Reframing Perspectives: Truth, Reality and Commitments

The essence of coaching, I think, is in helping clients reframe perspectives that no longer serve your highest purpose or greatest need. Often that will call into question ways of thinking and feeling that you have held as true or real. For some, re-ordering these beliefs can be temporarily unsettling.

Truth and reality have many levels and colors. As children, many of us were taught that there is only one Truth, and one Reality. As we grow into adults we learn that what was presented to us as the one Truth or Reality was our parents’ or society’s explanation, but that what was unknown when they formed their truth and reality has since been replaced or augmented by new knowledge.

If we’re lucky to be well educated or if we are naturally open to the process of critically thinking for ourselves, we easily reframe the perspectives about truth and reality we’ve been taught in our early years.

But if we’re committed to sustaining a certain explanation, it’s much harder to reframe old, outmoded, dysfunctional views into new, more growthful, more healthy perspectives.

In coaching, we ask: what belief or assumption are you committed that might no longer be the version of truth you want to invest in? What reality have you been committed to that you now see has to change?

Change itself necessarily implies that there is an old version of reality and a potentially new one, an old truth and a new one. If this were not so, there could never be any change at all.

Growth by it’s very nature is change.

What is the central truth you are committed to right now? How does that commitment shape your choices, your current reality? How might you need to change that explanation of truth in order to have the choices and reality you really want?

What a Niche is, and What it isn't

I'm hearing coaching students voicing reluctance to declare a niche in the same way that my counseling colleagues are reticent to do so. In the coaching spirit of reframing and shifting perspectives, I offer these thoughts:

What A Niche Is

A niche is a magnet. It's a way of presenting yourself as a specialist in helping an identifiable set of people with a defined range of problems, and drawing those people to you to aquire your help.

A niche is a focusing tool. It helps you determine how to put the range of your skills into language that people who will want them can recognize.


What A Niche Isn't

A niche is not a description of you. You are not the niche. Your clients and their problems are the niche.

A niche is not a way to limit who you work with. It's a way to better ensure that some if not most of the people you work with will be ideal for you -- ideal as in, have issues you really like to work with and feel exceedingly expert at, and who perfectly match your preferred way of working, your personality, don't blink at your policies, and think you're worth every penny.

A niche is not about the work you do. It's about getting clients so that you can DO the work you do. Despite believing that a good coach can coach anyone who is coachable (or that everyone is coachable by a good coach), that idea is not helpful in marketing. In fact, it's counterproductive because it promotes vague, overly general, and confusing messages.

Prospective clients will not care or be impressed by the fact that you can coach everyone on everything. That actually may sound implausible and therefore suspect. It will make your marketing backfire.

We all feel special and unique, and when we need help we want the specialist who is expert at our unique problem. We don't want the jack of all trades.

Ironically, holding yourself out as a specialist in one area will make you seem more client attractive to others in other areas. They psychology is that if you are an expert at one thing, you're probably pretty darn good at a few other things. Whether that's true or not, it works for the purposes of marketing.

And that's why niche marketing works for coaches like it does for counselors.

The Gift of Time

Once a year we get an incredible gift – by the grace of whatever consensus that gives us the return from daylight savings time, we get to re-do an hour of our lives.

Sure, for most of us this occurs in the middle of the night, as clocks are set back at 2 am. And if you’re chronically fatigued like I am, you probably spend this precious hour sleeping. But think of it. What if you could use that hour to undo an argument, take back a harsh word, or remove yourself from a conflict? What if you could push against the obstacle just one more time and this time gain the breakthrough?

What if you used that hour to pause all the fear and worry, and look instead at what you’re grateful for, and at what makes your life content, if not wonderfully happy? What could taking advantage of this gift contribute to you?

Or, an even better question is, how might you use this small bit of extra time to contribute to making someone else’s life better?

Often, it’s not the big efforts that define a life, but the small, daily, unnoticed and unapplauded ones that create who we are on the moment to moment basis. It’s the unconscious, reflex reactions that are the evidence of what we truly value, and we rarely stop long enough to really examine how are beliefs and assumptions are getting put into action.

