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.

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.

Coaching Behaviors: Listening

Photo credit: NeONBRAND

One of the structural flaws of our minds is that it is hard for us to think deeply and coherently for any length of time. We keep losing the main thread the same way we lose our keys on the way out the door. Competing, irrelevant information has a habit of darting across the mental horizon and jumbling our shaky insights. Occasionally, consciousness mysteriously goes blank for a moment, like we’ve lost our streaming connection. These mental glitches distract our attention, chipping away at our potential for finding creative flow in our work, and reinforce doubt in the value of what we are trying to make sense of.

“Why am I doing this? Why did I embark on this effort in the first place?” we think.

When this kind of thinking happens, we can experience overpowering urges to check the news, social media, gossip, walk around the office to distract others or search out a snack. All unproductive behaviors. All behaviors with external focus. As a result, some of the topics we most need to examine—our inner state, our interpersonal relationships; our goals; our skill development; the triggers that bother us so much about the way our colleagues do or don’t do their work—sink into to the mental sands, at great mental cost.

What helps in our attempts to know our own minds is, surprisingly, having another mind present. For all the appeal of independent learning, thinking usually happens best in tandem. The curiosity of someone else gives use the confidence to remain curious about the things we are most intimidated to confront about ourselves, the dogs in the basements of our minds. It is the application of a light pressure from outside us that helps give structure and perspective to some of our jumbled impressions. That coaches require us to verbalize our thoughts mobilizes us toward greater discipline in our concentration.

What helps in our attempts to know our own minds is, surprisingly, having another mind present.

Occasionally a friend might be unusually attentive and ready to hear us out. But it isn’t enough for them  quietly sip their coffee or cocktail and hear us out. Listening means more than merely not interrupting. To really be hard means being the recipient of a strategy of ‘active listening’.

From the start, the coach will use a succession of very quiet but significant prompts to help us develop and stick to the points we are circling. These suggest that there is no hurry but that someone is there, following every word we say, sigh we take, and flinch of our voice and posture as they encourage us to “go on” and “say more.”

One flower, one gardener

When a coach listens actively, our ideas, memories and concerns don’t have to be well-formed. We are given a wide birth to stumble, backtrack, and get confused. But the active listener contains and gardens the emerging confusion. They can see the difference between a weed that will distract us and the seed that we need to learn to nurture. They help us plough old ground covered too quickly prompting us to address a relevant point that we might have skipped. They will help us chop away at a disturbing issue while continually reassuring us that what we are saying is valuable. All the while, they will note minor changes in our facial expressions, tone of voice, breathing, posture, and eye movements. They will be interested in what words we choose, and attentive not only to what we actually express but what we might have said instead.

They do not treat us like ineffective communicators; they are simply immensely alive to how difficult it is for anyone to piece together our blind spots.

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

Coaching Behaviors: A Self-Differentiated Witness

Photo by Dawn Kim

One of the most important skills a coach has, and they undergo significant training for this, is the ability to maintain their own experience in the presence of others’ anxiety. Self-differentiation sits squarely in the middle of taking a firm stand on our own point of view (our judgment, our decision, or a boundary we set), and remaining connected and attuned to those with whom we take a stand.

It’s sort of like a gyroscope, where all the parts tilt, move and roll, but the center remains firm. Applying this metaphor to our relationships, we maintain an interactional equilibrium: the ability to maintain yourself and your relationships in the face of forces like fear, conflict, judgment, and anxiety.

Coaching without a high degree of self-differentiation can lead to a high degree of reactivity where the coach and the client can lose their balance, responding in automatic, nonconstructive and ineffective ways.

The power of the witness

It’s easy to look at someone else’s decisions and pass judgement. Coaches with a grounding in psychology get trained not to judge and to remain separate yet connected as they intervene with a client on a challenge. Curiosity, genuine nonjudgmental interest, is a quality that needs to be constantly cultivated and practiced.

The witness sees the good, the bad, the terrible, and the mundane. Witnessing a family member, friend, partner or associate’s experience gives it meaning. How we witness one another’s experience makes that experience constructive and positive, or devastating and painful.

In our families and at our work, we hide most of who we really are. There is more than enough judgment to go around and we can almost feel our knuckles being rapped when we play outside the lines. We know how quickly we’d be kicked from the campfire if people could read a ticker-tape of our mind.

Much of our inner monologue might seem foolish: how we felt a strange impulse to burst into tears during a touching commercial of family re-connection; how often we wish we could travel back in time and correct the missed opportunities of our youth, or even just take back what we said to a colleague in our last meeting. Using a harsh lens, some of what is inside can be pretty pitiful: how worried we are about asking a stupid question; how needy we feel for the attention of someone in our group; how much we worry about our appearance. There is also a part of our mind designated for the illegal. This is where the death wishes hang out—our fantasies about a work colleague, or our very plain plans for what we would like to do to a bad boss. But some of what have to contend with is substantial, as we reckon with the vulnerability we feel in undertaking scope with which we have little experience or initial understanding, like leading a team, a division, or a whole company.

When we are under stress, our thinking becomes myopic. We return to what we know works and that knowledge turns into our most powerful hammer. The problem is, not every challenge requires a hammer and our coach can help us acquire a broader perspective so that we can see and learn to develop new tools for the problems that confront us.

Not everyone knows when they need a helping hand. When our world becomes small, we are often counseled to reach out to friends and colleagues (and sometimes coaches!). But we know, deep down, that the social contract in our relationships dictates that we do not burden them with more than a mere fraction of our insanity. There is only so much, we think, we should tell a friend, colleague, or boss before we appear weak, damaged, or put ourselves at risk for being sidelined. All this contributes to our sense of feeling like an imposter, a fraud, or generally undeserving of what we have genuinely earned.

As a safety measure, we filter ourselves. In every interaction, we ensure that there remains a wall between what we say to people and what is truly going on inside our minds.

An exception lies with coaching. Here, remarkably, we can say pretty much anything we want—and expect it to remain confidential. We don’t have to impress the coach or reassure them of our sanity in a particular situation or confirm the insanity in which we operate. We need to be up front, candid, and tell them what is going on. There is no need to stop them thinking we are not completely qualified to do what we do, not worthy of our roles, or just plain terrified. We can gingerly hint that we have some qualities we wish to work on, those shadows in the dark corners of our minds. And, we will find that the coach is not horrified, offended or surprised—only calmly curious. We will learn that we are not frauds, imposters, or undeserving of success. Eventually, we arrive at the opposite of isolation.

A good witness, someone grounded in a science of inquiry, is a model to us on how to become our own advocate.

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