Faith And Hope As Gifts Of Leadership, With Jean-Christophe Normand
In this episode, Andrew speaks with executive coach and Catholic Deacon Jean-Christophe Normand. Jean-Christophe shares his personal journey of reconnecting with his childhood faith and discusses how his beliefs shape his coaching and leadership work. This conversation explores the impact of strong personal convictions and delves into the formation and development of meaningful relationships.
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Faith And Hope As Gifts Of Leadership, With Jean-Christophe Normand
In this episode, I'm speaking with my friend and colleague Jean-Christophe Normand in Paris, France. He's a fascinating individual with a very different background, deeply steeped in Catholicism, both in terms of his formal education, which did not come early in his life, but later on, and also in how he brings that into his work, primarily as a coach and consultant at this point.
The pace of this conversation is a little bit different than some of the others. It's a slower, longer sharing pace where he talks broadly about the role of religion in France, as well as more personally about his journey away from a traditional career into a deep study of Catholicism. We hear about a 700-kilometer journey he took with a donkey.
In terms of his wisdom and practice, he talks about the important role of hope and the importance of suspending judgment. He talks about leadership as a responsibility and the role that his faith plays in that for him. Not surprisingly, the importance of aligning our personal and professional lives. One way that he does that is through practice at the beginning and the end of each day. I invite you to enjoy this different and rich episode of the show.
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*Please note that the podcast transcript is AI-generated, and thus there may be inaccuracies in the transcription from time to time.*
I'm happy to have my friend Jean-Christophe Normand with us from Paris. It looks like you're in an art museum somewhere with that background. Jean-Christophe is a coaching colleague of mine from the Companions for Leadership, formerly Oxford Leadership Academy. He is based in France. We've had a chance to participate in several meetings together. I've always respected his approach, his background, and his wisdom. That's what we'd to talk about. Welcome to the show.
Thanks, Andrew.
Your background is quite different than many other coaches. You have been formally trained in, could I say traditional Catholic? How would you describe your education and maybe how it's a little different, alternative, and wonderful?
First of all, I'm a European and I'm French. That blends in some specific characters. You may not know, but the French have a specific relationship to religion, which is sometimes a little bit paranoid or antagonistic in the sense that we have something that we call laïcism in France, which implies that we have a clear cut separation between religion, social, or any form of political activities.
That's something that I was brought up with, even though I spent half of or most of my younger years abroad. I wasn't specifically brought up in that, but I am culturally and emotionally 100% French. Therefore the culture that I have traditionally in France has been very much engrossed in Catholicism. I was baptized when I was a couple of weeks old, and I followed what you would call catechism when I was a youngster.
If you had met me when I was twenty years old, culturally speaking, I was a Catholic, but I was by no way somebody deeply religious. I was more intent at that age on fooling around and not paying much attention to religious aspects. I think it came on late with regard to myself. First of all, there was my marriage, which was a religious marriage.
That got me a little bit more in the saddle, and then progressively, things set themselves up in place. I think I was touched by a certain number of contexts, situations, events, or people that I met that spread into me a deep religious feeling and the need to invest myself in that field. Maybe if I go back a step in terms of you saying that I was a coach, I am. I've been doing this business for fifteen years, but at the beginning of my career, I was a financial controller in metallurgy in a large corporation. A twist happened when I was around 40 years old. My wife and I went through a series of difficult situations. We weren't able to have children on our own so we went into an adoption process. We adopted children from abroad. We went through three difficult adoption processes.
We lost one of the three children that we adopted. I think that that was a starting point for a deeper reflection in terms of, where could I find sense or purpose in my life. We had invested ourselves in a local church here, but we were still trying to seek our ways. When I turned around 40, something snapped into me. It was the urge to walk away from the existing job that I had, which was not providing me with what I needed.
I wasn't quite sure how I was going to walk out, but one thing that happened was that I engaged in one-to-one coaching with somebody who immediately I had very good feelings for. That got me into a deeper reflexive mode where I decided that if I was going to walk away from the job that I had been doing for the previous twenty years, I needed to engage myself in a reflexive mode and I needed to look outside.
