A wise woman once said: “People think coaching is just telling someone very nicely what to do!”
Coaching is as far from that as it is possible to be.
Typically, when someone comes to us with a problem or a challenge, that’s where we focus: on the problem.
It may be something negative in their life, such as a bad relationship with their boss or doubts about their ability to perform. Or it may be something positive. Maybe they’ve been offered a promotion and are trying to decide whether it’s the right move for them. Perhaps they’ve just started a new role and are wanting to make a good start in the early weeks.
Whatever the issue, however, it’s human nature to focus on the challenge.
We search our memories and experiences to see when we had a similar issue. We then share what we learned, what worked for us and, maybe, what didn’t work for us. We give advice, often without fully listening and understanding the full extent of the issue. As soon as we find an example in our own experience, we shut down.
It’s what we do as friends, as colleagues, as bosses, and as family members. And sometimes it’s exactly what the other person wants. If I’m new in a role and have to close an audit finding (for example), I want someone to tell me exactly how to do that.
Looking at the issue and giving advice is also a fundamental part of mentoring, where the mentor dips into their vast experience to share lessons they’ve learned.
Mentoring can be extremely valuable. But it isn’t coaching.
When we coach, we focus on the person, not the problem.
Whether we’ve experienced similar problems in the past or not is irrelevant. Our experience as a leader is largely irrelevant. What matters is not how we would solve the problem. What matters is helping the person we’re coaching solve the problem for themselves.
My advice, my way of addressing an issue will be absolutely right for me. But I have no way of knowing whether it’s right for another person.
So when we’re coaching, we focus not on the problem but on the person – and in particular – what that person has been doing that has led them to get stuck with this issue.
We add value by creating a space where the person being coached can take time to reflect. There is so much power in being listened to thoroughly, non-judgementally, by someone who is on our side but has no agenda.
It’s like stopping a tumble drier and spreading the clothes out to see what is there.
Coaches act as a mirror, reflecting back to clients the themes and the patterns that we are noticing. We notice the language that our clients use and play that back. So often, the words that we select subconsciously mirror what’s happening at a deep level.
Coaching is based on the philosophy that each of us has our own answers to our own particular issues. It’s just that we are often too close to those issues to be able to see the answers.
When I coach someone, I help them to step back and notice patterns and themes. Sometimes, just seeing those patterns and themes is enough for them to see how to move forward, and how to get unstuck. Other times, we need to work together to build new habits, new patterns of behaviour, and new practices.
It’s not that what they’ve been doing up until now has been wrong. If that were the case, they wouldn’t have reached the level that they have professionally. It’s just that those habits and patterns of behaviour no longer fit, and they need to learn new patterns of behaviour new habits in order to move forward.
So a coach will focus on language, on habits and patterns of behaviour, and act as a mirror.
A good coach will find the right balance between support and challenge for each client. As a coaching client, you have to feel that you’re in a safe comfortable environment so that you can open up fully and be vulnerable, often for the first time.
If you don’t feel able to do that with your coach, very little progress will be made and any progress that is made will be superficial and short-term only.
With just support, however, coaching risks becoming simply a nice conversation. A good coach will also challenge their client. Not in a confrontational way, but in a way that enables the person being coached to see where they may have been getting in their own way.
By working in this way with clients, coaches build their capacity to solve not only the issue or the problem that they’ve brought to coaching, but also to address issues they may face in the future.
It’s only this approach that leads to long-term sustainable change. And that is the power of coaching.
In other words, the ultimate aim of every coach should be to make themselves redundant.
The type of coaching I practise is called integral coaching. What this means is that I work with the whole person.
I don’t really believe in the distinctions between life coaching, executive coaching, career coaching and so on.
I just coach people.
Often the issue that someone brings to coaching may not be the root of the challenge they’re facing. I want my clients to be able to bring their whole selves, their whole lives so that we can take a holistic view of how best to progress.
One client came to me for coaching on how he came across in interactions, wanting to be less intimidating. As we talked, he shared that this was an issue with his young family too, and the work we did led not only to improved performance at work, but also to a better relationship with his children.
The other way in which my coaching is integral is where I focus my attention.
Often coaches will focus just on the cognitive: what we think, how we analyse situations etc.
The brain is an incredibly powerful organ and is a critical part of any coaching program.
I firmly believe, however, that if people could solve problems simply by thinking about them, they would have already done so. If they’re coming to me for coaching, if they’re stuck, I believe that’s because something is happening at a different level.
When I am coaching, I bring in the emotions. Often if we’re feeling stuck or unclear about how to progress, it’s because there are unacknowledged emotions in the background.
For example, my client Maggie (not her real name) was struggling with an underperforming team member. She had spent a lot of time thinking about how she could make performance objectives clearer but to no avail.
Their relationship was deteriorating and the only way forward that Maggie could see was either to start a disciplinary procedure or to find a way to encourage the team member to leave.