An hour is enough time to think a new thought, change perspectives, give forgiveness, voice an apology, ask for what you want, or finally own your power. It’s enough time to make a new commitment to yourself, and to specify at least three action steps for accomplishing that.

An hour is enough time to begin to change everything. How will you use your gift of time?

Economic Anxiety: A Prompt to Be More Creative

Show of hands…Anyone out there NOT feeling anxious for your business security? There’s no way to ignore the fact that business as usual is at least in limbo, if not in process of reconstituting itself.

You probably have heard that the Chinese character for crisis is made up of two elements – danger and opportunity – signifying the two mental approaches that can be taken in crisis. We can be consumed by the fear of danger, or we can look for new opportunities.

While the economy is reorganizing it’s a good time for sole proprietor business owners to think outside the old box and pigeon holes you’ve been operating with up to now. Ask yourself these opportunity oriented questions:

• Is a new client niche emerging for me from this crisis?
• What “dead weight” is this situation pointing to that I can eliminate?
• Where can I leverage my skills and efforts to maximize the available potential income right now?
• How can I work smarter, not harder?

Why Counselors are Outraged About Life Coaching

People in the counseling professions (that is: psychotherapists, clinical social workers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, mental health counselors, addiction counselors, etc) are very concerned about the growing popularity of life coaching. Might their worries be justified?

While some of the concern is clearly rooted in scarcity consciousness and the perception that coaches siphon off clients who can afford to pay counselors out of pocket (something very attractive to counselors who hate dealing with insurance companies) and thereby cut into counselors income, a very real concern is centered on the potential for coaches to try to coach someone who needs mental health care. Are coaches really qualified to identify mental illness?

Not according to counselors.

Their sense of do no harm is triggered – and rightly so -- when they hear coaches claim to help people solve relationship problems and improve marital communications (the purview of marriage and family counselors), end anxiety (a diagnosable mental illness), relieve depression (another diagnosable mental illness with high rates of suicide), and so on. They believe coaches are acting unethically in this regard.

Many if not most counselors believe that coaches in general – and life coaches in particular – are not well enough educated to recognize when a client is experiencing mental illness, and should be properly diagnosed and treated by a qualified, licensed mental health professional. They are outraged that coaches walk so close to their boundary as an allied profession, but without the depth of academic training, years of closely supervised experience, state administered licensing exams, or public accountability structures to protect vulnerable clients.

They have a point.

Unless coaches come into that field of work with other background as a therapist, most are unlikely to have the advantages of knowing the diagnostic distinctions that any counselor can recite in their sleep. Since there is A LOT of shades of gray in mental illness diagnosis – which is an interpretive art form more than a hard science as any good therapist will admit – how can coaches serve the best interest of clients who may be diagnosable?

After working more than 18 years as a psychotherapist, here are my 4 rules of thumb for coaching:

When a client is unwilling to take responsibility for changing their attitude, perspective, or circumstances, a counselor would be a better helper for them. Coachees need to accept accountability and work on change.

When a client is overwhelmed by their emotions for months on end in ways that interfere with normal functioning and relationships in daily life, a counselor is best suited to help. Coachees need to be emotionally available to tolerate the discomforts of taking risks for change.

Coaches should ask for a brief emotional history before agreeing to contract with clients, as a liability protection. Coachees need to not be actively suicidal, enmeshed in substance abuse, delusional, paranoid, oppositional, nor dealing with behaviors that are dangerous, abusive to others, or illegal in order to be coachable.

When a client can’t be self-regulating and willing to try something new to shift out of worry, fear, anger, sadness, shame, or guilt, and coaching is going nowhere after a number of weeks, short term counseling may be needed alone or in conjunction with coaching. Coachees need to be able to get beyond their emotional responses in order to take action.

