Our suspicions of coaching

It is easy to be suspicious of coaching. Three common myths of coaching are, it: is reserved for poor performers, is a self-indulgent activity, and will change everything.

Coaching is for poor performers, or the broken.

A common myth of coaching is that it is a resource reserved for employees at risk or in need of “being fixed.” Only when we are drastically failing at our jobs, we think, would we ever consider asking someone for help.

But coaching is simply a mature response to very normal anxieties of the workplace. Everyone reckons with frustration, anxiety, or overwhelm. Those emotions are the inevitable result of having taken on a large scope of work with little training, support, or development--a common experience. When we are under pressure, we develop coping strategies—of which we lack awareness—that hurt or sabotage us and others and limit our capacities for contentment. In this specific sense, we are all frustrated, anxious, and overwhelmed and, therefore, prime candidates for help of some kind. What qualifies us for coaching is not a major catastrophe in our careers; it is enough that we are simply human.

Coaching is self-indulgent.

It is tempting to state something a 'luxury' when we know little of it. Depending on your point of view, it can be considered a 'luxury' to read all the time, exercise every day, bake bread instead of buying it. The term 'luxury' is simply an insult for what one has no interest in rather than a category defined by cost.

Coaching is routinely accused of being self-indulgent by people who see who worry that by talking intimately about ourselves once a week or more, our personalities are at risk of growing dangerously self-absorbed. The interest of coaching may, the assumption goes, cause a belief that we can and should find moments of our work history as compelling as they proved in a coaching session. But this is to misunderstand the origins of the ego, which lies not in excessive intelligent attention but neglect. Coaching is unlikely to make us less interested in the lives and work of others; the higher probability is that it will free us from our inner suffering, that to date prevented us from participating fully in the experiences of those around us.

Another worry is that coaching is a costly replacement for a more effective manager, and indicates a failure to develop the patience, empathy, and systems perspective involved in cultivating a healthy manager-direct dynamic. But this defense of the healthy manager relationship fails to acknowledge the rules and codes of conduct that govern the institution. We cannot expect an ordinary manager to listen with specific knowledge, care, and persistence every week to our ongoing troubles. We cannot assume they will put their own needs to one side while linking and making sense of our lifelong patterns. These assumptions would be ambitious. Unique insights require unique professional skills. It's a lot like wishing a friend to perform open-heart surgery on us because they like us. It is appropriately respectful of the manager dynamic to know all that it cannot be and do.

Coaching will change everything.

The last but most crucial coaching myth is that coaching overpromises. It can, unwisely, be presented as the key to transforming us into rich, invincible achievers at home and work. Such inflated promises rightly invite doubt. But ultimately, they are not a true reflection of what coaching hopes to do for us. Its real aim is more limited: to assist us in the task of becoming slightly more mature, somewhat less reactionary, and to be a more self-aware participant in their professional drama. Coaching cannot cancel out the essential wrinkles of misunderstanding between coworkers or quell the rumor mill of an organization. Still, it can equip us to cope with these circumstances with more insight, courage, and confidence.

How coaching might change us

Who are we after coaching, if the process were to go as well as could be hoped?

We will still be learning. People will continue to misunderstand us; we will meet with opposition; there will still be goals that will be out of reach; success will come to people who don’t appear to deserve it. There will be qualities we have that will still not be fully appreciated by others. We will still have to compete with and submit to the judgment of those around us; we will still be too far in or too far out of organizational politics—trying to strike the right balance. Coaching doesn’t make our lives or careers better than they truly are.

However, with these caveats in place, coaching can still bring substantial benefits.

1. We will have slightly more freedom

The coping beliefs and behaviors we choose to protect our primal wound are rigid. We develop fixed mindsets about people and circumstances and that limits our room for movement and development. For example, we may seek a distinctive personality type for a boss; or we gravitate toward certain peers; or we avoid developing certain skills (like public speaking); or, we have to be constantly cynical or else insistently perky (both alienating behaviors). Our sense of who we can be and what we can do is held prisoner by past experiences. Coaching can liberate us from these patterns by helping to increase self-awareness around such patterns and inclinations.

2. We learn to take a stand and advocate, for ourselves, first—then others.

With one leader we were humiliated and silent. With another we felt defensive and combative. But experiencing a coach’s patience, kindness, and attention encourages us to be less frustrated with ourselves. A coach’s constructive reflections of our reactivity help us gain awareness and clarity of our core needs. Having once voiced our deeper fears and wishes for our careers with a coach, we can bring those goals or stand our ground again with someone else. We learn there may be an alternative to silence, frustration, and remaining stuck in our ways.

With a greater sense of our right to speak up, we may become more aware and better at articulating our particularly unique contributions and perspective. Instead of just resenting another person’s criticism and quickly falling on our sword, we might explain why they perceive us the way they do. If we are upset by our boss or peers, we don’t need to accuse them of evil and leave the room or fantasize about quitting. Rather than seeking various forms of escape, we now know how to explain our sensitivities to certain criticism and what support we need to feel “safe enough” on the team to contribute. Instead of trying to pretend that nothing is ever our fault, we can offer a candid explanation or our limitations and commit to trying to do better going forward. Only when we learn to advocate effectively for ourselves can we start to advocate effectively for others.

3. We can be more compassionate, with ourselves, first—then others.

In the course of coaching, we will realize how much we were let down by certain people in the past. Former bosses or mentors might have fallen short or failed us in some way. They didn’t pave the way, stick their neck out, stand up for, or develop us the way we needed. A natural response might be blame. But the eventual constructive and more mature reaction (building on an understanding of how our own flaws arose) will be to interpret the behavior of those we needed because of their own unique set of circumstances. Maybe those bosses, mentors or peers were suffering their own dramas and constraints. A coach helps us develop empathy and perspective that those that have wounded or slighted us almost invariably didn’t mean to do so; they were themselves hurt and struggling to endure. And even if they did mean those actions against us, we have a choice in how we respond.

We can develop a more compassionate picture of a world in which complexities and anxieties are blindly passed down and around organizations. The insight isn’t only true to experience; holding it in mind will mean there is less to fear the next time those crises come around, enabling us to make smarter more considered decisions. Only when we learn to be compassionate with ourselves can we start show compassion for others.

In these ways, coaching will have done some of its most important work.

The ability to self-manage, see clearly, and make good decisions impacts leaders at all levels in every sector. Imagine contending with the emotional complexity we’ve just reviewed in this little book, while they face:

Protecting staff, seeking support through a broken chain of command, while getting a naval warship safely to dock amidst a global pandemic;
Deciding on the path of artificial intelligence for a social media organization while it is actively impacting a nationwide election; or
Adapting a global retail organization from being everyone’s “third place” in the community to gather and linger with their coffees to takeout only, resisting layoffs and preserving an hourly workforce.

Coaching is more relevant now than it has ever been.

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