As we started to explore the situation, I asked Maggie to describe the emotions she was feeling.
This isn’t as simple as it sounds.
Sometimes we are so unused to tuning into our emotions that we lack the vocabulary. Sometimes we categorise emotions as good or bad, and feel embarrassed to mention any of the less ‘acceptable’ emotions. And sometimes we just don’t see what value there is in naming emotions.
Maggie named her emotions, one or two at first, ‘frustrated’ and ‘angry’, then going deeper, ‘bitter, resentful, irritated’ as the coaching progressed.
Maggie laughed as she said “It feels such a relief, to be honest, to be open about how I’m feeling and I can see now that I’m carrying these emotions into our conversations. I can see that I’ve said certain things almost to ‘poke’ at my team member, to provoke a reaction, to make myself feel better.”
She had reached a new level of self-awareness through the coaching process.
We’ve often been encouraged in a corporate environment to leave our emotions at the door when we arrive at work. Unless you’re very senior and it’s anger. I’ve noticed that seems to be accepted in certain environments!
But we can’t leave them at the door. Human beings are emotional creatures. And we tend either to vent those emotions or suppress them.
Venting our emotions has a detrimental impact on others and only brings us short-term relief.
Suppressing emotions doesn’t make them go away. It makes them retreat into the body and then often causes physical side effects such as poor sleep or neck ache.
By bringing emotions out into the open, we’re able to share them. We build the ability to be aware of our emotions, to acknowledge them, without being overrun by them. This is part of what we mean when we talk about emotional intelligence and developing our levels of self-awareness.
Emotions can often be a good source of information, a signpost to new insights. Thomas More described anger as “a dark angel sitting on your shoulder, saying ‘This isn’t right, something needs to change’”.
And coaching is inherently about change.
The other area that I focus on when I coach, along with the cognitive and emotional, is my client’s somatic experience.
By this I mean the body, a wonderful source of intelligence.
If we are encouraged at work to leave our emotions at the door, the body is even more neglected. It’s often seen just as a vehicle that carries our head from meeting to meeting.
Yet like emotions, the body gives us so much information. Part of my work as a coach is to build my clients’ ability to tune in to the physical cues they are being given all the time.
Take my client Harold for example. He had been told that he was too aggressive in meetings.
We started with a process of self-observation, noticing the emotions he felt in meetings. Like many people, Harold struggled to find the words to describe what he was feeling but the more he observed it and tuned in, the broader his vocabulary became and he was able to describe feeling ‘irritated, frustrated’, and even ‘angry’.
I asked him also to tune into what was happening physically, which was a real challenge for him. “I don’t feel anything,” he said.
I asked him to describe a situation where he had recently noticed feeling irritated.
He described a team meeting where he was presenting the quarterly team performance. As he was partway through his presentation, his boss interrupted him, talked over him, and took them off on a tangent. Harold said he was really cross.
“Look!” I said, “Harold, look at what your hands are doing, look at how you’re sitting!”
He had lent forward and was clenching his fists.
The wonder of the body is that, whether it’s in the moment as something is happening or whether it’s while we’re remembering, it produces the same physical reactions. As Harold remembered his irritation, so his body went into the same pattern.
As his coach, I’d been able to hold a mirror up for him, allowing him to see and feel what was happening.
So if the emotions are a signpost to potential new insights, the body acts as a map helping us to reach those insights.
The reason why this matters is that we used to think that we had a thought and it triggered an emotion that played out in our body. That isn’t necessarily the case.
Often, our body reacts to something first and that triggers an emotional response which we then interpret in our brains to make sense of.
When I was first learning to coach, at the Centre for Coaching in Cape Town, and this insight was shared with me, I was a bit cynical.
One day as I was driving home, I drove into the garage, and I noticed a feeling in my stomach that I’d come to learn meant sadness for me.
I was confused as I hadn’t thought about anything that was making me feel sad. Why was I feeling this in my stomach? As I reflected, I realised that the garage was empty. My partner at the time was away and his car was missing. That’s why I was sad.
If we can tune into what is happening physically as well as what is happening emotionally, that increases the chances of us being able to catch a thought before it’s taken root. Which allows us to choose to act rather than react.
Once Harold was able to notice what his fists were doing, he was able to relax his hands, put them on his knees and sit back, which made him feel calmer.
You can’t think yourself patient and you can’t think yourself confident. It’s only by exploring the emotions and the physical cues, and learning how to work with the body and with emotions to develop an integrated new way of behaving, that true and sustainable change can take place.
If my aim as a coach is to make myself redundant, the way in which I do it is by building my clients’ ability to tune in to their head, their heart and their body and use the intelligence from all three ‘brains’, to build their ability to step back, reflect and choose to act differently.
The ability to step back, to observe without judgement, to reflect, and to choose to act differently is my definition of self-awareness.