Responsive / Reactive: Reflections on Trauma Aftermath

A coaching class today put an all-too-real world perspective on the difference between being reactive and being responsive when a student spoke of these two ways of holding and interacting with our experience in relation to tragic events. Specifically, she spoke about the looming anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th in the US. Another student spoke of being in the lingering impact of hurricane Katrina, with its recent cousins Gustav and Ike re-traumatizing folks on the Gulf Coast.

Psychologically speaking, anniversaries of traumatic events tend to refresh the memory of the horror, helplessness, confusion, and chaos experienced in the original event. When we've been through such a thing as a mass casualty attack or a huge natural disaster, it's difficult to make sense of the randomness of it. We get shaken to our core in a deeply existential way. Beyond the material level of destruction that happens, we are forever psychologically altered as well. Some of us never fully recover.

It is natural to be reactive about these anniversaries. But it isn't good for us to be reactive for too long. Let's examine what reactivity is, in order to understand why responsiveness is more healthy.

When we're reactive, we re-experience the trauma again -- perhaps to a lesser degree but often in disturbingly vivid, cellular memory detail. We get overwhelmed by fear and grief or anger, and feel powerless again.

This reactivity has physiological consequences in the body. Our neuro-chemistry goes on alert, flooding the body with corticosteroids (the stress hormones) whose purpose is to help us flight or flee when necessary. But when this flood is in response to a memory, there is nothing to fight, no real threat from which to flee, so the hormones don't get discharged in the way that's intended, and instead do damage to the immune system and especially to the adrenal glands -- two systems we need to keep us healthy and keep our energy up.

In this class, one student pointed out that sometimes in the aftermath of a traumatic event, we have a bit of guilt-fear over ending our reactivity, as if to do so would dishonor those who died. This is also quite a normal reaction. Connect to this, I believe, is a reluctance to let go of reactivity because in a way it keeps us alert, hypervigilent against the potential of another disaster happening to us again. If we let go, we might forget to be careful, and could leave ourselves vulnerable to being dangerously caught off guard again.

These reasons for staying in reactivity are somehow logical, but not the less harmful to mind, body, and spirit.

Responsiveness takes nothing away from those whose lives were taken on September 11th, or during Katrina. Responsiveness simply shifts our intention from being determined to perpetually mourn and not let it happen again, to the more productive perspective of finding the good, or the opportunity in these anniversary days of remembrance.

Another student in the class shared that in the Jewish tradition when loved ones die, family members honor their memory each year on the anniversary of the passing by making a charitable contribution in their name, or doing some good deed that the loved one is obviously no longer in a position to do. Honoring the day, and the life and life work of others is a great way to be responsive to our feelings of sorrow while at the same time using it as an opportunity to turn it into a blessing for someone else.

Listening to the student discussion in the class, I wrote two question sets that coaches could use with clients who are experiencing the reactivity associated with traumatic anniversaries, to help shift thrm from reactivity to responsiveness.

• How can you bring love and compassion into this moment for yourself? How can you do so for others who are also still struggling? What can you do to increase love and compassion in the world? What's one small thing you could do that would be an act of love or compassion in your family, your community, the world?

• What's one step towards peace that you can take today? How can you honor one or more of the lives lost in these tragedies? What could you contribute to or create that would be a voice for peace? What's the commitment you will make to serving Life, not fear, and how might that change you for the better?
  

WAIT = Why Am I Talking?

Let me preface this entry by saying that there are many different styles of coaching, just as there are different schools of psychology and therapy. Some are more warm and flowing and friendly, while others are more pointed and direct and task focused. The best style in both coaching and counseling -- it seems to me -- prioritizes listening as the most basic skill and tool, regardless of the client's agenda or the coach's (counselor's) personality.


There's a reason for this in therapy that no doubt would also apply to coaching. Research shows that clients heal and change more due to the quality of the relationship that is built between counselor (and presumably coach) and client, than due to any other single technique, tool, strategy, or philosophy of change. But the key component of that relationship is that the client feels listened to in depth, uninterrupted by the professional, and truly heard and understood.


