Coaching Behaviors: Partnership

Photo by Tom Crew

The ongoing contact we have with a coach, the sessions that may last one month, or continue less sporadically over years, contribute to the creation of a partnership. Our coach is a partner in our success and personal and professional mastery of being able to: create, make progress toward, and maintain reasonable goals; manage ourselves amidst our own discomfort and that of others; increase our tolerance for reactivity; and be candid with our experiences. Because these skills are hard for everyone, mastery takes a lifetime. A coach is there for part of that journey.

We are almost certain to have some to see a coach in the first place because, in some way, partnering has become fraught with challenges. We sense the issues, but don’t quite understand the root of the problem. Maybe we try to please too many people. We gain our sense of security from their admiration, but then feel inauthentic or inwardly numb and pull back.  Perhaps we connect strongly at first with a direct, boss, or stakeholder, but then always discover a major flaw that turns us off and baits us to sabotage the relationship by avoiding contact or withholding information that will make them successful, establishing an unproductive cycle.

The relationship with our coach may have little in common with the sort of partnership we elsewhere in our life. Because therapists spend so much time in a client’s past, they remove all potential for collegial rapport. Because coaches focus so much on the present, and partner on strategies for gaining results in the present—this relationship has a bit of latitude.  Some coaches do socialize with their clients; others draw a bright line. Coaches experience a conflict when a private or personal interest appears to influence the objective of his or her official duties as a coach and a professional. When that happens, they openly disclose any such conflict and offer to remove themselves when a conflict arises.

Regardless, unavoidably and conveniently, we bring to our coaching partnership the very tendencies that emerge in our relationships with other people across our web. Here too we may be too quick to bond thinking we have found the safety of a “tribe”, only to cool, or we are too prone to idealization placing the coach upon a pedestal, then gripped by an impulse to flee.

Except that now, when we are with our coach, our tendencies will have a chance to be witnessed, slowed down, discussed, sympathetically explored and—in their more sabotaging displays— overcome. The relationship with the coach becomes a barometer of one’s behavior with people more generally and thereby allows us, on the basis of greater self-awareness, to modify and improve how we relate to ourselves, our teams and stakeholders, and the world at large.

The coaching partnership acts as a microcosm of our general ability to collaborate.

In the context of a coaching session, our biases, idiosyncrasies, beliefs, and habits are observed and can be commented on. We are not criticized, but we are held accountable. The coach notices important information about our character that we deserve to become aware of. The coach will (kindly) point out that we’re reacting as if we had been attacked, when they only asked a question. The coach might focus our attention to how we seem to want to tell them impressive things about our accomplishments for the week (yet they like us anyway). The coach might notice how we seem to rush to agree with them when they’re only exploring an idea to see if it fits our situation and one in which they themselves are not very sure. They see where we adopt attitudes or outlooks that we don’t actually have. They see how committed we seem to be in the idea that they are disappointed in us for our lack of progress or inability to perform under pressure as we might have liked. They will point out our habit of casting people in the present in roles that must derive from the past and will search with us for the origins of these attributions, which are liable to mimic what we felt towards influential caregivers and now shape what we expect from everyone.

The coaching relationship acts as a microcosm of our relationships in general. It makes a unique vehicle for learning about our less noticeable emotional and behavioral tendencies. By re-experiencing relational problems with another person who will not respond as ordinary people will, who will not shout at us, fire us, complain, say nothing or run away, we can be helped to understand what we are up to and given a chance to let new patterns of relating emerge which help us achieve the results we are after.

The partnership with the coach becomes a template for how we might collaborate with others going forward, freed from the maneuvers and background assumptions that we carried within us from childhood, and that can impede us so grievously in the present.

The coaching partnership may be for us the first properly healthy collaboration we have had. We learn to hold off from imposing our assumptions on the other and trust them enough to let them see the larger, more complex reality of who we are—we allow ourselves to be vulnerable as we learn as we manage anxiety, frustration or embarrassment. It becomes a model—earned in a highly unusual situation—that we start to apply in the more mundane aspects of our lives, with our colleagues, bosses, stakeholders, and further aspects of our web.

