Four things I love about coaching

In this blog, I’ve been trying to make coaching more concrete—what it is, how it works, and why it matters. In an earlier post, I wrote about my own experiences being coached to give an idea about how coaching can help people. 

This week, I want to dig a little deeper by describing the four things I love most about coaching.

I coach you, not your problems.

People come into coaching wanting to work on a whole array of things. I work with established and emerging leaders interested in managing stress, speaking up for themselves, navigating career transitions, preparing for a promotion, recovering from a divorce, healing from loss, improving public speaking skills, parenting their kids, managing their teams (which can be much like parenting), or figuring out what they truly want.

And sometimes it’s all of the above.

All of these problems are important. Many people seeking coaching—as I was—are coming in with their backs against the wall. They’re in what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers would call a limit situation or boundary situation, a place where they’ve never been and maybe no one has ever been.

If you haven’t been in one, you will be.

Maybe you’re there right now.

And it’s never pretty.

But here’s the deal: You aren’t your problems. If you’re feeling stuck, you are not your “stuckness.” You’re much more than that. You’re a person with a complex life story, relationships, values, and goals that influence the way you show up. You’re living in a particular context that shapes how you respond to life. And you bring a unique mix of strengths, capabilities, and wisdom no other human will ever have.

If we’re going to be working together to help you respond to your problem, we need to understand you first. So if you want to run your team better, I might want to know about how you feel about your kids and parents. If you’re broken up because you wanted to be promoted to Director by age 30, and you’re frustrated because you’re turning 31 next month and nowhere near that goal, I’ll be curious to know what makes being a director so important.

In the process, we’ll be working to knit all the parts of you together. And that’s a beautiful thing—for both of us. For me, it means I can get to know you as a person and appreciate your depth and complexity. And for you, it means you get to understand yourself differently and reconnect to parts of you you may have left behind.

I’m not here to fix you.

How can we do this? Several years ago, I read a quote from Quaker writer and education activist Parker Palmer about his first (and maybe only) rule for helping others: “no fixing, no saving, no advising, no setting each other straight.” For Palmer, sitting back and listening to someone who’s struggling without jumping in to “fix” them can be really difficult, especially when we think we know the answer. But we need to step back if we’re going to let the other person grow. He writes:

When you speak to me about your deepest questions, you do not want to be fixed or saved: you want to be seen and heard, to have your truth acknowledged and honored. If your problem is soul-deep, your soul alone knows what you need to do about it, and my presumptuous advice will only drive your soul back into the woods. So the best service I can render when you speak to me about such a struggle is to hold you faithfully in a space where you can listen to your inner teacher.

Holding the space Palmer describes is hard work, but it’s freeing. Once, I was coaching an executive team whose organization was in crisis. During our first session, I introduced myself by saying, “Hi, my name’s Craig. And I’m not here to fix you.” Immediately, everyone smiled, and their shoulders relaxed. It was like someone had opened a window in our Zoom room, and all their tension went out in the breeze.

The tension went out of my body, too. They could explain their situation without thinking I would be judging them for mistakes they had made, and I could work without feeling like I had to “save” them. And before we knew it, a plan emerged in front of us without any of us having to “do” anything. They had found what Palmer calls their “inner teacher.” In stepping back, I gave them the space to think and discover their own answers to the challenges they faced.

I help you learn to help yourself.

People who aren’t familiar with Parker Palmer or Quaker spirituality may find all this talk about “inner teachers” a bit too esoteric. If I don’t come in with advice and answers, what exactly am I doing as a coach? Or to put it more bluntly: What are you paying me for? 

The answer is simple: I’m teaching you how to succeed without me. 

I do this by asking challenging questions, listening to what you have to say, mirroring back what I’m hearing, and giving feedback that helps you orient yourself. In the process, you can create solutions that make sense given your background, strengths, and situation.

Because at the end of the day, I’m not you. I know, from painful experience, that if I give ten pieces of advice, one is going to be useful to you, three will sort of fit, and the remaining six are either going to be completely irrelevant or piss you off. 

When I act as an advice vending machine, I’m offering what MIT professor Edgar Schein calls “unhelpful help.” It seems like I’m helping you, and it may be making me feel really good about myself, but it does nothing to help you figure yourself out. 

You’re what matters here. Not me.

For instance, because I have a doctorate in communication and have written extensively on leadership, many people come to me wanting to improve their public speaking. Maybe I can. But while there are some basics about public speaking that everyone needs to take into account—like not looking at your feet the whole time—every great public speaker is great in their own way, and each of them struggles with their own unique issues. 

At the outset, neither of us will know how you can be great and where you will struggle. We have to learn as we go.

If you’re going to develop, I have to ask you about your context and goals. We have to think together about your strengths and challenges. We to design commitments—I like to call them “experiments”—for you to work with before the next time we talk. These commitments are often quite small: Research a new possibility, notice how they feel when they’re in conflict, schedule conversations with new contacts, and so on. But they move you forward.

And the experiments aren’t homework. They’re chances to learn. Sometimes, experiments that don’t end so well can teach us the most. We’ll have to talk and experiment some more as you become more confident.

And I’ll be there, supporting you until you don’t need me anymore.

I get to see you grow.

Here’s the thing about limits. They can feel hard and fast, like walls holding us back. They pressure us and fill us with anxiety. Some of them have been with us for our entire lives. They’ve taken root in cultures, our assumptions, our thoughts, and even our bodies.

But limits aren’t walls keeping us in. Howard Thurman, civil rights activist and spiritual guide to Martin Luther King Jr., called them growing edges. For Thurman, there are edges to everything—our capabilities, our resources, our lives—but those edges aren’t fixed. There’s always something beyond those edges calling us to come out. And there’s always something within us pushing out to meet what’s on the other side.

Thurman sees the growing edge as a testament to hope and endurance and the stubborn persistence of life. He writes: 

There is inherent in the nature of life what I call “the growing edge.” We see it in nature; always vitality seems to be nestling deep within the heart of a dying plant. A kind of oak tree comes to mind. You have seen it. The leaves turn yellow and die, but they stay on the tree all winter. The wind, the storm, the sleet, the snow—nothing is able to dislodge these dead leaves from the apparently dead branches. The business of the tree during the long winter is to hold on to these dead leaves. Then there begins to be a stirring deep within the heart of the tree. The expression of its life reverses itself. Its function is no longer that of holding on to the dead leaves. It turns them loose. They fall off. In their places, buds begin to come. What wind, storm, hail, sleet, ice could not do during the long winter, now comes to pass very quietly because of the vitality inherent in the tree. At winter’s end people bum the dead grass, so that this growing edge, the vitality inherent in the grass roots, may manifest itself with dignity and with glory.

Seeing the stirring of life inside people is what I love most about coaching. That growth doesn’t happen overnight, but gradually, over time. It happens gently, softly, as we push against the edges holding us in. It’s beautiful for me to see, like watching a flower grow and blossom in April snow.

The blossoming Thurman describes brings coaching full circle. The transitions and challenges that bring people to coaching and seem so scary transform to become opportunities to grow and expand. No matter how darkly drawn the edges in our lives seem to be, there’s always something more behind them. You just have to have the courage to look for your way through. 

What’s holding you back? How do you want to grow? Drop me a line here.

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