A case for coaching
Why coaching works and when it doesn’t. From my own experience, not as a coach but as a client.
Photo credit: Nicolas Meunier - Unsplash
For me it starts with questions: How do I get to the heart of the situation? What’s my part in it? Why I do what I do?
In getting to the bottom of these I want to then be at a choice as to what I do about it. You could say it’s a desire to know and understand myself more in how I work and show up in different situations.
So curiosity is a key element. And a willingness to grow. But I’m experiencing a limit, a block of some kind. Often it’s something I’m afraid to face and would rather avoid but am at least willing to talk it through with someone.
What is all this if not the human condition? We get so far and we get stuck. Not because we’re broken or deficient in some way needing to be fixed. Rather, we’ve just reached a limit, a place within us where we experience being stuck. And equally we have a desire to grow, to not settle but to progress further. To become unstuck.
Being stuck and wanting to progress: This is the place where coaching works.
I don’t go into a coaching agreement with the notion that someone will fix me. And I definitely don’t enter into it looking to be given the answers. I don’t want my coach to do the work for me. She wouldn’t anyway. I know that for sure.
Being stuck in an area of work or life and having someone come along and fix or do it isn’t valuable in the long term .
That’s like finding yourself stuck in a video game and handing the controller over to someone so they can clear the level for you. Sure, it’ll get you past the problem but in no way does it prepare you for what’s to come. In having the work done for you there’s been no struggle, no trying, no back and forth, no learning. You haven’t experienced or learned anything about yourself or about the situation, except perhaps that when you’re stuck you’d ask others to do the hard work for you!
No experience brings no growth. And worse, now that the controller’s back in your hands you’re faced with even harder, stiffer odds as the game has progressed. In no time you’ll be stuck again with no new experience to call on. More help needed, more dependancy created — not a good cycle to be in.
That’s not coaching.
In a true coaching relationship as the client I want to do the work for myself and gain the experience that will help me grow and progress independently.
A fundamental distinction then of being the client is that you do all the work. The difference however is in having a coach you’re not alone and you’re not doing that work unnoticed. The coach observes, notices, reflects back, guides, encourages and challenges you.
This is where it comes together in the shared experience of the struggle, the wrestling with the ‘stuck-ness’. In the detail of the conversation and the space created between client and coach an empowered relationship forms where insights and awareness emerge.
We face an area of challenge and stuck-ness and together coach and client look at that, go into it, explore it, understand it, notice behaviours and learn together. All of this is evaluative, trial and error experimentation in the spirit of adventure, revealing more about ourselves and our specific relationship to the situation. This is a unique kind of conversation.
Coming back to the video game analogy this time you keep the controller in your hands and continue being in the game with the coach alongside you, noticing and learning together through the experience of what’s happening.
As simple and obvious as all this sounds and is, it is a uniquely different experience that doesn’t happen and cannot happen in isolation. It happens through relationship — two people in conversation, in service of awareness and growth. This kind of collaboration, observing and shared experience creates perspective, insight and opportunity that couldn’t nor wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
This is why I use this special kind of conversation that’s coaching. And it’s why I’m a coach today — to make this kind of conversation available for others.