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This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.

Coaching Behaviors: Interruption

Photo by David Becker

Coaches actively listen, but they also interrupt—strategically. They seek to understand—for their own sake—following their curiosity about decisions, behaviors, assumptions we are making. These decisions, behaviors, assumptions may or may not be informed by our past, but our reactivity about them most certainly is.  

We come to coaching with certain goals. We are seeking answers. There is a presenting problem that hints at, but does not fully capture, the full picture. Why, for instance, do we repeatedly hire people who do not perform? Why do we seek out bosses that do not support us? Why is it so hard for us to work through others? How can we be both so convinced we need to leave a role and yet have remained completely unable to find something more fulfilling? Why do we sabotage our potential?

By their questions and their attention, the coach tries—harder than anyone we’ve spoken to yet—to discover how our presenting problem connects to something larger. In particular, they help us navigate “the web”: ourselves and our team(s); our wider ecosystem of departments, vendors, customers, and strategic stakeholders or partners; and, how we interpret “the outside” market, the economy, the natural environment, and political shifts (as appropriate). Remember, the coach’s goal is to help us increase effectiveness by interweaving relationships with results, pinpointing key areas of growth.

Starting in the first session, we gather a succession of small discoveries with the coach to contribute to an emerging picture of the sources of our presenting problem, not just the symptoms.

When we view ourselves at the center of our web, we gain insights in the way in which our character has slowly evolved in response to early wounds. We learn how those wounds form into triggers, and how our reactivity to those triggers hampers our possibilities today.  

When we view ourselves at the center of our web, we gain insights in the way in which our character has slowly evolved in response to early wounds.

Reactivity narrows our focus. Responsiveness broadens our view. In the space between reactivity and response is where we find the seeds of our creativity.

When we view ourselves interacting with our teams and wider ecosystems, these triggers amplify. Do we trust others enough to delegate? Can we get past our initial judgments of peers enough to collaborate effectively rather than work around them? Can we learn to engage rather than avoid difficult personalities we encounter as managers, partners or stakeholders?

When we take in the even broader environments (social systems, market competition, etc.) we notice additional pressures in the system.

We may, for example, start to sense how a feeling of rivalry with another manager led us to take on more challenges to compete for a boss’s approval, as well as seeing, perhaps for the first time, that the logic of our self-sabotage no longer holds. Or we might perceive the way an attitude of negativity and pessimism, which restricts our personalities and our friendships, might have had its origins in a someone who let us down at a time when we could not contain our vulnerability, and thereby turned us into people who try at every juncture to disappoint themselves early and definitively rather than allowing the world to mock our emerging hopes at a time of its own choosing.

It is unhelpful to state any of this too frankly, to any client, as they are likely to resist. There is a dance to active listening—and not everyone is dancing to the same music. There are useful or counterproductive behaviors that we can have with our coach. Here are some examples (the first two are constructive, the second two are less effective):

• we want advice, the coach fosters independent thinking.

• we seek feedback, the coach gives it.

• we vent about a colleague, coach soothes.

• we are late for appointments or forget to reserve a room, the coach tolerates it.

Often, the dance pattern developing between you and your coach is an example of the system the client is in with their own team or organization. Systems have a way of extending themselves out to their furthest boundaries. In that way, they have a strong gravitational pull.

The coach resists this by reflecting to us the decisions we are making, or how we are reacting and behaving. Together, we replay those scenarios and discuss alternatives. For the process to work, the coach reflects of the structure of our troubles in a way we can best interpret it as our own observation and insight.

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This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.

It's safest inside a ring of fire

Some truths are counter-intuitive.

My focus has been to study master craftsmen. Craftsmen are innovators, working on the fridge or trade, and focused on raising standards. I look at what they do and how they think can be applied in other areas.

