The Coaching Confessional

[This post was written in June 2008 but only appears on this weblog, now that the coach has given up dithering.]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on coaching as an ‘industry’ but more particularly on how I conduct my work with clients within this industry.

I’m one of those coaches who hasn’t turned her back on ‘pro-bono clients’ and is now, not unexpectedly, feeling the impact of this on her own practice. I think many of us, including those who’ve already been coaching informally as an extension of their job rôles, coach during their training on a pro-bono basis. However, when pro-bono clients outnumber the paying ones—well to thriving coaches, that’s a sure sign of a stagnant, unsuccessful business.

I believe in contributing social capital, and, because I work in my day job with adults whose education has been interrupted, perhaps detrimentally affected by learning or social issues, my colleagues and I do a lot of informal coaching. I know it works, and not only in changing lives or outlooks. Because I’m exploring ways of using positive psychology techniques to build positive emotion, it’s helping to foster successful learning experiences.

But in the coaching community, well, I’m someone who hasn’t really made it in the industry.

And won’t.

Someone who doesn’t — indeed who can’t — go for the kill in that first free session.

To top that, my itty bitty shitty committee rattles away in the background.

I like to think it’s not incompetence. Perhaps I am missing the commercial gene. Perhaps I'm not committed to making coaching a fully-fledged business.

I tuned in online to a coaching session with Dave Buck on Live Coaching Friday last week, during which the coachee realised that her need to be nice was affecting her game. Instead of using her insight as an opportunity to hook a client, she jumped in to help fix the problem.

My need to help people is greater than my need to make money from them. I’ve been tactfully reproached by my coaching ‘network’, such as it is, for making that same mistake i.e. recognising issues and ‘fixing’ them in the first free session. True, I also find it quite a challenge to fix that financial deal with someone I barely know, who is at the other end of the phone.

When has it not been like this? When our family’s income dropped, I was able to be entrepreneurial, building up a modest home industry whose profits more than covered a drop in our income and which could, had I not preferred teaching, have become a successful business. I frequently spot gaps in markets, but have too many projects to do anything about them, and whoops, two, three years on, somebody else is making a packet from a product.

My perspective could change. I think that means, with coaching, deciding that I don’t need coaching to be my cash cow, but that I can enjoy the fact that I’m doing the kind of coaching that I am. And stop feeling that what I’m doing, i.e. building resilience and developing skills, as opposed to building and promoting a business, is somehow less acceptable.

Perhaps a better alternative is to re-assess what I really contribute through pro-bono coaching and why I need the gratification of doing it! It's not hard to think how I could re-direct that energy in a way that ringfences it.

Think I just used this blog as a confessional...

A helping hand from the enlightened Scots

The best UK resources for happiness, confidence and well-being can be found on the web site of the Centre for Confidence and Well-being.

Go visit.

Taming the elephant

My mind keeps going back to a metaphor Jon Haidt uses throughout his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. Today I found an archived interview in which he discusses it. It's about 10 minutes into Part One of the CBC interview.

But this time, paying closer attention, I felt a tad helpless about steering the elephant.

Why Not Go Public?

Going public with your goals is one way of ensuring that you are accountable to someone.

Here's a way. All you have to do, is publish your goals on the 43 Things web site. It's brilliant. It's free. It's motivating.

Here followeth a brief Party Pooper Warning: You do need to weigh up whether this might become another diversionary tactic. Will the time you spend editing your list, or reporting on progress, or surfing to inspect your "goal twins" among other users, fill up time that you might have taken some action? Be honest now!

It's possible to "go public" discreetly just as long as you don't make your user ID and your "circumstances" too recognisable to family, friends, colleagues, and all the rest. As it involves online, you can bask privately in the encouragement and suggestions of other 43ers, especially those who share some of your goals.

Just a minute rules

The rules for Just a Minute would make excellent goal setting guidelines.

No hesitation

No repetition

No deviation

Update: Thisidea became a theme for my March newsletter. If you would like a copy please let me know like this: whynotwizard(youknowwhat)gmaildotcom

Change One Thing

Boots (PLC, that is) has repeated its New Year 2006 campaign and is once more urging its hapless customers, at every till point, to "change one thing".

And why not, when it clearly works?

And especially if you have been diagnosed with, or suspect you have, ADHD, it makes sense to change just one thing at a time, working on it in short spurts, modifying your behaviour in just this one respect, for the magic 21 days that psychologists say we need to "practise a behaviour" to establish it as a habit. Let's even call it a month to be sure - to allow for lapses.

For all of us, small steps may make the journey longer than taking great strides, but if we keep at it steadily, forgive ourselves for relapses and keep moving, we will get there.

What may be an issue, of course, is our impatience. We want soon. Dieting represents a certain hardship. Discipline. Self-control. Deprivation, even. We'd rather get it over as quickly as possible so we can fit into those dream jeans.

We'd all rather shed the extra weight in half the time, even though aiming for half the weight loss (a modest 400g a week instead of a kilo - a pound a week, rather than two) makes the whole dieting thing less stressful, and apparently makes it far less likely that that lost weight will start piling back on after the goal is reached.

Thus ASAP promotes the cycle of dieting, regaining, dieting, regaining.

So if you're changing one thing, change it modestly, ease into it gently. And if you wander off the path, dust yourself down; no recriminations; get back on that track and keep walking.

Just Showing Up versus Being Prepared

I’ve just ordered another book from Amazon! (Oh January Spendthrifts...)

It’s Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up. This book has been simmering for 20 years so not a rush job, and backed by years of reflection and experience. Its author: Patricia Ryan Madson, a respected, innovative teacher, who recently retired from full-time teaching at Stanford University. Her speciality:drama and in particular, improvisation.

[Today I put a “My Bookshelf” list in the side bar of this blog and will gradually add books which have helped me as a coach. If you click on the link, you’ll get the details.]

I’d come across an extract from the book, covering the first of (I gather) thirteen maxims: Say Yes. What I responded to immediately, here, and to a related comment was the importance of getting started. I have clients who can’t get started and I often share with them advice I got from a friend in my first year at university on how to overcome “essay block”. Just start writing.

Anyone facing this problem from freshman to doctoral student will find lots of support in Ben Dean’s free emailnewsletter: the All But Dissertation Survival Guide. Back issues are archived - this bloke is generous and smart.

I also found online the transcript of an interview Madson had had with Tom Peters.

Something in it was pointing a finger right at me! Perfect is the enemy of good.

Expanding on this, she commented: "If you relax, you'll do it right. If you've done the background work, you know the stuff." When it comes to writing my newsletter, I do what I‘ve done all morning. I find sidetracks: lots of peripheral tasks to work on instead—all of them related to my newsletter and perfectly justifiable, but at the end of my morning, there’s no newsletter.

When I do get down to writing, I’m never satisfied. I edit and re-edit.

So I now have my first challenge to myself for 2007: Bin that perfectionism.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

How was your year then?

I switched to LBC in the car, just as James O’Brien was winding up his shift. Apparently his theme today had been Christmas Round Robins.

What he quoted from one went roughly like this:

“This year my wife’s dream finally came true and we changed all nine internal doors.”

I wasn’t about to be ROFL, well not at the wheel anyway, but I snorted. It wasn’t until I reached my destination, that the word bathos reared up from the depths where it has been languishing for a couple of decades.

And yet…and yet… Easy to sneer. That was the environment she wanted, that was her magnetic goal, which she’s now achieved. Just a pity it made it to the Round Robin.

You can listen to it, and other Robins, on today's Best of James podcast. Names were not changed to protect any sources.