Earlier this week, Patrick Stewart died, and I was absolutely devastated. Patrick Steward’s Captain Picard was a huge part of my childhood and I have blogged many times about how much he, and Star Trek – The Next Generation more generally, inspired me in my life and my work. Being a late Gen X-er, I am firmly in camp Star Trek, not Star Wars.
There’s so much else Patrick Stewart achieved and inspired in his life, it feels a little callous to mourn him most as Captain Picard, but in my life, this figure mattered more. His calm, quiet, humane example of leadership inspired me throughout my life. He is definitely a (fictional) figure, about whom I feel that he is an essential part of my personal mythology. Without him, I wouldn’t be quite the same person.
Fortunately, later in life I met real people who inspired me, and without whom, I feel things wouldn’t have happened in the same way. Luckily for me, quite of few of these pivotal relationships continue in some form, even if the cadence of our conversations has shifted. My mentor Margaret, for example, became a friend.
Margaret was my first proper coach and mentor, and we had several conversations that shaped the future of my career. I have recently thought a lot about those special conversations, those moments when you have an idea or a realisation or someone says something that really stays with you… and things are never quite the same again.
Since I have started working as a coach and mentor myself, I have had a few people come up to me and tell me that something that we talked about or something we did together made a difference to them. That I was part of such a pivotal moment for them, a moment that made a difference, a moment without which things wouldn’t have happened in quite the same way.
It’s a deeply humbling experience, and immensely rewarding, to feel that you made a difference to someone, helped something happen.
Also, I realise now what Margaret meant when she said that she didn’t do anything, and that it was all me. What I took for her natural modesty was instead a truth I couldn’t see at the time: namely that it was all me. Just as I can see how my coaching clients or mentees make it all happen themselves. It is their energy and drive that makes it happen.
I am there for the moment, the moment in which they realise that they can. And that moment is what really matters. After that, they just do it all by themselves.
So, thank you, Patrick Stewart, for giving me a Captain Picard who was there for some of those moments for me. I will forever be grateful.
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