Craftsmen tend to work alone. They are in community with other craftsmen, but they work day in and day out by themselves. They are in the business of playing with standards and elevating them. They do this through innovation and creativity.

There is great power in groups. We all know the kinds of things we can accomplish with strong teams. But this article focuses on the trouble we can get into when craftsmen encounter groups. And I want to point to a parallel that happens with people embracing creative problem-solving, trying to push through norms, and how organizations respond.

When groups grow, they become more coherent and pull together. They start to share an identity and see things similarly. They become powerful. These qualities can build cohesiveness on the one hand, and group-think on the other.

A challenge to both the craftsmen and the groups they interact with is that individuals outside the group are trying to work with existing standards, something the group is familiar with, and create something new.  This difference gets aggravated by the fact that innovations are experienced as happening out of sync.

The cliche "they were ahead of their time" comes to mind, but no one is ahead of their time. People invent in reaction to something (an event, a set of ideas, etc.). This is why we experience innovations as unpredictable.

We rarely recognize them as solutions or potential answers to a problem. We don't know what to do with them when we see them. They make us think differently. They change the way we understand and engage the world around us. They force us to learn something new.

The virtue of any particular innovation is hard to judge until you've tried it.

As a result, communities often fear what they can't understand. More often than we would like, we circle the wagons believe around our beliefs, shunning the new idea. We don't even want to give it a try.

History shows us that bad things can happen at least temporarily and good things are lost. They are lost often at a time when they're needed most.

It's fire season here in Seattle, so it seems like a good time to reflect on firefighting, in general, and in particular, a 1949 fire that fundamentally changed the way we approach fighting fires.

This particular fire is a cautionary story and it's an important illustration of how the issue of learning well, how we can meet challenge head-on, and predict that it's going to happen because it happens over and over and over again throughout history.

The fire-fighting crew this group was a very heroic bunch of young men between the ages of 17 to 22. They called themselves "smoke jumpers." The last of them recently passed in 2014. They were the first firemen to parachute from a plane into remote areas to fight forest fires. The smoke jumpers were a courageous, elite group held together by their group values, their mission, and the courage to do accomplish a difficult job. They dropped into a chaotic environment with the few resources they could carry.

It's most important to remember for this story is that these men knew if the fire came toward them, they could find safety on the top of a ridge. A ridge provides a natural break in the line of fire.

The innovator of the story, Dodge, was older and more experienced than the group. He could do everything the smoke jumpers could, but better. He had a great reputation and a lot of experience. He was also a reticent, quiet man. He took care of everything in the base camps. But he wasn't one of them.

The day of the fire, he was their Foreman. They didn't know him personally and it was the first time he had actually led them as a group. Left in the afternoon to meet the fire and they were on the ground fighting by five o'clock. We know because they found a watch that was melted indicating the fire confronted them 59 minutes later at 5:59. The incident happened in a very short period of time.

This is a familiar dynamic between communities and innovator.

In a crisis or pressure-filled experience, it's never time that matters,

it's the certainty with which we hold our views that seems to make a difference.

When they saw this fire the innovator saw one thing, and the group saw another. The kids saw something they could conquer they could tame. They referred to such fires as "ten o'clock fires" and laughed about them.  But Dodge saw the fire and saw something different. He saw a fire that was about to explode and get out of control. He tried to move the group down toward a river that ran through the center of the fire, where they could safely fight the fire within relative safety. They would be able to exit through the river.

But the wind was so strong grass just burst into flame between them and the river and they were trapped. He told them to run. At this point, their only option was uphill, against a fire traveling 100 yards a minute. This was a race they would not win.

At that moment, he did something that at the time that no one had ever done before. He took a pack of matches out of his pocket, turned toward the fire, and lit a ring around himself. He had invented what is now called an escape fire. It is something that every forest firefighter has been educated in today and has saved many many lives since.

The term now means....

escape fire noun, \is-’kāp\’fī(-ə)r\

1. a swath of grassland or forest intentionally ignited in order to provide shelter from an oncoming blaze.

