New coaches are taught to tolerate silence: wait, do not fill it, the client will speak. Doyle's first response to that instruction is a long pause, which is either a joke or a demonstration and is probably both.
"Tolerate," she says eventually. "You would not say you tolerate the second half of a conversation."
Three kinds of quiet
The tradition she trained in distinguishes at least three silences: gathered, empty, and the one where somebody is working up to saying a thing they are frightened of. They feel entirely different from inside, and a practised director can tell them apart within a minute.
The distinction is not academic. If the room has gone empty, the silence has ended and you are both just sitting there — say something. If someone is working up to it, anything you say costs them the run-up they were taking.
"Most people who have been taught to tolerate silence are, internally, timing it. They are waiting out a duration. The question is never how long. It is what kind."
The part she will not lend out
Doyle is regularly asked to run workshops for coaches, and mostly declines. Her objection is not territorial.
"You can have the taxonomy. It is not secret. What you cannot have in a weekend is thirty years of being wrong about which one you were in."
Authority without a database
She is a signatory to the safeguarding code adopted by forty-one retreat centres this year, and one of its more insistent advocates for the single mechanism it contains: a named person at every centre who does not teach and cannot be overruled by whoever does.
"In almost every case we looked at, the person you would have to complain to was the person you were complaining about, or their student. That is not a tradition. That is a structure with a hole in it."
On the lineage question — how anyone is supposed to verify a teacher whose authority comes from a chain of transmission — she is less certain, and says so.
"A register turns a relationship into a certificate, and certificates are the thing we were defined against. I have not resolved it. I am suspicious of anyone who says they have."