Theology And A Personal Shock
I started to disengage myself from my company. I did that over three years. I started looking a little bit at what theology was all about. I went to a Catholic university and started to follow some classes and try to understand a little bit what we meant, what were the words, or how we could describe what is a religious feeling, especially a Catholic religious feeling in the 21st century.
Two years after engaging in that, I had another personal shock. My parents had a serious car accident and my mother was left in a state of tetraplegia. She was deeply in hospital. That led me to think that somehow I had to get some sense in this world because there was a lot of suffering linked to that. There was anger also linked to my father who was the driver and who had been in a certain way reckless.
I had to come to terms with that. I like to tell this story because it's an experiential chapter of my life. I decided to walk away at the time from my company. I started a business in coaching, but I had to cut off from twenty years of being a handsomely well-paid financial corporate executive. I did that by engaging in a walk. I walked from Paris to a town probably 500 miles away from Paris.
I did that with a donkey. Why a donkey? At the time I had a back problem and I couldn't carry stuff, but there was also another reason for that. A donkey is a very biblical animal. When you open the Bible, you see the donkeys all over the place and they have the character of their own. I had seen a lot of family walks with donkeys over the last 3 or 4 years.
I told myself this would be a great way to walk away from the job that I had and try to engage in an experience that was both profoundly human and spiritual in the sense that I'm the guy who whenever I engage myself in a project, I will label out very clearly what I want to do. I make reservations and I nail down precisely how I am going to do it.
This was a situation where I was walking off from Paris. I knew roughly the paths I was going to follow, but I had no idea where I would stay in the evenings. I had laid out 4 or 5 monasteries on the way where I knew that I could stop over for one day and rest. That was it. Before leaving, I was terrified of the idea of walking away with this donkey that I hardly knew.
The moment I left Paris, a deep sense of calm settled in me. I knew immediately that I had done the right thing. What I experienced with that donkey was sometimes a combination of a lot of frustration and sometimes anger because she wasn't walking the way I wanted her to. We all know that the donkeys are great animals, but they can be very stubborn.
At the same time, some profoundly human experiences. The people I met on the way were some incredible people. This walk or this track to a certain extent went on for a month. It was very inspirational. It was the thing that I needed to walk away from my previous job and settle into a new context. It was difficult afterward. It took me a couple of years to turn around, but it's the pattern to get me moving forward in a very different frame of mind.
Three Distinctive Areas Of Life
Coming back to your original question of who should I consider I am. Now, I'm close to 60 years old, so this was twenty years ago. I'd like to say today that I have a life with three distinctive areas. As you said, I'm a coach and a consultant. I facilitate programs within CFL. I'm also now a professor at a Catholic university, teaching to a wide audience that can be either Catholic priests or people who are employed as lay people for the church who were running educational programs for the Church.
There's a third area. I'm also a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. I was ordained. In that sense, I have a specific mission as a deacon, which is to assist a local Christian community to baptize and marry. I preach at a church. I liked this idea of having a life that is invested in what one could think are distinct areas, but they're not so distinct.
When I'm operating as a deacon, there's a part of me which is a coach. When I'm acting as a professor at the university, there's also a part of me that is a deacon. The interesting thing is how all these three areas intertwine and are linked with one another. They've brought out in me a character, which I find to some extent surprising, but that has enabled me to embed in either of these practices a little bit of these different cultural backgrounds that I have.
If I consider, for instance, the coaching and consulting business that I do, how do I operate? I don't see myself as fundamentally different from the other colleagues that I have at CFL. Maybe one slight difference. I notice very often in discussions that we have that I have a very deep feeling linked to hope. In the world that we live in right now. If we want to be very blunt, there is a lot of darkness.
