Working with a coach has helped me lean into who I am as a person, and reframe what I may have considered to be weaknesses as super powers! I want others to understand how personalized and life-changing coaching can be, so my question is how does it help one continue to grow as a person and professional? — Cindy R.
When I was first learning to coach, I had to resist explaining how it worked to clients at the end of calls.
My desire to empower and educate was fine in theory, but my timing was way off. I was like a magician who’d just wowed an audience with an incredible trick on stage, then attempted to explain it even as people were still clapping.
Like hello, dude, read the room. The audience wants to be entertained, not educated.
Similarly, coaching clients need to leave their calls soaking up every bit of personal insight and wisdom available in the moment, not suffering through a tutorial of what just happened. I don’t know why I struggled with this for so long except that I feel motivated to pull back the curtain and cut through coaching’s “woo”. Ultimately, as you said, Cindy, I want more people to embrace its benefits, and I believe education is the way. So, naturally, I love the question of how coaching helps one grow and evolve.
I think we should begin with reviewing the basic ingredients.
Coaching is rooted in research and emerging ideas about how people thrive. Add to that communication skills that guide us—either one-to-one, or one-to-many—toward a state of agency and action. In this, coaches help us gain greater access to our innate wisdom, path, or truth. It sounds so simple! But to do it well takes tons of practice. It reminds me of how a skilled baker can achieve the perfect rise and texture in a soufflé while the rest of us wind up having made a dense or collapsed mess.
Next, coaching skills can be applied to anything one can dream up, from becoming a better manager of people, to defining the purpose and pursuit of a life. The engagement often begins with the question, “What do you want?”
Here’s an example. For a long while, I’ve had a desire to get more involved in community organizing and politics, but with the energy and intention of a bridge-builder or healer. So, what do I do with my longing? Or what does this mean for my career? These are questions a coach might explore with me.
There are circumstances in which we resist coaching when it might be helpful, and that seems important to note. Some people choose to hunker down in a bootstraps-mentality while simultaneously unloading their frustrations about life, work, or relationships on anyone who will listen.
“Maybe you’d want a coach?” I must say to someone once a week. “I can help you find one.”
“No,” the person often responds, scrunching up their face as if the idea smelled rotten. “It’s not that bad.”
This is a thing with humans—we want to explore stuff on our own, or discover the answers ourselves, and I relate. I am a “let me tinker to see if I can figure it out” gal too, because the process of mucking around helps me test the limits of my skill and understanding.
If this resonates, rest assured that a coach is not going to hand you answers or merchandise pulled from the racks of my least-favorite aisle, “best practices.” It’s not how-to advice; your life will not begin to resemble an Ikea bookshelf. Coaching can help you sort the nuts and bolts from the lumber parts, but I promise that you will still build the whatever-thing-you’re-making to your liking.
My final thought is that coaching requires you to get curious about yourself, and enroll in the work of changing habits and mindsets.
It’s not a passive process.
What do you want? Is it to swim like Michael Phelps, or lead like Satya Nadella, or write like Toni Morrison? Because there’s a coach for that. You won’t become your role models, of course. You will be you. You will find your own unique brand of greatness and potential.
But what’s possible?
That’s how coaches think. Then we sidle up alongside you in the pursuit.
—Steph