Homer: Well, there’s not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol is sure doing its job.
Lisa: That’s specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, sweetie.
Lisa: Dad, what if I were to tell you that this rock keeps away tigers.
Homer: Uh-huh, and how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn’t work. It’s just a stupid rock.
Homer: I see.
Lisa: But you don’t see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I’d like to buy your rock.
The Simpsons, Season 7, Episode 23
Coaching, eh? Isn’t that where you tell someone how to live their life?
No
Isn’t that where you give advice to someone on how to solve their problems?
No.
Isn’t that… No.
Coaching is “none of those things and less”, as Stephen Fry liked to say. But it’s completely understandable that people don’t know how coaching works, because coaches tend to guard their process as if it’s the secret formula to Coca Cola. Often, this is because Coaches don’t have a process (and more than you think as well) and often it’s because they are worried that if they publicise their process, other coaches will steal it.
Legendary wall street trader Mark Minervini once said that he could publish his strategy for picking trades on the front page of the New York Times and nobody would be able to copy it. Not because it was complicated, but because it was his. Minervini understood something fundamental to every practice in our lives – we don’t trade the market; we trade our beliefs about the market.
Coaching and indeed every other endeavour, follows a similar law: We coach according to our beliefs about coaching.
So, what are my beliefs about coaching?
Coaching is not about fixing clients; it is about helping them to become more of who they are.
The client is the expert in their own life, and they have the answers within themselves.
The client has the agency to act or not act.
A key part of the Coaching process involves helping clients gain self-awareness and insight. Coaching can help the client discover their own solutions.
The Coach’s role is to guide the client to uncover their true self. Challenging clients appropriately can help reframe a client’s thinking and identify possible areas for growth.
Coaching can lead to positive change and personal growth.
So, if that’s what I believe, how do I translate those beliefs in a coaching process?
After I graduated from Smurfit Business School with my Professional Diploma in Executive Coaching, I had already done over 100 hours of pro-bono work with clients who were coaching-curious or just wanted coaching but did not have the means to pay. This was an extraordinary journey for me, not least because I gained a window into the needs, wants and behaviours of a large subset of the population that would not, in professional terms, be you typical coaching client. The freedom of any financial obligation led to some lively and good-humoured sessions, and I learned an enormous amount about the human condition just from working with this cohort. My gratitude to them is eternal, and I wish them all huge success in their lives.
But good humour and lively conversations, while fun, won’t cut it for a coach who is serious in their intent to actually be of service to the client. I learned that a process is needed and given the beliefs I had about coaching, I began to notice a shift in my technique and a higher success rate with a specific type of client.
The core problem that I like to coach
We often talk about something in specific and explicit terms, but when it comes to labelling the obvious, we make up something ridiculous instead of just calling it what it is. This has been exacerbated to infinity by the culture of corporate speak and hypersensitive organizational environments.
So, we talk about workers who “under-perform” who are “disruptive”, and who are “mis-aligned with the core mission.” And that’s just off the top of my head. I could write a whole piece just about corporate labels.
But let’s just stick with these. Let’s begin by describing the underlying problem(s) that all three are trying to describe.
Under-performing = not doing their job.
Disruptive = stopping other staff from doing their job, and possibly also not doing their own job.
Mis-aligned etc etc = not doing their job or trying to do someone else’s job. Or just doing the wrong job.
The behaviour that each label describes is, at its core, a failure to do the work assigned, to refuse the responsibility granted, and/or to attempt to evangelise these practices and bring others with them.
The labels themselves are just that. The behaviours are the underlying problem. And these behaviours stem from one or more beliefs. These beliefs are core to the individual’s sense of being, have kept them safe in the past and the individual believes that they will keep them safe now and in the future. Their social status may depend on, and drive, these beliefs. To change these beliefs might mean the annihilation of their identity.
The behaviours that these beliefs drive once worked for the individual. But in the context of their current work and professional environment, they are a liability, both to the individual and the organisation. But only the organisation can see it.
Find the beliefs, find the solution
That’s great Kevin, but how do you find someone’s beliefs?
It’s a process, and here it is:
Chemistry Call
I start with a 30 minute chemistry call with the prospective client. This is usually presented as an opportunity to see if we can work with each other. The reality is that I want the client to understand what I do, and to gauge their interest in participating in the process. I have never lost a client during a chemistry call.
The Chemistry call also serves as an opportunity to onboard the client to the first and may be the most important part of the process proper; the discovery of their drivers. I give the client a publicly accessible link to a website that will help them learn about and discover their Kahler’s drivers.
Kahler’s Drivers
Kahler (Kahler, 1975), identified five drivers that motivate us and can also cause dysfunctional behaviours.
Be Perfect
Be Strong
Try Hard
Hurry Up
Please People
So, for example, my dominant drivers are Be Perfect and Be Strong. What to do with this information on behalf of a client?
The client will recognise immediately their dominant drivers and the role that these drivers play in their lives. We can use our ability to associate almost any of our drivers with almost any of our matching behaviours, so having an actual score to discover the dominant drivers is very useful. But what do these drivers do?
Kahler proposed that our drivers activate our “scripts”. To understand what a script is, we need to take a quick detour into the realm of transactional analysis.