I believe that because of my faith, there is this underlying hope in human beings. It's hope in events. It's hope that globally even though there are dark times around us, there is still light at the end of the day. Hope means that there is a dawn after the darkness. Whatever I do and however difficult it can be, I always have this inner feeling that at the end of the day, right will overcome evil in a certain sense.
Leadership Through Faith: Hope means that there is a dawn after the darkness.
I know that's a gift. It's a gift because it's not something that's called for. It's not something that you order, like you order a lunch or whatever. It's a gift, hence, the deep gratitude that I express in whatever I do for the life that has been given to me. The gratitude that I have for this gift enables me to walk through sometimes difficult paths.
I get feedback from people who say, “The surprising thing we see about you is how you're able to stay calm in sometimes difficult contexts or when there's a lot of urgency.” That doesn't mean that internally, I'm not boiling also, but I can reflect peace. I'm sure that it comes also from the fact that as a deacon, I follow a ritual of prayers. That provides within my day these sequences where I try to connect myself with something that is above me. We can call it meditation. We can call it personal prayer. It's something that I think also contributes to root me deeply into in terms of what I do or what I say.
The other point is to say that one of the very important things that I've learned is not just the fact that I've been brought up as a Catholic. It's also because I was able to travel at a very young age. I was fortunate enough to learn English when I was young, hence the fact that I speak it quite fluently. I have a feel for diversity. It's more than a feel. It's a profound respect for each individual as he stands. I try to offset any form of judgment on anybody that I meet because judging is categorizing. It implies immediately putting a boundary between me and the other person.
Emmanuel Levinas' Philosophy
There's a French philosopher that I like very much called Emmanuel Levinas. He was a 20th-century philosopher and of Jewish origin. A lot of his work was on alterity or the difference that you can see in others. He would say, “Anybody that I meet is walking on sacred territory. It's something that I have to respect because there is a sacred part in any one person that I meet that I will never be able to grab totally, but that I'm asked to respect.”
To some point, that is the philosophy that I try to follow. Whenever I'm with a client or a student, I always try to think, “Who is this person in front of me and how can I honor this person regardless of what he's requesting or what his story is? How can I be the person to adjust myself at the right level in the conversation that we need to have so that I do my part as best as I can?”
That's the pathway that I try. We talk a lot about wisdom. It's a difficult word I find to define. I would say that the wisdom that I try to apply is in this profound respect for the individual that I meet and the intensity of the relationship that we can build together. I believe that as a Catholic Christian, I'm given some inner energy that enables me to do that. I would be unable to do that just by myself if I had not benefited originally from these inner gifts.
Today, I have no idea as to why I have had the benefit of that. The grace of the faith doesn't have any form of explanation. I meet very bright people every day, some who have outstanding attitudes and behaviors to others but who do not have faith. There's a mystery there that we're all confronted with. Why does one believe in another one? We don't know. We only know one thing. It is that every one of us has to follow a path to elevate ourselves in what we do and bring some form of good to this world.
Each and every one of us have to follow a path to sort of elevate ourselves in what we do and bring some form of good to this world.
Thank you. What I hear you saying is that if we were going to invoke the ubiquitous iceberg metaphor, your face is below the surface in deeper depths, and that equips you to operate above the surface the way you do with the hope and with the energy that you bring. Your reflection of the type of integration that I experienced is very grounded, beautiful, and practical. It's very practical. You're not often in a cave in saffron robes. The saffron robes would be a different tradition, forgive me. Anyway, you're not often in a cave but in the world, supporting, assisting, helping to heal and balance, and bringing some light to this world where there is darkness.
Especially in the one-to-one relationship, it's believing that no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the story is, the person in front of me, there's some form of hope for him in his story, not mine, but in his. Sometimes in coaching, we meet some pretty damaged people or we hear stories that are quite sad. Sometimes also I've witnessed in corporations or companies attitudes of rejection and sometimes violence made to other people.
Whatever the circumstances, I always try to shed some light on the situation and always bring each individual to believe that the future can be better for him. Even if you're at the last stage of your life, that's something I often have in my predictions. I say to people, “Even at the last moment, you’ll never know.” There is still an opportunity to breathe in this light of love that we are made for. Up until your very last breath, there is hope for redemption. That is something that drives me in everything I try to do.
