[This User’s Guide to Coaching series explains everything you need to know to successfully engage and work with a coach—a life coach, a creativity coach, an executive coach, any sort of coach. It accompanies Dr. Maisel’s latest book, The Coach’s Way, described as “the finest resource available for anyone who wants to develop or enrich their coaching abilities.” Grab your copy now!]
Your coach may be extremely intuitive, empathic, and wise. But she can’t mind read or know what only you know. She can’t know that you’ve added twenty hours a week to your work week, that you secretly hate the novel that you claim to be loving writing, or that you and your first grader are squabbling a lot. She can only know things of this sort if you tell her.
If, in your first session together, you seem to be lost in the weeds or going around in circles, it may be that your coach is not understanding you or it may be that you are not explaining yourself. In either case, take a deep breath and see if you have something to add that might help. This might sound like, “You know, it might be important that I’m working longer hours at my job” or “By the way, I haven’t mentioned it, but my fights with my six-year-old are taking a lot out of me.”
Don’t expect your coach to instantly know what to make of this new information. She has to process it and add it to her budding picture of you and her sense of what might help. So, she may well reply by saying, “Can you tell me a little more about that?” or “How does that affect the picture that you’ve been painting?” By providing that tidbit of information, you may have made more work for yourself, because your coach is likely to ask for more information and your best understanding of what you just brought up signifies. Sigh, accept that the ball is back in your court, and help your coach—and you, in the process—better understand.
Sometimes the tiniest bit of additional information makes a real difference. For instance, I invite my clients who write to try to institute and maintain a morning writing practice, something that they get to every day as soon as they wake up. I know from experience that the writer I’m chatting with may already do certain things first thing each day—exercise, do morning pages, check email, meditate, etc.—so I know to check in about that. I hope that my client can move those things to later in the day, for the sake of her writing. She may agree—and yet I may sense that we still “aren’t there yet.” I suspect that there is something that she hasn’t told me yet—and so I inquire again.
I’ll ask, “Okay, so now there’s absolutely nothing in the way of you getting to your writing first thing?” And my client may snap her fingers and suddenly remember: “Oh, I have to walk the dog! That’s non-negotiable!” To her, that’s nothing special. To me, that’s a bit of a game-changer. I am now much less sanguine about her getting to her writing each morning, because I know from experience that that innocent walk will wake her up too much and get her thinking too much about the fullness and busyness of her day. I need to take that walk into account—it was something I really needed to know about, as “small” a matter as it might seem.
Help your coach understand. You don’t want her out to see and adrift, without a paddle or a clue. Throw her lifelines of useful information. She means to help; but she needs your help. Offer it up generously.
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“The Coach’s Way is possibly the finest resource available for anyone who wants to develop or enrich their coaching abilities. This new book is designed to give coaches the confidence and structure in their practice that will generate real results for their clients. Any- one who makes a living in the coaching arena will benefit from Dr. Maisel’s tremendous experience and training as a therapist, coach, and human. I’m so glad to have this book as a guide for my own coaching work and will recommend it to many others in the helping professions.”— Jacob Nordby, author of The Creative Cure: How Finding and Freeing Your Inner Artist Can Heal Your Life
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Read Part One Here: The Coach’s Way: User’s Guide to Coaching
Read Part Two Here: Can You Tolerate the Truth?
Read Part Three Here: Can I Collaborate?
Read Part Four Here: Picking a Kind of Helper
Read Part Five Here: Picking Your Coach
Read Part Six Here: Don’t Worry If Your Worldviews Differ
Read Part Seven Here: Check Your Expectations
Read Part Eight Here: Provide Your Coach With Information
Read Part Nine Here: Be Prepared to Be Psychological
Read Part Ten Here: Schedule a Session
Read Part Eleven Here: Right Before Your First Session
Read Part Twelve Here: Your First Session Begins
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock