The Interview: Anne Grete Mazziotta
How the chance to bring coaching training to San Quentin Rehabilitation Center more than 25 years ago ignited a dream that never died.
Anne Grete Mazziotta is a coach and senior faculty with Co-Active Training Institute. This interview is a bit different: It’s the first in a series about the work of Re-entry Coaching Academy, a nonprofit with the mission to bring coaching and coach training into prisons. Anne Grete recently co-led a training (along with Eric Kohner and others) in a facility in Eloy, Ariz., and she shares about that experience. —Steph
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Tell us about yourself.
I think at my core I am a curious, wide-eyed explorer! My favorite states of being are awe and wonder. It's the perfect place to come from as a coach and as a trainer of coaching skills. Sometimes I tell my students that the role of a coach is to be "professionally lost.” If you allow yourself to be lost, you let go of the need to get anywhere, or to fit anyone or anything into a box—you remain open and curious to whatever you encounter, and it gives you a lot of permission to play and to be creative. The "professional" part has to do with not freaking out while being in this "lost" space.
I am also a person that sees people to be essentially vast and magnificent. Of course there is a lot of stuff that can cover over our magnificence, but I believe that this quality wants to be expressed in each human being. It's so fun for me to see a person's greatness or beauty, to speak to it and to cheer on its expression. I feel lucky to have found coaching as a profession. It's a good fit for me.
You recently led a coach training workshop in a prison in Eloy, Ariz. How did you become interested in leading workshops in prisons?
CTI led workshops at San Quentin [Rehabilitation Center] 25 years ago, but the extra security that they needed to conduct the classes was very expensive. I’ve been looking for some way to work with prisons ever since. I think it’s related to my understanding of freedom, which is an important value of mine. There’s something so meaningful about working with people who don’t have freedom, or much external freedom.
Recently, I discovered the Re-entry Coaching Academy and reached out thinking that maybe I could volunteer as a coach or a trainer. ReCA’s mission is to train inmates—or residents, as they call them—in coaching and communication skills, and ultimately to have residents conduct trainings for each other.
What was this most recent prison facilitation like?
It was startlingly comfortable, and I didn't expect that. It was wonderful. The metaphor I use is if the public-facing courses I teach are like meals, then the participants attending them are used to eating three square a day. But teaching people in the prison was like feeding people who haven't eaten in a really long time. The men who were in the course don't have many opportunities, so when they get one, they bring everything. That commitment was incredibly moving to me—as trainers, it called us to give the same level of passion and engagement right back. It was a tremendous feeling of purpose and meaning.
The other surprising thing was that we were working with people who had received unbelievable messages growing up, and who had committed very serious crimes—and yet all that my co-facilitator Eric and I could see in the room was beauty, light, and, strangely, innocence. We saw their desire to contribute. So, either I am just a diehard liberal and have gone over the deep end, or that's the essence of who we are as human beings.
We were holding both things, that they were convicted of terrible crimes, and that they were incredibly beautiful. I think coaching and coach training chooses to speak to, and grow, the beauty and light in people.
Can you bring insight to what the value of coaching would be for a resident of a prison facility? I ask because our cultural understanding is often that coaching is about achieving goals; how might your experience in prisons shift, or broaden, our perspective?
If you've taken CTI’s first course, Fundamentals, then you know that it begins with an exercise in which everyone asks each other, “What's your dream?” I asked one of the residents about his dream, and he looked at me like I was crazy. Then I said, “besides getting out,” and he offered me an answer. But at the end of the course—I get moved thinking about it—he said, “You know, I thought you were nuts when you asked me about a dream. But now I know. It’s completing this course. I want to be a trainer.”
There are practical applications to learning coaching—designing alliances with prison officers, for example. But I think what's more important is beginning to think differently about yourself and connect with yourself. What's positive about you? Even generating a dream—to believe that a dream is possible. That's really life changing. It’s not so much about starting an exercise program or losing 20 pounds, but it's the seed of being somebody different.
Does this hearken back to your value of freedom—can you say more about what freedom means to you?
I think it's about the freedom to choose. It's freedom of the mind and the heart. I think you can be free within a prison if you don't lose yourself.
I'm dealing with a health issue right now, and I notice that when you get caught up in the medical system, you start feeling like “a patient.” But there’s also the freedom to remember and hold on to your wholeness, your health, and not become some sick person, even if you're going through a lot of procedures. I think we're huge—each of us is huge. And personally, I like to stay connected to that, and to remind others, because it’s easy to feel small when it's not true.
So it’s about freedom and self-concept. Even if you fail, over and over again, you never have to let go of your dream—even a completely unreasonable one—which I find quite liberating.
I want to hear a little more about your background, too. How did you get into coaching? What's your origin story?
I have a background in counseling psychology, and I was working as a guidance counselor in 1996 when I got an issue of New Age Journal, which I didn't even subscribe to, in the mail. Cheryl Richardson was featured on the cover wearing a sassy red dress, and it was all about positivity, really. In it was a description of this new profession called “coaching.” I thought, this is for me, and I started to pursue it. CTI and Coach U were teaching at the time, and CTI was the only program that met in person. And I just loved the curriculum. I was fortunate to be in that early group, and got hired by CTI in 1998.
Did you feel resistance to coaching having been trained as a therapist?
I did have difficulty fully embracing that people are “naturally creative, resourceful and whole” because I had been in a place of responsibility for diagnosing—so that took me a while. But I did ultimately embrace it because I always thought, who am I to give diagnoses, to make these decisions? It really went against a core piece of me. When I encountered coaching, and it was about empowering others, I realized that's what I would want for myself. It felt much more comfortable.
Will you continue to do more work in prisons?
Absolutely. I am going to be 66 soon; I think of it as grace that I got to do this at all, and I'm hoping for more grace. It will be the most meaningful work of my life.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Love this permission to be “professionally lost”. There is so much freedom in the awe of vastness. Thank you Anne, and Steph for bringing this to us.