That quality of relationship can't happen if the professional talks too much -- whether the talking is about her own experience, or even in the set up of asking a powerful question. Perhaps that's why in our coaching training we learn the acronym WAIT to help us remember to talk less. WAIT stands for Why Am I Talking.


In both coaching and counseling I find it best to keep a 90/10 ratio of listening to talking. That is, listen 90% and talk only 10%. Neither counseling nor coaching are the appropriate venue for sharing my experience. The coaching alliance is not a friendship in which thoughts and feelings are mutually shared.


Treating the coaching or counseling relationship as if it were a friendship that allows the professional freedom to talk about her own experience like girlfriends or sisters do, takes the process away from the client, and worse, can make some clients feel as though they need to take care of our needs to be listened to and validated. Creating that kind of climate, most coaches and clients agree, is an abuse of the contractual relationship.


Self-disclosure (talking about your own life) is a big no-no in counseling, and I'm learning it's equally frowned on in coaching. This is not to say that I don't do it at all. But when I do, it is ALMOST ALWAYS as a last resort because I have failed to help the client gain awareness or shift perspective in any other way.


Conversely, I don't believe in withholding information about my experience when clients ask, like many therapists do. And I don't require clients to turn inside out to process how knowing my experience or having personal information about my life will serve their own thoughts and decisions. I personally find that kind of interrogation offensive and not at all a contribution to healing or empowerment.


Questions work best for the clients when those questions directly serve the purpose of getting them to think more deeply, which usually can't happen if we are filling the time with chatter about ourselves.


One of the most useful things I've learned is to ask a question and then shut up and wait. And wait. And wait. Giving the client the time and unintruded upon space to think and find her own answers is a high level coaching and counseling skill. For us, holding the silence is a huge part of what it is to coach.


Novice counselors and coaches both sometimes feel the impulse to give advice. In both professions, advice-giving is regarded as a bad idea. Doing so robs the client of the chance to form their own opinions and come to their own decisions about what will be best for them. It's the equivalent of giving a fish meal, rather than teaching how to fish.


You might even say that advice-giving is fishy, or that it's fishing to soothe your own ego rather than working to help the client find their own confidence. Again, research shows that changes in behavior last when people have ownership of the idea, process, decision and design of the change they make. Taking our advice denies them that crucial ownership, and instead gives them hand-me-down thinking that they may borrow but are unlikely to fully own.

Some Distinctions Between Counseling and Coaching

One big concern coaches have concerns not engaging in therapy and calling it coaching. I know my colleagues in the counseling world are particularly worried about coaches crossing this line, and I hope my coaching colleagues are vigilant about holding this boundary as well.

Yet, there is a lot of confusion about where that line is. Here are a few guidelines I use to keep myself from wandering out of coaching mode (and other coaches may do it differently, so I'm not the prime authority here):

~ I don't ask about how a problem got to be the way it is
~ I resist wanting to know much about a coachee's history
~ I refuse to "process" every little thing to death
~ I'm not overly interested in or accommodating of the coachee's emotions
~ I refrain from analyzing psychological drives and conflicts
~ I keep the client focused on her stated goals, don't allow the telling of lots of story that takes her off track
~ I hold myself ruthlessly uninterested in the trama/drama of what happened in the past that forms the excuses for current reality

Essentially, much of what a coachee wants to tell me is irrelevant to helping them move forward. People are caught up in their stories, and I try to be compassionately unengaging with that, because it's their story that keeps them stuck. I'm sure that sounds harsh, but I don't think it comes off that way when doing the work.

What someone might notice when observing my sessions is a dynamic that could go like this:

~ coachee launches into their story
= I ask: what's the UAC that's operating here
~ coachee talks around UAC by telling more story
= I ask: what's one thing you could do that would make the biggest difference with this?
~ coachee tells me the things that won't work
= I praise their ability as a researcher to know what doesn't work and I bring them back to the question of what will

Etcetera

I figure coachees are paying me to help them do the following:

• Set goals towards a much bigger life than they now have
• Take action to get them from here to there
• Accept responsibility for their thoughts, words, and deeds
• Be more invested in their future and present than their past

Getting Fit

I bet you thought this entry would be about physical fitness, didn’t you?

