When I first started coach training back in the mid-1990s, there was a lot of emphasis placed on the coach being ‘coachlike’.
There were – and still are – lots of discussions about what this might mean, but I still vividly remember the Clean Sweep programme that was at the heart of my first coach-training programme with Coach University. Devised by Thomas Leonard, this was a 100 point checklist that coaches (and their clients) could use to check how well we were doing. The checklist was remarkably prescriptive and created much angst amongst the coaches I knew in those early days. One coach I remember from a coaching workshop talked about how relieved she was that the trainer drank coffee – she had read in the Clean Sweep that we should use caffeine no more than three times a week. And I remember myself feeling embarrassed and less than most of my peers at the time because I was in a very difficult relationship (not the ideal happy relationship coaches were supposed to have).
The profession may have become more accepting of the coach’s humanity as it has matured over the last three decades, but in my work with coaches over the years as a supervisor and trainer, I repeatedly come across the concerns that some aspect of the coach’s life or way of being isn’t ‘coachlike’.
From trainee coaches asking how they can be a coach if they haven’t resolved all their personal issues, to experienced coaches talking in supervision about how ‘bad’ it is that they are judgmental of their clients, or feel drained when they think about a particular client.
Don’t think for a moment that I am immune to this. There are still things about myself, and about how I approach coaching, that can make me squirm in embarrassment or feel aren’t how I should be as a coach. Even my most judgmental friends will comment on how intolerant. I’m also remarkably arrogant at times (and equally feel very anxious about what people think of me at other times), and there are clients whose attitudes or ways of showing up make me feel quite antipathetic to them.
What all the work I have done on myself over the last forty years has helped (and is still helping) me to do is to recognise that the work is
not to fix all my personal issues and characteristics, but to learn to live with them – and to hold them with lightness. I remember being enormously helped, for example, by my therapist telling me years ago how anxious he still was after decades of work on himself. That observation on his part gave me so much more permission to be me than any ideas on overcoming anxiety, or so-called coaching questions about what I would do if I weren’t an anxious person, could ever have done.
And isn’t that what our clients really want – permission to be who they are, messy imperfect and flawed as they are – as we all are. Indeed, one of my supervisees told me a while ago that one of their biggest ‘takeaways’ from our work together was more comfort with and acceptance of themselves as they are.
And it goes without saying that the more we can accept ourselves as we are, the more space we can give to our clients to accept themselves as they are.
When there are parts of me that I can’t or won’t accept, then I cannot be fully present with my clients who have those parts in themselves. If I despise or try to hide (from myself and others) my intolerance or my arrogance then when I meet those qualities in a client, I will in some way be closed to them.
More simply put, how can we ever hope to have anything like the unconditional positive regard for our clients to which all practitioners aspire when we are unwilling or unable to hold ourselves in that regard.
I say that like it’s easy. It isn’t.
It’s a lifetime’s work – as I said, even afte all this time, there are still things I not only find difficult in myself, but also find difficult or embarrassing to acknowledge. This is, I think, what Sir John Whitmore had in mind when he said that the difference between a good coach and a great coach had nothing to do with coach-training and everything to do with on-going work on ourselves. If we are to be of service to others, then we simply have to face ourselves in all our messy difficult selves.
One of the ways forward is to develop the capacity to sit peacefully with, and to bring some lightness and curiosity to, the bits of ourselves we don’t like or try to keep hidden.
That is, I think, a big part of the function of supervision (and something Robin Shohet – whose supervision course I am attending – continually speaks of). There’s nothing sweeter for me than talking to my supervisor about some ‘uncoachlike’ attitude I might have or some element of myself that I still struggle with (and to which I might have been reluctant to admit), and then both of us laughing about it.
It makes it a lot easier to move forward when we bring the difficult stuff out into the light in safe spaces – like supervision.
I’ll end with a quote from Hassidic wisdom that I’ve always liked:
“If you want to raise a someone from the mud and filth, do not think it is enough to stay on top and reaching a helping hand down to them. You must go all the way down yourself, down into your own mud and filth. Then take hold of them with strong hands and pull them and yourself out into the light.”
When we do our own work like this, then we can begin to help others to come out of their depths into the light.