Up until your very last breath, there is hope for redemption.
It reminds me a bit of a person very important in the founding of this country over here across the pond, a fellow named Benjamin Franklin, who was born in Boston but is known for his life in Philadelphia. When he was on his deathbed, a friend of his said, “Benjamin, are you afraid of death? Are you afraid of what's going to happen to you when you die?” He said in his very practical, spiritually founded belief system, “God has always taken very good care of me. Why would I expect that to change now?”
There's always that if we look at it in a certain way. I agree with you that to have that system of beliefs is a gift. I'm curious to know, particularly because your faith is very strong for you. How do you navigate through a world that may be labeled secular, for lack of a better term, where your faith is important to you and you bring it forward? You bring forward your faith. I don't think you proselytize, you don't evangelize, or I haven't experienced you that way.
Navigating A Secular World
That doesn't seem important, but you do bring it forward. How do you bring it forward recognizing that other people may come from very different traditions or maybe very anti-tradition? It's very trendy to not be at all interested in religion, although I think traditional religions are making a comeback with good reason. How do you navigate in the world that way, being sensitive to and respecting the differences that people have in that regard?
First of all, I try to adapt as much as possible to the individuals or to the groups that I meet. Adapting means starting by putting myself in a listening mode more than proactive, or I would say receptive versus proactive. That's the only way that I can find the pattern or in other words, it's the only way to access the interior of this person and to try to establish a relationship.
You know as well as I can that I can say hello to somebody and listen politely, and from a relationship point of view, we realize nothing is happening. I must confess that sometimes it's more difficult than others because we all have our fears. For instance, I have a strong issue with people who have a drinking problem because my son had a drinking problem and that's left a lot of wounds personally.
I try as much as possible to be in the adaptive mode. To enter into this person's frame of mind and establish a relationship, how do I do that? I will do that by seeking or trying to understand what is important to that person in the present context. I will try to avoid forming any form of judgment on what he thinks, whether it's right or bad.
I will try to see if we can find a common ground. If I take the metaphor of a fire, maybe being able to find the place where we can both sit down side by side and share something of our core humanity. What is our core humanity? It's the human condition. It's the fact that we both have our limitations. We both have weaknesses and strengths. We both have a frame of mind with souvenirs and with stories. If I succeed in establishing a form of relationship, then I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. In other words, adapting to the person and trying to establish some form of communication or wavelength. I'm not going to say we understand one another, but we're able to walk side by side for a little bit of time.
It is beautiful. When I hear you describe that, it sounds to me that relationship formation and what you need to do to foster and facilitate that relationship formation is very fundamental in any functioning, healthy, working relationship, particularly perhaps in a coaching relationship. Would that be fair?
Yes. It has to do with body language, behaviors, and above all, suspending judgment because we're very powerful at putting and categorizing things in people. The moment we do that, there's generally a momentum of fear or of not necessarily positive emotions that rise. That's something that I've been trying to work on and set up whatever the circumstance is.
It's funny but I find that the lower the person from a social point of view, the easier it is for me to do that. It's much easier for me to reach these levels of relationships with someone who's doing a very basic job, a very simple house cleaner and stuff like that, than somebody who would be very socially high up with a lot of responsibilities.
Why is that? I'm not putting any form of judgment but I find that the lower you go, the fewer barriers there seem to be. We could have fewer frames of mind that we're not framing as much. I've had intense joy in meeting people in strange situations, people who are very culturally different from me but brought me a lot of joy because I found that we could connect very quickly.
I hear what you are saying. However we might describe it, the word “lower” isn't the best word, but I understand what you mean, perhaps I think as people go higher into more positions of more responsibility, etc., I think maybe there's more to protect. Perhaps there's less openness. That's why sometimes I think the more “complicated and sophisticated” my life might get, the more I have to work to stay open. This show is about spirituality and leadership. Tell me about leadership from your point of view and the impact of your faith or how you've seen it work with other leaders to make that connection. However, you might connect it, which I'm sure it is. I'd love to hear how.
