Thoughts on Coaching
Adult In Training
We have a responsibility to train ourselves. Our growth and maturation as adults is a deliberate process that requires a lifelong, cyclical effort of practice, reflection, and improvement. I have written about this and continue to remind myself and whomever reads, as often as possible. Our potential is limitless. Yet as adults, we face innumerable challenges in finding the necessary coherence between our emotional and rational selves. This should come as a surprise to no one.
This is what my own training has helped me understand so far:
Our human nature leans on the comforts of satiating our fragile egos and finding comfort. Our learned beliefs come from people and experiences in our past that we were forced to embrace. Our emotions go unchecked and the primary drivers of actions and decisions. Our society presents us with scripts that we unconsciously follow to help establish ourselves as acceptable members of said society.
These are the questions I am asking in this training:
In the face of these challenges, and others, how can we go about training ourselves? How can we learn to think for ourselves? Practice is important but how do we know we’re practicing the right things? We need to be reflective on our work, our actions, and our emotions, but what can we do to build awareness? Improvement sounds great but how can we objectively measure the progress of our process?
This is where I see my training going:
It takes time to cultivate deliberate practice. It takes courage to face yourself and reflect on the impact of that practice in action. It takes patience to focus on the process of growing, rather than the outcome of growth itself. Building emotional maturity and growing up is not an easy task and I am here to tell you that there is help available.
One way to face the daunting task of becoming a mature adult, of growing up, is with a coach.
Coaching is the practice of partnering with people in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential through deep listening and understanding.
On my own journey of becoming a coach and being coached, I have identified three key ways in which a coach helps people develop the necessary self-awareness and emotional maturity to aid in the growing up process.
Space to be Heard
We all think we have someone with whom we can talk. A partner, a best friend, a parent, a colleague, or even a dog. If we’re honest, however, it is unlikely we feel heard or understood in nearly enough of these interactions. Everyone has their own shit to deal with. Their own anxieties or beliefs that keep them from actually hearing what we say. Bias, ego, or belief blocking their ability to receive. Or any of a potential million other things happening in their heads that distract them from understanding.
Perhaps it’s helpful to start with a common example or visualization of a conversation with a close friend (replace with parent, sibling or whomever my fit the bill). You’ve known this person for a while, you trust them, and you are comfortable sharing the inner workings of your life with them.
In this conversation, they ask the typical “what’s new” question and you decide to bring up a challenge you’re having at work with your boss. You tell a story of something that had happened earlier that day that caused you to feel anger and a slew of other negative emotions, making you question why you’re even working this job in the first place.
In this visualization, how deeply are you analyzing this type of conversation? Reflecting on and asking yourself questions about the space that existed in that conversation can be quite telling about what you were able to learn or get out of sharing your issues.
Visualize the reflection. Does your friend let you finish without completing your sentence or rushing you to some kind of conclusion? Did they pay attention the whole time or did they get distracted by some external force (phone, passerby, television, etc.)? Did they actually have the space and presence to listen to you? Did they allow you to feel your feelings or simply offer some solution-oriented, unsolicited advice to make it all better?
Let’s face it, listening is a skill that the majority of people lack. Our narcissistic natures tend to force us into some level of self interest that blocks empathy, unless the intention is set otherwise. True understanding requires a single and undivided mind.
Even beyond the presence and listening skills of your friend, how much of your authentic self were you able to bring to the conversation? What masks do the people you know and love force you to wear when communicating with them? In sharing your story, what did you hold back?
Within our closest relationships, there are always unconscious roles that we play that may limit us from sharing in ways that reflects our true experiences.
The Space Created by a Coach
Coaches, unlike most people, are trained to have the stillness and create the optimal space to listen. They are trained to understand through an undivided mind, partnering with their clients to allow them to drive the thought process. As a person with no previous connection to us and thus much less bias in the content of what we share with them, a coach is far more capable of objective reception of what is said. They are far less likely to be triggered or to have an ego reaction to what we say.
