After over twenty-plus years of coaching, my understanding of it is still evolving. This seems to me to be a very good thing, because every time I sit across from a client is a fresh moment to discover what is possible and to let go of what has worked before.
Of course for someone who is beginning coaching what I just said is not so helpful and might even be anxiety producing. When we first start any activity, it is important for us to have norms, rules, procedures and standards. All of us have encountered this when we took up driving or skiing or typing. The more mechanical the activity, the more rule-based it is. So for example in learning to type, we don’t have to worry about the keyboard changing between practice sessions. Unfortunately this steady-state, mechanical way of knowing that is important in the early stages and that fits permanently with particular activities has been extended to a way of knowing about everything forever.
I’m saying that, for example, the beginner way of knowing about management where someone learns to set goals, hold people accountable, give frequent feedback, and so on, won’t work for everyone and won’t even work for the same person over a period of time. We all learn this from our own experience of attempting to apply a rule in a situation where it doesn’t hold up. Sooner or later, in other words, we begin to understand the importance of context and tuning into an individual’s situation. At that point, we face our own anxiety because we cannot rely upon a structure to inform us or justify what we do. Once we move beyond strict routines, we must rely upon our own experience and skill.
There is no shortcut to what we learn through experience. No amount of reading about driving a car replicates what it feels like driving down a foggy, mountain road in the middle of torrential rain. Experience is what shapes our understanding so that we can know at a glance what the appropriate action is. We do this everyday, walking into a meeting or stepping into the middle of a situation at home. No one has to stop and explain to us what is going on. We immediately recognize it because we’ve experienced something similar many times.
At this juncture, careful readers might be seeing a paradox in what I’m saying. At once I’m claiming that each moment is fresh and that we have to rely upon experience to know how to respond beyond rules. How can both be true? If we hold to experience, aren’t we attempting to recreate a past situation? And if we abandon experience, aren’t we simply lost or rote in our response?
These questions could be provocative for you to enter into and answer for yourself and I certainly invite you to do that. Here is a simple way of working with the paradox. Once our experience is broad and deep, our response will never be rote. You can see this directly yourself by attending a performance by any skilled jazz ensemble. The musicians will have so much experience in playing and listening and creating music on the spot that they can be spontaneous and fresh in each measure of playing. So in this way of looking at it, experience provides a huge repertory that we can draw upon as necessary.
Sometimes when people read about experience, they imagine that it somehow happens on its own. Yes, it’s true that every moment we have experience, but that’s not what I’m pointing to here. To take up the jazz example, all of these players have the benefit of experience based upon thousands of hours of practice. Experience with watching sunsets or enjoying rare wine won’t help so much when it comes time to respond to a changing rhythm or chord progression during a performance. Practice as presented in the book has a structure and standards and requires great persistence. It’s the only way though we can become proficient at an activity and remain freshly creative. In other words, experience is not just a matter of doing something over and over again. We must engage in the activity with a clear intention to improve our competence and continuously correct ourselves as we go. Lacking this intention, repeated activities are not practices but, instead, recurring situations that wear us down. To see what I’m talking about, please see your local Department of Motor Vehicles or other governmental bureaucracy where people for the most part are not freshly meeting each moment but have been instead dulled by repetition.
Central to any practice are distinctions, particular ways of talking, that let us operate within the given activity. We must learn the language of brake, accelerator, steering wheel, rear-view mirror and so on before we drive. Essentially this book is a collection of such distinctions, meant to orient you to the world of coaching so that you can become more and more competent as a practitioner.
This third edition has two new chapters of distinctions that have been added from my experience of training thousands of coaches and working with hundreds of clients. The topics of these new chapters get to the heart of what has coaching succeed or not.
The chapter called “Getting in Condition to Change” addresses what to pay attention to at the beginning of a coaching engagement. The central concern at this juncture is whether the client is in a condition to take on change. No amount of circumstance or concentration of will power will prolong or overcome a lack of readiness. For serious lasting change, clients must have enough freed up attention and energy to observe their life, put down unhelpful habits and take up new practices and new relationships.
As we all know here early in the 21st century, nearly everyone we meet is too busy. In fact the usual response to “How are you?” is “I’m busy.” In the midst of this busyness—which is not only behavioral but cognitive and emotional as well—any seed of change will quickly be paved over or die of neglect. Have you noticed this? Many coaches at that juncture abandon their clients or attempt to cheer them on to a more willful effort. As the chapter shows, these methods are at best short-lived and leave the client unable to continue progressing on their own at the end of the coaching program. Instead, the chapter presents ways of assessing the client’s readiness for change and appropriate remedies when that is found not to be the case.
The other new chapter, “How Things Really Get Done,” addresses the central and usually hidden topic of coaching: language. The only thing that coaches ever do is speak and listen. For many readers, this may be an obvious point but coaches sometimes forget in our contemporary world that almost all our clients do as well is speak and listen. The quality of work that anyone does follows from her ability to listen deeply to what is being asked, engage in a conversation to clarify the intended results and then continuously converse as the project unfolds until everyone involved is satisfied. This competence appears everywhere in work. And its absence is the main cause of breakdowns, waste, and loss of business.
Not only our work life but our relational life as well hinges upon our ability to build rapport, explore possibilities, and coordinate action. Like all competencies, this one has its own list of distinctions, which are presented in detail in the chapter. The good news is that almost everyone can learn to speak in a way that moves action forward, that opens up new possibilities and that builds relationships. It is not so much an innate ability as a learned skill.
As you read these new chapters and the rest of the book as well, please allow what’s said to affect you. I wrote this book as a series of distinctions that point to a way of understanding and working with people that is satisfying for both client and coach. Please do not get caught up in the words themselves, but instead find what they are intended to bring your attention towards. Steadily practicing in the way described in the book will over time lead you to a high level of competence. You will be able to be of great assistance to others and be able to live a life of deep fulfillment yourself.