Leadership And Responsibility
For me, leadership is very much related to individual responsibility. If I want to lead my life, it means that I've reflected, to a certain extent, what was important for myself, not just in terms of values but the usual aspect, vision, purpose, and meaning, and I know where I'm going. This feeling of responsibility can be applied to the spiritual area.
When I was younger, I had this image that anything in the religious area was overly complicated. It was complex to understand, even more complex to live. I could see the distortion there was between what I could read in the Bible and the attitudes of a lot of Catholics around me. I wasn't very much impressed. Applying formal leadership in spirituality is a very demanding topic because nobody is perfect. I will certainly not say that I'm on that line, but there is a sense of responsibility.
As a deacon, I've committed myself to following and respecting what the Roman Catholic Church says. To be honest, sometimes, I'm confronted with difficult situations that require a specific form of leadership in the way that I'm able to respond or the way that I'm able to handle some conversations that will challenge the way that the church has been run.
There's the individual aspect and that's probably the most important. It's making sure that there's an adequate alignment between what I profess or what I say and what effectively I do. It's as simple as not cheating with yourself or not cheating with others if I can put it in very simple terms. It means trying as much as possible to apply to yourself what you're preaching to others or what you're saying.
All the time, we're giving out advice or we're giving out concepts about how we should do this or how we should do that. From a spiritual point of view, I try to do that by being as careful as possible in the way that I align my personal and professional life to what I profess. I can only do that by having an inner life where each morning when I wake up, I offer once again the day to God because that's to God and his son, Jesus.
I offer my day by saying precisely my specific prayer rituals. These prayers are an offering that I'm putting at stake once again. I'm doing that every day, the capacity to honor this level of alignment between what I profess and what I do. You never know what the day is going to come up with. There are weaknesses and there are moments when you fail to do that. By doing that each day, it's like signing a blank check every morning.
It's recommitting every day. It's stepping forward every day in a very deliberate and conscious way. It's automatic. You're doing this every day very consciously. That's what I hear.
At the end of the day, I try to also close the day by expressing a word of thanks for the good things and also, for the unpleasant things. I will try to see behind the unpleasant things how effectively I've moved or how I've been working effectively upon my growth situations. Being in these areas, like any other individual, I need to pay attention because those are generally speaking very often weak points that we have.
There's this opening of the day and the closing. It's like the breathing. You open and you close. It frames the day. I find it's essential for me to follow that pattern to avoid this trap that we can easily fall into, which is a lack of awareness of what's going on. In today's world, it's so easy to fall over. To be engrossed in things that are forms of alienation of our true self. It's this question of how we are monitoring both life and the self.
Is life overtaking us and leading us or are we paying enough consciousness to ourselves so that we are receiving life, but we are effectively working with life to draw the lines and build something consequential over time? We know that as we grow older, that becomes often an issue because we don't have the energy that we had in the past, but we have something else that feeds us. At 60, I can see the difference compared to when I was 40, but it doesn't mean I'm not happier for the latter.
That’s beautiful. As we age, our priorities change. What am I craving today? What would be a rich experience today? What's rewarding for me today? I appreciate that. That notion of the life out there, I hear you talk about that outer life and inner life. The challenge to go out in the world and do what we do while staying at home is the way I think about it.
Coaching And Spirituality
As a teacher of mine liked to say, “The world is designed to make us forget.” Hence the need for the type of practices you're talking about, which are lovely. I'm curious to know whether they are religious-oriented or not. Do you coach people to undertake these daily reflections to start the day a certain way and end the day a certain way? Is that something that your clients do? Whether it's a religious practice or not.
The world is designed to make us forget.
I don't have requests for that specifically. As a professional coach, I stick to the goals that I'm given. Like most coaches, I'm careful about the balance from a holistic point of view. I sometimes will dive into things like you get enough sleep, your heating habits, and stuff like that. We may go over the subjects of purpose or meaning.