Moreover, a coach is paid to focus on you and only you for the time you are together. They won’t pick up their phone to check a text and they won’t check out the waitress as she walks by in the bar. They truly create a space of presence and attention. It is in this space that we can explore our thoughts and speak those thoughts to someone who is actually listening.
Additionally, a coach is not someone with whom you have a history. It is far less likely that someone will feel judged by or embarrassed from what they to a coach. This enhances the space available to share openly and authentically as bias, triggers, and egos tend to be far less present.
Through an intentional listening skill building practices, Coaches have cultivated the ability to help the people they work with actually feel heard. This feeling alone is a unique and valuable part of what makes coaching so effective. We have space in which to think out loud and begin to explore our experiences, beliefs, and desires without interruption, fear, or unsolicited advice.
It is in this space that we can begin to explore and learn about ourselves as we look within to determine what we need to grow up.
Curiosity to Explore
Exploration is the driver of all growth, defined by the desire to seek out and make sense of novel, challenging, and uncertain events. Within the space to be heard, we are given an opportunity to dive deeper, an opportunity to explore ourselves. A coach is trained to be curious and partner in the thinking experience to learn more.
Let’s go back to that conversation with your friend for a moment. Somehow, you’ve actually managed to get your whole story out. Your friend actually managed to pay attention the whole time. Congrats!
What happens next? How will your friend respond? Will they ask you questions to try and understand better? Will they receive you?
The most likely scenario is that you’re getting a reaction of some kind. Whether it is a trigger or a reversion of the scenario to become about them, a deeper exploration is unlikely. You may get advice, an attempt to change your feelings, or a story of something similar that happened to them. What you said very possibly made your friend feel a certain way and they will certainly respond according to those feelings.
Even in the best case scenario, your friend isn’t on the hook to keep the focus on you and your situation. You will be lucky for neutrality and even luckier for extended attention and presence to your circumstance. Exploration of your feelings, beliefs, and paths forward will take some time and very few people will take spend that time focused strictly on your situation.
Exploring with a Coach
Where a coach excels in this area is in both their ability and charged service in deepening the exploration process. Coaches are trained to listen, but not just to hear what we say. Coaches are paid to focus on us but skilled in seeing beyond the surface of our words. The presence a coach cultivates and employs allows them to remain aware to our processes and ask powerful questions that draw on what we say and how we say it.
Curiosity is a skill and coaches are trained to be curious about the people with whom they work. It is through this curiosity that exploration happens.
For a coach to be great at what they do, the people they work with should be feeling more and more understood as they come to understand themselves over the course of their coaching sessions. To do this, a coach has to be curious and interested in the deep and important things in their clients’ lives.
It is in this exploration of ourselves, guided by a coach’s curiosity that we can move our challenges forward. Forward in pursuit of goals, sure, but more importantly toward emotional maturity. The path forward, finding truth, meaning, fulfillment, it all stems from self inquiry and taking the time to truly know ourselves at every stage of life. This is where the guidance of a coach’s curiosity and powerful questions can help us understand ourselves better. In that understanding, we can begin to figure out what is keeping us from growing up, or what we simply may be missing in the process.
What beliefs are leading me to feel a certain way? What are the emotions that are driving my actions or responses? What are the sources of my anxiety and what do I do to deal with that anxiety? What is my role in creating the problems that exist in my life?
A coach can be with us in this process and support us on the learning journey of self inquiry.
Learning Yourself
Ok, so we’ve done a lot of work so far just to get through one conversation with that person we visualize talking to when we have a problem. We are at a very fortunate point where we feel listened to and understood. We feel as though the person across from us was curious and helped us go even deeper in to what is really going on.
Great. Now what?
If we go back to visualizing a now much deeper than usual conversation with a friend, you’re probably feeling pretty great at this point. You feel heard. You felt understood. You felt their curiosity in their questions. You’ve explored your emotions and different perspectives and are now thinking about your situation at work in different ways. You are quite lucky to have such a good person to talk to in your life.
