I shouldn’t give you my opinion…but…
Over the course of coaching conversations, people often ask for my opinion on things. Or whether I have any advice on a situation. I avoid answering these questions because I believe that the most effective coaching comes from helping clients to work out their own solutions. People always have their own best ideas and my responsibility as a coach is to help them to find it rather than giving them my own point of view.
That being said, because I spend a lot of time talking to a lot of pretty incredible people, there are things I have learnt as a coach that I wouldn’t bring up to any one person in a one to one session, but think they are worth sharing in a general way.
More than anything they’re just ideas from a different perspective.
The world is our own interpretation
We interpret the world according to our experiences and the framework we have created. No one is an objective observer in their own life. One person’s hilarious joke is someone else’s insult. And someone else just might not understand it at all. Your reaction to that joke is based on how you’ve learned to behave and respond to things.
This is also true of other people - what people think about us says far more about them than it does about us. They have their own pre-dispositions, baggage and reflexes to work through - just the same as you. It’s easy to forget that when someone shares an opinion of us that we don’t like. But opinion isn’t truth and we can tie ourselves in knots when we confuse their opinion with what’s real. It’s much easier said than done but once we become aware of the way you react to things, that’s when you can start managing your responses. You might not always be able to change a negative into an outright positive, but you might start seeing the silver linings.
We’re not always as right as we think we are
Most of us are convinced most of the time that we’re right. Even when we’re not.
This is something the vast majority of us are unaware we’re doing until someone else points it out. And even then we’re pretty sure we’re still right. Interestingly enough, certainty is an emotion. We feel certain or we “know” we’re certain based on our own opinion - it’s not the same as being factually correct. By keeping an eye out for feeling absolutely certain about something rather than taking the time to reason something through, we can respond much less emotionally and therefore much more clearly. Even if it just gives you pause for thought, a little perspective will open up far more options and ways to respond to a situation, rather than just going with your first (emotional) reaction to what comes your way.
Language is generative
Something that surprises me time and again during sessions with my clients is that language is so much more than just a description. Language is how we construct what we see and feel - and therefore how we interpret the world around us.
This is one of the most important beliefs in coaching. Change starts with recognising that we want something to change - but often don’t know what that actual thing is. Being able to describe what’s going on for us, whether it’s an external issue or a more personal behaviour is a first step in seeing our way out of it. The very nature of the issue changes as we describe it because it moves from something subsurface and interior, to something with words and ideas and therefore form attached to it. Awareness and description are two sides of the same coin - once you’re aware of something you can start to describe it and conversely once you start being able to describe something, you become aware of what it is, what it feels like and its particular nuances. It is the first step in making any sort of constructive change to our life.
Listening to learn is pretty wise
I found this on one of the coaching blogs I follow but can’t credit it because a. It’s memberships only and b. The author is listed as ‘anonymous’ - which is a shame as I’d love to thank them for the brilliance of the idea. So I’ll just have to say thank you to whoever it was and let you all know that I wasn’t responsible for this genius insight. Listen to learn rather than win or fix. When we’re listening to someone, 95% of the time we are thinking of the next question, the solution or ways to prove that we’re in the right. We’re so busy having a conversation with ourself that we’re hardly paying attention to the person who is actually doing the talking. By listening to win or to fix, we’re doing the other person a real disservice because we’re not concentrating on them and not gaining anything new – we haven’t opened ourselves up to new possibilities of what they are saying. Listening to learn doesn’t mean you can’t later “win” or “fix” something either, but it does mean we can do it from a broader, more informed perspective.
Not knowing everything is fine
We don’t live in The Matrix. We can’t simply download all knowledge about everything straight into our head. People often confuse not knowing something (or how to do something) with not being ‘good enough’. It’s easy to connect not knowing with feeling inadequate but they’re not related in any way. We all always have something to learn. And when we make mistakes, that’s just another way of learning - albeit an uncomfortable experience. CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella speaks passionately about instilling a ‘learn-it-all culture’ rather than a ‘know-it all-culture’ because being a learner simply means that you do not know about something or how to do something in a particular area of your life at a particular time. Once you know what you don’t know, that’s when you start growing.
Conflict is how we see new things
Humans are pack animals; we’re wired to interact as a group and cooperate. You can’t bring down a woolly mammoth single handed. This instinct is often so strong some people find disagreement almost impossible - the experience being overwhelmingly difficult. Compromising to keep the peace becomes the status quo. But maintaining the status quo comes at the cost of new perspectives and genuinely constructive discussions. By bending over backwards to keep everyone happy, we lose the creative edge where change happens. Equally unhelpful is when we’re all 100% certain we’re right (point 1) which means we are unable to see anything worthwhile in what we don’t agree with. Yet it’s in that undefined area between agreement and disagreement that new ideas are born and we get a deeper understanding of our differences.
Next time you catch yourself retreating at the first sign of disagreement, think of a way to be curious rather than defensive and let the other person know that you want to hear their side of things. See where it takes you. It will probably be far less uncomfortable than you think…
The paradox of insignificance
We are all the most important person in our own lives. It’s natural that we get caught up in our daily drama and the drama of those closest to us. Especially given the year we’ve just had (sayonara 2020) , and the intense first week of 2021, it can be immensely helpful to take a step back, look around and consider how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. It might sound counterintuitive but remembering that what happens on a personal level is both hugely significant (to us) and vastly insignificant (to the universe), brings a whole new sense of perspective to whatever we have going on in that exact minute. It takes ourselves out of ourselves and enables us to engage in the matter at hand more creatively and dispassionately than if we were totally immersed in it.
Coaching combines a little bit of all of the above - it helps you put words to your feelings, realise that you’re not always right and that that is ok. Helps you realise that you don’t know everything and that’s ok too. It will also help you realise how much you do know and how much more you might like to learn.
Everyone has their own understanding of how the world works, their part in it and what the universe might have in store for them. We’ll never be entirely in the driving seat because we’ll always have to navigate circumstances that are out of our control - but standing back and trying to take in our situation with understanding rather than simple reaction puts us far more in the centre of our own circumstances.
See what coaching can do for you…get in touch.
