells the boy something he says he's told no one: that he practises the same art as his mother, Phaenarete, who was a midwife. Midwives, he says, know who is pregnant before the woman does. They can bring on labour and ease it. They match people. And his own version of the art has one thing theirs lacks: he has to test the offspring, because a soul can give birth to a phantom as easily as to something real, and the worst thing he could do would be to let a young man raise a wind-egg as a child. He is, he says, barren of wisdom himself. He brings forth nothing of his own.

Set the two images side by side. The carriage moves you. The midwife attends you while you do the moving. The offspring in the midwife's picture is yours, conceived before she arrived, and her whole skill is in timing, steadying, refusing to substitute her own child for the one being born, and testing whether what came out is alive.

Every body that certifies coaches now agrees with the midwife and not the carriage. The client is the source; the coach owns the process, not the content; the measure is the client's own goals. Every verb the profession uses is a midwife's verb: evoke, facilitate, draw out. That is maieutics, under a carriage's name. The older word says what the newer one hides.

Decision

Decide comes from Latin decidere, to cut off: de, off, and caedere, to cut, the same root as incision and homicide. A decision is a cut. It's the moment you sever the other branches so that one can grow.

This is worth knowing because most people who arrive with a decision don't want to cut. They want a way to keep all the branches, and they call the search for that way "thinking it through." The four-session format called the Decision is built on the etymology. Lay it out. Work the live options and what each would cost. Then make the cut, aloud, and take the first step. The Latin knew that a decision that leaves the alternatives alive isn't one.

Threshold

Threshold is Old English, þrescold, and its first half is the same word as thresh, which once meant to tread or trample, as in threshing grain by treading it. The second half was worn down so early that the dictionaries say its literal sense was lost in ancient times, and in English it was probably reshaped to look like hold; one proposal has it as an old suffix that would make the whole word a threshing-place beside the house. Better to say that than to invent something tidier. So a threshold is, roughly, the place where you tread as you enter: the sill of the door, worn by feet.

It's the word for the moments this work is for because it's the exact spatial image. A threshold isn't a room. It's the strip between two rooms, and you don't live on it. You stand there, sometimes for a while, and then you're in the next room and the sill is behind you. The anthropologists who studied rites of passage took the Latin for threshold, limen, and made liminal the name for the middle phase of every rite: neither the old status nor the new, and not a place to stay. The whole shape of the Arc is in the word.

The Buddha had a version of this. In the Alagaddūpama Sutta he compares his teaching to a raft: a man builds one to cross a river, and once across, he'd be a fool to carry it on his head. The raft is for crossing over, not for holding onto. That's the coach's word too. A vessel you leave on the far bank.

Eudaimonia

The last word is the one the whole practice points at, and it's the one that's been worst translated. Eudaimonia is usually rendered as happiness, sometimes as flourishing. It is literally eu, good, and daimōn, a spirit, a divinity, the go-between that Diotima says Eros is. To have eudaimonia is to have a good daimon: to be well-attended, well-directed, in the keeping of a good spirit. Heraclitus put it in three words: ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn, a person's character is their daimon.

Aristotle, who made the word the centre of his ethics, is clear that it's an activity and not a feeling. It's the human being functioning well over a whole life. That's why happiness is such a bad translation: happiness is a state you're in, and eudaimonia is something you do, well, for a long time. Nobody can give it to you. But somebody can help you hear which direction your daimon is pulling, and whether the one you've been following is yours. That is close to a definition of this work.

Why it matters

None of this is antiquarian. When you know that coach means carriage, you can ask who's supposed to be driving. When you know that maieutic means midwife, you stop expecting the coach to supply the answer and start expecting them to test yours. When you know that decide means cut, you stop calling avoidance deliberation. When you know threshold means the worn strip of a doorway, you stop trying to furnish it. And when you know eudaimonia means a good daimon, you understand why the work is about direction and not about mood.

The profession's newer words, transformation, empowerment, growth, alignment, don't do any of this. They're not wrong, exactly. They've just had their images taken away, and a word without an image is a word you can't think with. So this site uses the old ones. They still have their pictures.