Well, sorry to disappoint -- I’m speaking here about getting the right fit between coach and client. And maybe there will be some similarities, if not analogies or metaphors that can be made between the two concepts.

Why is getting fit important? I think there are a number of obvious reasons. For example, without fit:

· Coach can become an obstacle in coachee’s process

· Coachee may struggle with investing in the process

· Coachee may not feel understood or supported

· Coach may be unable to assist in goal attainment

Although it may not be possible to have a perfect fit, just due to the nature of differing cultural and experiential backgrounds, education, or personalities, there may be a few ways to ensure the best possible match, such as:

· Coach can market to an ideal client niche

· Coach can resist temptation to take on everyone

· Coach can claim her own expertise and stick to it

· Client can be clear about her initial goals

· Client can ask for what she needs and wants

· Client can be view herself as a hiring authority

· Coach can be quick to say when there’s not a close enough fit

It’s not a bad thing to refuse a client, or for a client to decline to hire. In fact, I suggest it’s a sign of integrity to know your limits, know what you want and accept only the best chances of getting that.

Here’s how this resembles physical fitness, which is about toning muscles and improving functional endurance.

Getting fit between coaches and clients is a process of exercising the mental, emotional, spiritual muscles of truth telling, empowering relationships, investing in self-commitment, asking for what you want and need, and knowing that it is in everyone's best interest to do so. And that is what improves the functional endurance of the coaching relationship.

Coaching Styles

The debate about what coaching is or isn't has popped up this week in various classes and with several clients. The official position is that coaching is not mentoring, teaching, counseling or consulting. Really?

I think this depends on what your personal style is, what the client needs and what your contract with them is, and what licensure you are operating under. It isn't as compartmentalized, and cut and dry in actual practice as the espoused ideal makes it sound. In this week of the opening of the Summer Olympics, perhaps we need to rethink what athletic coaches do for their charges -- can you imagine an olympic coach not mentoring, teaching or counseling at various points in an athletes' training? I can't.

While it may be useful to hold the intention to not be exclusively a mentor, teacher, counselor or consultant in the "coaching" context, I assert that all of these shades of difference are called for at one time and another with just about every client, if we are truly serving their best interests and genuinely helping them achieve their goals. Perhaps it is useful to keep an awareness ever present in ourselves of the distinctions, but also of the usefulness of each role and the types of moments in which each role would be more useful than "coaching" per se.

Coming from a background as a counselor and a teacher for 18 years, perhaps it's just being difficult to shed those skins and to find the "coach" costume can be restrictive to my range of motion. That's possible, and I'll own that I don't see it to be necessary. In fact, I believe it would be a disservice to my clients if I neglect using all of my skills and experience for their benefit.

What drove me crazy as a mental health counselor was the notion that we were supposed to be something other than human, with human flaws and characteristics. I never bought that idea as particularly healthy, for myself or as an authentic role model for my clients. Now I hear coaching instructors stating that we shouldn't make judgments, or give advice, or be much of anything but an unopinionated sounding board.

Uh, no. That's not a very powerful model of coaching to me, and would not be authentic to my personality or coaching style.

I was greatly relieved the other day when one of my favorite coaching instructors confessed to doing some teaching with her clients. YES!! I thought. Finally, someone who is real, and uses all of who she is in service to her clients. That's the model I aspire to. That how I already work with people.

The coaching model of powerful questions and requests that move clients into action towards making a big difference in their lives is what sets the profession apart from most of these others, in my view. But my coaching style will also incorporate teaching what the client needs to know in order to answer those questions, fulfill those requests and know what actions to take. And my style will also incorporate the counseling needed to help the client face fear, shed shame, and claim confidence, as those as mental and emotional health issues.