2. an improvised, effective solution to a crisis that cannot be solved using traditional approaches.

The fire was approaching fast. He called to his men and said to them, "Step with me into this fire."

The team was running as their training had instructed them to do. Fifteen smoke jumpers ran for the ridge because that was the knowledge that they could rely on.  But Dodge took his canteen out, watered a cloth for this face, knelt in the ashes, and laid down in the ashes of the fire he had burned. The fire burned over him. Other firefighters found a lucky pile of stone. But the fire caught the rest of the men.

Dodge, the foreman, survived the fire by staying in the circle he had burned in the grass. Two more made it to the top of the ridge, only to watch ten members of their team fall to the fire. Two more died the next day in a hospital. All but one died of smoke inhalation.

This is a sad story and I don't tell it to make you feel sad. However, this urgency of communication and influencing between innovator and group is one that breaks down all the time. You only have to look back through history:

• the first time we were told the earth is flat;

• the first time someone said microscopic things are responsible for disease

• the first time someone said vehicles can go underwater, through the sky, and into space

• the first time someone said a computer could fit in our pocket

• first time Lady Gaga said I'm going to be a rock and star Idol

Whenever groups come together, they have common beliefs and their identity is preserved by them holding on to those beliefs. Innovators need to understand that when they are calling people to come with them to a new idea
they're inviting them into an unproven fire.

No one knows if someone says "I have the greatest idea in the world" if it's going to work or if it's going to be a disaster until effort happens. I think in every group we have to ask questions and assign mechanisms that allow us to be open to ideas we haven't anticipated.

As innovators, we have to find better ways to communicate and accept new ideas while maintaining our relationships. There have to be better ways to pool ideas and share resources in times of stress.

I know that was an intense story, but I want you to think about how you go through your day and interact with others when you are a member of a community that is holding to beliefs, or an innovator approaching a problem from the outside-in.

You are both. You are going to be in communities that you're working hard to build and you're a creative innovator that has ideas that people around you will not understand. So the question that we all need to answer for ourselves, and it's a different answer for everyone, is:

what is the one thing you can do if you're a member of a community

to see what's possible when what is presented

is something you don't understand?

OR

when you take the role of innovator 

and you are telling someone what is possible, 

and sharing how you see differently or more effectively?

In the end, learning new ideas, and really being able to try them on when it counts, is the way we move forward. It's about getting over our own anxiety. Change is not the problem. I'm not entirely convinced that we even mind failure so much.

The problem for most of us is fear of deviating from a leading strategy.

Just look what it's doing to the business of healthcare, education, and poverty.

Introduction: To the little book of coaching

Photo by Dustin Lee

Coaching is one of the most valuable developments of the last century. It has grown in popularity the last twenty-five years. Coaching provides an exceptional tool to raise our levels of awareness, attunement, improves our relationships, and assists us in discovering our personal potential. It helps us cultivate a hospitable environment for growth in our professional lives to achieve greater results.

Psychology, and it’s focus on an individual’s potential for growth and maturity lays the groundwork for coaching. Because coaching borrows heavily from psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and other related fields, questions inevitably arise: What is the difference between coaching and therapy? What is coaching really?

Coaching has distinct boundaries with psychotherapy practices. Because of this it is  deeply misunderstood, mischaracterized, and practiced by a very wide spectrum of talent, creating doubt in the marketplace. Coaching is rarely described well, and its voice seldom heard with enough clarity.

This little book attempts to explain how I interpret and practice coaching and how it leverages basic principles from psychology, in particular, the difference between dipping and dwelling in the past; what the needs are in all of us to which it serves; the methods by which it addresses these needs; and what outcome of a coaching intervention could ideally be. It is meant to help people who have never had a coach, understand what coaching is and what is not, and how they might utilize coaching toward their own performance goals.

This is NOT a book teaching how to do coaching. It is not meant to be substituted for advanced learning.

