Who Do You Talk to When You’re Usually the One Everyone Else Talks To?
As coaches, we spend a lot of time listening.
People bring us the things they’re struggling with, the decisions they can’t make, the conversations they’re avoiding and sometimes the things they haven’t said to anybody else.
We’re used to creating space for all of that, but who does that for us?
Knowing how coaching works doesn’t make us immune
I coach a number of coaches and I’ve noticed how easy it is for us to assume we should be able to sort ourselves out.
After all, we know how coaching works. We ask questions for a living and we understand patterns, beliefs, thinking and behaviour. Many of us have spent years developing our self-awareness, but none of that stops us getting completely caught up in our own thinking.
I certainly do, and I’ve had a good example of that recently. I’ve been thinking about where I want to take my own business next. I knew I loved working with coaches, both coaching and mentoring them, and there were plenty of clues that I wanted to do more of it.
But instead of simply noticing that, I managed to make it much more complicated.
I thought about positioning, what I was already known for, whether focusing more on coaches meant giving something else up, what I should be doing and whether it all made business sense. I could make a perfectly reasonable argument for several different directions and the more I thought about it, the less clear it became.
Eventually I realised I was trying to think my way into a decision when, underneath all that noise, I already knew what I wanted. I wanted to coach more coaches.
There was no big revelation and I didn’t suddenly discover a new strategy. It just became obvious once I stopped making it so complicated.
Our coaching knowledge can sometimes give us even more to get tangled up in. We start analysing why we’re thinking something, looking for the belief underneath it or wondering what pattern we’re repeating. Sometimes that’s useful, but at other times, we’re simply adding more thinking to thinking.
When our thinking looks like reality
We can be remarkably convincing when we’re talking to ourselves.
That client didn’t get enough from the session.
I’m not as good as that coach.
I should be further ahead by now.
My business isn’t working.
When we’re caught up in it, those don’t feel like thoughts. They feel like accurate descriptions of what’s happening.
Then we go for a walk, have a conversation, sleep on it or simply leave the problem alone for a while, and somehow it doesn’t look quite the same. Nothing outside us may have changed, but the way we’re seeing it has.
We don’t always need to work ourselves out
This is something I’ve become much more interested in. Perhaps every uncomfortable thought or feeling doesn’t need investigating and we don’t necessarily have to uncover where it came from, challenge it, replace it or do something with it.
Sometimes our thinking settles when we stop interfering with it and then something we couldn’t see before becomes obvious.
That doesn’t mean ignoring real problems. It means recognising that trying harder to think our way to clarity isn’t always what produces it.
Of course, we can talk to friends and family, but those conversations are different. People who know us well often have an opinion about what we should do, or they want to reassure us and help us fix it.
There’s something different about talking to someone who doesn’t need you to reach a particular answer. Someone who will stay with you when you don’t know, notice the thing you’ve just said and nearly skipped past, or challenge you when you’re treating one version of events as though it’s the only possible one.
That’s one of the things I value most about being coached myself. It isn’t about someone giving me the answer. It’s having somewhere I don’t need to have one.
Until next time,
Cath
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P.S. Perhaps the question isn’t whether you need coaching, but whether you’d value having that kind of space for yourself. I know I do. If this has struck a chord and you’d like to explore what having your own coach might give you, send me a message through the contact page and we can have a conversation.