Unfortunately, however, the conversation ends and everyone goes back to living their lives. Can you count on your friend to follow up? What about after a couple days at work? Will your friend take the time to talk you through a reflection process?
Learning With A Coach
As I have mentioned, learning is a life-long process. It takes time, it takes patience, it takes work. This is where a coach can really bring some exceptional, long-term value. A coach ensures that we are focused on the reflection and change required for learning. We can certainly find substantial benefit from exploratory conversation but learning is a cumulative effort. It happens through focused analysis, mindful, experience, and deliberate reflection.
A coach is trained to not only connect the dots necessary for learning within one session, but over the course of many.
A coach takes the understanding gained through what they’ve heard and subsequent exploration to help generate learning that leads to desired changes or actions. In helping create sustainable change, a coach holds their clients accountable for the real-life ways in which the things they learn are implemented into future experiences.
What limiting beliefs have I uncovered and where can I practice testing the validity of those beliefs? Who can help me make the changes I seek and who may be making my growth more challenging? What habits do I need to create or break? What values drive my actions? What motivations do I have? Where do I find joy?
The real work that a person does, even when they are enlisting the services of a coach, happens between the sessions. As that work continues, a coach serves as a guide in integrating new awareness and insight. The coach isn't there to teach or give advice, but instead to offer partnership in designing goals, actions and accountability measures that integrate and expand new learnings.
Together, a coach and their client identify potential results or learning from identified action steps and work to consider how to move forward. This includes reliable resources, available support and potential barriers. From there, the work outside the sessions can happen and the cycle of learning continues.
What Coaching Has Taught Me
First, and most important, there is no magic bullet. There are no shortcuts. Our emotional maturation and path toward becoming grown ups takes time, deliberate effort, and will come with a lot of ups and downs. I am not saying you can simply go out and hire a coach and poof, you’re no longer struggling with life. That isn’t how it works.
If we want to develop and intentionally take on the work it will take to do so, a coach can simply be there to help us along in the inevitably long, arduous process.
I have learned that the space to listen is rare, and a coach is committed to being present for us to feel heard and understood.
I have learned that the skill of curiosity is necessary to explore ourselves and better understand our challenges from multiple perspectives.
I have learned that learning happens over time and requires reflection, awareness, and an evolution of beliefs.
I have learned that at some point, a good coach should actually help get us to a point where we are able to coach ourselves. If we are fortunate enough to get to a point where we graduate our coach, then everyone has something for which to be proud.
On my own journey toward becoming a coach and being coached, I have come to five core understandings of my own process and path.
My emotional maturation ongoing and is far more about absorbing from the process than achieving an outcome.
There is a difference between the technical changes I make and the adaptive changes — my maturity will develop through adaptation.
My growth requires an intrinsic motivation to learn and a deliberate effort to teach myself rather than depending on being taught by others or by lived experience.
Curiosity of myself and of others will help me develop the self compassion and empathy necessary for any healthy relationship or connection.
My work is to develop congruence between my thinking brain and my emotional brain and find wholeness and integrity from that congruence.
My intention is to be a coach with the space to listen, with the curiosity to explore, and with the presence to be a part of ongoing learning. In my pursuit of this intention, I am deliberately working on my own abilities and embodiment of these core skills. I am developing a healthy relationship with my ego. I am cultivating stillness and self-regulation. I am becoming more aware through curiosity of myself and others that go beyond the surface. I am learning from my process.
Where would coaching be helpful to you? What are some areas that you would find benefit in someone else’s attention and listening? What could you be exploring about yourself more deeply? Where are you missing opportunities to learn?
Deliberately growing up isn’t an easy path, but it’s a meaningful one. Care to join me on it?y growing up isn’t an easy path, but it’s a meaningful one. Care to join me on it?