The book suggests my central belief that coaching, with someone well-trained, is one of the single greatest steps any of us can take towards greater awareness and fulfillment. Investing in coaching can reduce anger and frustration, defeatism, poor confidence, and general feelings of being lost or stuck while helping you achieve results.

This is a guide to the purpose and meaning of coaching.

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This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.

Finding a Mentor

FINDING A MENTOR

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

Editorials are deeper pieces than daily thoughts from short blog posts. 

They provide actionable ideas and anchors for reflection on your life or your work.

Explore more posts here.

Today I was working with someone focused on a job transition.  She asked a question I hear frequently from clients who know that mentorship is important to their careers but don’t know how to engage them.She asked:

Thinking about THE job (not just any job), I have worked through all your recommendations but mentorship. I'm stalled out. When I look at peers with similar career goals, many are now big successes in the industry, but find myself hesitant in approaching them and asking for help. I don't want to be perceived as needy. But my hesitation also stems from not really knowing the right phrases to use that would make them want to engage. I need your help in this area and so I can follow-through of this job hunting step.

This is an important question. So many people I speak to are struggling in their approach to finding mentors and are ending up disappointed, frustrated, or confused.Here are some insights I can share about finding great mentors and making the most of the help you receive:

1. Work inside out. 

To find great mentors, you don’t want to reach out to people outside your network. That’s not how you’ll find them. Generally speaking, when you find the right mentor, it is obvious. Chasing or forcing a connection rarely works.Start inside out. Find mentors among the people you’re already interacting and working with now. They need to be people to whom you have already demonstrated your potential. They know how you think, act, communicate and contribute. They have to like, trust and believe in you already (why else would they help you?). They also need to believe with absolute certainty that you’ll make use of all their input and feedback.Strangers (or those who’ve become “big” successes, as the individual above mentions) will virtually always have to say “no” to mentoring requests from strangers. Why? Because their time is already spoken for, and they’re drowning in similar requests. Secondly, they don’t have a relationship with you, and therefore can’t know how you operate or if it’s a great investment of their time to help you.Find your mentors among the people you know who are 10 steps ahead of you in your field, role, or industry, doing what you want to, in the way you want to. Connect with new people who you can help, and who will find it a mutually-rewarding and beneficial experience to support you. If you don’t know of any inspiring people that fit this bill, you need to go out and find them. Here are some great tips from Kerry Hannon about finding a mentor, and from Judy Robinett about networking that generates amazing results.

2. Connect

Develop a relationship. Start small.  Follow their work. Be helpful and supportive. Be generous. Tweet out their posts, comment in a positive way on their blogs, share their updates, start a discussion on LinkedIn drawing on their post, refer new clients or business to them, and the list goes on. In short, offer your unique voice, perspectives, experiences, and resources to further the action and conversation that these influencers have sparked. Understand that you are able to be of service to them, and go out and do it. Be a builder. Build on their foundation and extend it.Don't ask for mentoring directly.

3. Prepare.

Attracting mentoring has a lot to do with how you operate in your career and your life. Would you want to mentor you? Are you open, flexible, resilient, respectful? Are you eager to learn? Are you committed to adjusting how you interact in the world so you can achieve your goals?You have to be in process. A car going 60 miles an hour is faster than one starting from 0-60. Be someone who is already actively building his/her career. Demonstrate that every day, to yourself first.

• Be great at what you do; people want to invest in someone with momentum.
• Ask for more responsibility.
• Know how you can contribute.
• Be prepared, volunteer.
• Promote others' successes.
• Build a support network by learning what others do and how you can help them succeed.

4. Empathize.

Walk a mile their shoes. If you were in their seat, what would you want to see from this individual asking for help? If you had multiple requests for help every day, what type of person would YOU choose to assist, and why? Go out and become that person that others would love to support and nurture.

The bottom line?

