Written 23 Oct 2008
What if, you are already in a coaching agreement…just not with a trained coach ? As a coach I have to also ‘be’ coached. This ensures that I experience coaching from both sides (not to mention it keeps me on track on my own journey). It suddenly clicked for me why I experience coaching as being so familiar… I have always been in coaching relationships… I just did not know it!
Think about it…… you receive an annoying mail from a work colleague who obviously thinks he knows more than you do and is now requesting a meeting to ‘fix’ problems which do not exist ( a fact that he would know if was not an interfering busy body) What do you do ? Phone a trusted friend and talk it through. Or you have a decision to make – should you change jobs, should you leave a relationship… should you buy that beach house… and you phone a trusted friend to talk it out!
Now sometimes these trusted friends are useful and you find yourself realizing why you are stuck, (why you are pissed off with your work colleague) and from those realizations you are able to make the ensuing meeting really productive and totally empowering.. to you! Sometimes! Most times you end up in a circular conversation. Your trusted friend can empathise and support you righteous anger, but invariably they are in exactly the same place as you are and are just as lost and confused! What you get out of these exchanges seems to never change anything. So you have more conversations (with the same ‘wrong’ people) and nothing changes. You put the phone down and feel like something is missing and your still frustrated and lost!Like me you may have one or two people you can really talk things through with, people who instinctively do not buy into your stories and limitations. People who ask questions that make you think. You suddenly realize that you are annoyed with your work colleague because you feel he has just said that you are an incompetent nit. You realize you can let that go instead choose to walk into the meeting curious rather than defensive. You try that and the meeting is a roaring success. Or in the case of the decision to change jobs, you realize that there are a whole lot of fears stopping you and you make the time to get them down on paper and work on completing each one to create freedom in your mind to make the choice you really want. Or even better, in both instances you change our position from reacting to the circumstances to really getting clarity on what it is YOU WANT for a change…rather than focusing on what you do not want.! If you have friends like these, hold onto them! They are pure gold because these people are doing the job of a coach, instinctively!
My question though is this., surely the direction of your life is too important to leave to the random chance that you happen to have in your life a friend who is a natural coach ? Natural coaching is effective, but it is also a bit hit and miss! All of us have our own unconscious agenda’s. So there you are, talking to your trusted advisor about leaving your relationship and the person you are talking to is totally threatened because if you become single your friendship changes and they do not want that! Do you think their contribution to the conversation is going to be neutral and focused on you gaining clarity on what you want ? Probably not!Now take that same situation to a coach. Coaches train to keep their agenda’s out of the sessions. We train to create a safe, non-judgmental environment – a place where you have absolute freedom to say and think ANYTHING!! To truly explore what you fear, what you think and of course, what you feel! How many of us have that space in our lives ?
As a coach I am trained to be curious. I practice cultivating a natural curiosity to explore where you are at. My objective is to empower you, to find out what you are not saying! My goal is to help you ‘get’ where you are at and even more importantly, ‘get’ how to be in action and moving toward what you want! I am there to help you get clarity on what is stopping you and what you can do to start moving again!
I can’t help wondering if getting my world record have been easier if I had know about coaching ? I seem to have spent that entire journey fighting the world, trying to get support and solve almost impossible problems on my own. Did it really have to be that hard ? What would have opened up for me with a coach ? What opens up for you if you had that one person dedicated to your goals… that safe place where you can explore who you are and what you want ?