I do not go into the spiritual dimension because it's not the area. I don't have to be explicit. I can be implicit about it. People who often ask me as a coach know that I have my activities as a deacon on the side, but I don't think they're asking to talk to a deacon. They're asking to talk to a coach, but a coach who's working with a frame of mind that they're interested in. They know that they will get from me potentially.
I'm speaking for them, but what I believe that they're probably seeking behind them a kindness, benevolence, and maybe some form of full respect for human nature or for whatever materials that they bring forward. I've never had any requests for that and I've not specialized in that. On the other hand, if you were to see me in my Catholic University, that would be a different ballgame.
I'm in the context where I have people who are expecting from me some words of wisdom along those lines. I'm in a different context and I move very easily from one another. Maybe the only thing that I bring into coaching is a bracelet that I have on my wrist, a small cross, or sometimes this cross that is a symbol of the deacon that I carry on my heart. That will be the most of it. I think that's enough as it is. It brings what is needed in the space that I've created, no more, no less.
You were talking about some of the qualities that you bring and why people would come to see you, benevolent and otherwise. One of them to me that's jumping out is acceptance. Acceptance of where people are. Acceptance of others' journeys, and respect for others' paths. I appreciate that and I appreciate you sharing your story. We have two donkeys here at our ranch in Santa Fe that because of their stripes are called Jerusalem donkeys. Please come to see them when you can.
I love that.
I look forward to continuing this conversation. Two things I would like to ask. First, if people want to learn more about you or your work, where do they go? Where could they look?
My LinkedIn profile. We have a website, which is both in French and English. People will see a little bit of the kind of activities we ran. There's nothing new or innovative in most of the websites that we have. We were in the process of thinking about running a new program because my wife had just finished a naturopathic training program.
We did this for fifteen years, We ran fasting seminars. We're thinking of starting up a new program that would bring in natural healing as a process, not just from the food or exercise but also from a spiritual point of view. That's still a work in progress, but it's one of the projects that we have in the future. By all means, LinkedIn and my website are open for grabs.
What is that website?
It's www.RHINC.fr. FR for France. It means a human relationship in collective intelligence. I had difficulty finding the appropriate name. I said to myself, it has to be words that relate to human relationships because that's what it is about. The other thing also was collective intelligence. That's the word that I was looking for.
Collective intelligence was also the second factor because I believe there is a wealth of collective intelligence surrounding us. The difficulty most of the time is we're unaware of it or we do not see it. My purpose is to try to bring out that collective intelligence to show that it is available and that it's available for good in the sense of bringing out the best of ourselves. That's what I'm intent on doing.
Anything else you might want to add? I don't know if I cut off any response or if there's something else you might want to share about what you've been doing.
First of all, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit of the view that I have on spirituality and leadership. It's a very important factor in the context of global warming. I'm convinced that we're all engaged in writing new narratives. I recently read a very interesting novel by an American writer called Kim Robinson called The Ministry of the Future.
He's based in California and he's a science fiction writer. It's the first example I see of somebody writing a positive narrative of where we're going. Most of the time, science fiction writers write horror stories of a world going to pieces and stuff like that. I encourage everybody to read that novel because it's the first time I think we have a real positive narrative of where we're going in this global warming climate issue. The fact that we have collectively the resources to potentially overcome this. It's not just about technology.
When you read his novel, you find out that it's also bringing together dedicated people who believe that they can effectively change the world. I like to see myself as being one of those. Not on a global stage but in the interactions that I have with the people that I meet. I like to think that I'm in a mysterious but real way, contributing to making this world a better place and coping with all the other human beings on this world to cross this threshold that is global climate.
Thank you so much. Thank you for the recommendation. I so much appreciate your time and I look forward to continuing the conversation. Merci bien.
Thank you, Andrew.
Thank you.
Important Links
Jean-Christophe Normand - LinkedIn