The answers to all your networking and career-building questions aren’t as far away as they seem. They’re right inside of you. Sometimes that can seem like an unsatisfying answer since we look outside ourselves most of the time.Imagining yourself in the shoes of those you deeply respect and admire, who’ve had fabulous success in the same ways you want it helps point you in the right direction. Then imagine your “future self” already achieving this tremendous success. Ask your future self what to do. And always conduct yourself — in life and in work — as one who is doing all that’s necessary to attract (and offer) fabulous, high-level help and support.

Your Circles Define You. Choose Wisely.

The people in our circles of influence set our standards, what we vision for ourselves, and how we approach change.Given the impact our peers have on us, it's surprising to me that we select our them based on proximity.Relationships are not necessarily formed people who have similar personalities and interests. It’s the people you literally sit next to, work with, or live near. Whom we find ourselves mingling with can have enormous implications. As Jim Rohn has wisely said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Similarly, international public speaker Portor Gale believes your social capital, or your ability to build a network of authentic personal and professional relationships, not your financial capital, is the most important asset in your portfolio. She wrote a book about it: “Your network is your net worth.”Like the frog in a pot of slowly boiling water, we adapt to whatever environment we find ourselves. We have what psychologists call an “external locus of control,” where we believe factors outside of us dictate the direction of our lives. Thus, we live reactively to whatever life throws at us.Who is in your smallest circle? How did they get there? Was it intentional or because they were close by? Do these people raise your game? Or, do they hold you back?If you want to move forward in your life or career, you need to surround yourself with people who have higher standards than you do. Life is a reflection of what you deem permissible. You embrace what you are willing to tolerate. Personal experience shows us that most people will stay in unhealthy relationships for too long, nurse poor finances, and endure jobs they hate. If those things were tolerated, they wouldn't be in our lives.Recently, I’ve been working on a book. I had gotten it to a level I was comfortable sharing it out. I shared it with friends asking for feedback and got a few comments here and there. I took a writing class and in every draft, my teacher shows me why and how it could be 10x better, and she holds me to that standard.Versions I was previously satisfied with now make me cringe. Were my standards that much lower than my writing teacher's standards? At the time, yes. As she helped me raise my game, my standards increased too. Feedback is a wonderful gift.The same thing happened during my doctorate research. I sent my advisor a paper I thought was good and he found it unreadable. He challenged me to rethink my outline, always centering me with the question, "what is the story I'm trying to tell?" His questioning forced me to continue to think deeper and deeper on my topic. It was challenging and even frustrating, but it made me better.This kind of dynamic isn’t just for working relationships. What about your romantic partner? Do they help you rethink your standard for what is possible? Do they help you become a better person? Do they challenge you to think differently? Do you help them?Generally speaking, at any given time, a small part of your group is moving forward, the rest mimic whoever they are around at the time (we want to fit in), and the rest are moving backward. I didn't make that up, it's the old 80/20 rule from economics.Here’s what the Wikipedia has to say about it:

The principle was suggested by management thinker Joseph M. Juran. It was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population. The assumption is that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes.

Because we reflect on those around us, it's important to take stock of who is in our circle and what standards they have. If they drop, we drop. If they raise, we raise. That is why phrases like "rising tides raise all boats" or "better together" are used to describe efforts of raising everyone in a corporate culture, or society at large.There are people in your life that just by being around them have increased your thinking, creativity, and energy. Those are the kinds of people you need to reach out and collect. Those are the kinds of people you need to be more like yourself so that you are an example to others just by being around you.The standards you embrace for your life and work are set by what kind of life you want for yourself. You determine what is permissible. You define a quality life and the quality of your work. If you’re fine coasting than those around you coast as well.If you want to raise your game, you have to find the better players and learn from them. Change your circles, change what and how you learn.The talent and “potential” you were born with are irrelevant, especially if they don’t help you realize it. We all know people in our lives with unfulfilled potential. Don’t let that be you.The people in our circles of influence set our standards, what we vision for ourselves, and how we approach change. This fact is undeniable.

The question is: what are you going to do about it?