Eric Berne, the father of Transactional analysis, defined a script as an “unconscious life plan, a blueprint for existence, that is adapted in the preverbal years.”
One example of a script is “Until”. The thesis of this script is that something good must be put off until something else is achieved.
For example, a person with this script might say, “I can’t watch that movie until I’ve finished my report.” The script is conditional. The person can succeed, but they cannot be content with the success. (Kahler, 1975).
What this means for the client.
Between the chemistry call and the first session, the client will do the exercise to discover their Kahler’s drivers. During the first session, we will discuss the results, and I will briefly explain what they mean, as described by Kahler.
We will spend the rest of the first session exploring the client’s biography, first as a summary, then as an iteration, as we pick out important events and how these shaped the client’s beliefs about their life. Towards the end of the session, I will invite the client to align their beliefs about these events, particularly around their reactions and subsequent choices, with their drivers, particularly the dominant two. The session ends with an invitation to the client to reflect on this between now and session two.
As you can see, most of the heavy lifting for the client gets done before the first session even begins. The client comes into that first session already knowing something about themselves that they did not know before. Mapping their biography on top of these drivers can have the effect of giving the client a window into their own process of decision making and why they feel “driven” to behave in a certain way.
Between session one and session two, I take the results of the clients Kahler’s drivers test and map these to the script(s) that transactional analysis deem appropriate. I’m not a TA expert but there is enough data in Berne’s and Kahler’s papers to make a connection between any set of drivers and a suggested TA script. I’ll read back on my notes of the first session and, being extremely wary of induction error, will attempt to find confirmation examples within the client’s biography that exemplify both the drivers and the scripts suggested.
Session two
In session two, we will recap session one and I will ask the client to revisit anything that they told me last time that seems to have more relevance to them now. It is unsurprising that the client will have already mapped some of their behaviours to their dominant Kahler’s drivers at this point.
Some clients revel in the discovery and take great interest in this, others not at all. The enthusiasm for the theory on the client’s side is not correlated to any outcome. The acceptance of the associations is what matters. And any acceptance should be thoroughly tested.
To that end, I will invite the client to disprove anything that they have already said. For example, a client that expresses the opinion “I’m always angry when X walks into the room because he reminds me of something that happened to me previously”, might well find that given careful thought, they have often chatted pleasantly with X during a lunch break or a meeting, without those feelings being triggered. Not everything is as it seems at first glance, which why we do the work of uncovering our beliefs.
At this point I will explain to the client what a script is, and how our drivers activate these scripts. I will suggest that the drivers that are dominant in the client can activate the associated scripts and I will then explain with an example or two (not from the client’s biography) how these scripts can work. I will then invite the client to find areas of their own lives in which those scripts may have been relevant.
Clients generally enjoy this part of the work because it helps them to gain an insight into their behaviours. “I never understood why I was doing that.” Is something that I hear a lot, even for behaviours that seemed unremarkable at the time. It is the understanding, the not the explanation, that clients find useful. And since the client is the one who has derived the understanding, this becomes their specific knowledge as it pertains to them. As I said previously, the client is the expert in their own life.
The purpose of laying all of this groundwork, and particularly for starting this in the first two sessions (where possible) is that by session three, the client will be consciously aware of their unconscious behaviours, but on a scale that is small enough to not overwhelm them. The growth of self-awareness is noticeable to the client at this stage, and the stage is now set to tackle the actual issue that brought them to coaching in the first place.
Sessions three and four
Even though most coaches talk about coaching as being “six session packages” there is no minimum or maximum number of sessions that need to be agreed on. For accounting purposes though, an accounts payable department prefers to receive a purchase request and an invoice for a fixed number of sessions, and the coaching gods have decreed that the correct number is six.
I mention this because I have often found that the third or fourth sessions are often the last truly useful ones before the process begins to level off. This is because sessions three and four move beyond self-discovery and into the gritty realm of personal accountability and action on the part of the client.
The first half of session three is used to recap the work done so far and to hear the client’s opinions on their progress. We then recap their reason for coming to coaching in the first place. This is usually comprised of some kind of problem statement (I can’t seem to handle my workload / get along with my boss / command the respect of my peers) that was either arrived at by themselves or presented to them as a reason for coaching to commence.
To be clear, this will have been discussed, often at length, during the first two sessions as well. However no substantive action can be taken on these issues until the client has an understanding of their own drivers and scripts, and therefore an understanding of their behaviours in different situations.
Sessions three and four are generally a forensic deep dive into workplace issues through a lense of the drivers and scripts of the client.
This part of the process comes with an uncomfortable ask for coaches - to continue to coach according to their beliefs. Because this is where things can get rough.
If the coach believes that the client is expert on their own lives, then the coach has an obligation to hold a mirror up to the client, in order that they must recognise their own contribution to the issues at hand. It is possible to do this without any judgement, and it is important the client understands this. What is not possible is that this part be skipped or glossed over. I did not truly become a coach until I understood this.
Because of the work done in sessions one and two, the client should not be afraid to confront their own truth at this point. If their behaviours in the workplace are not appropriate, or productive, or aligned, then they now have the tools to explain why. And I mean explain, not make excuses.
Over session three and four, the client is given the floor to cycle through all of the behaviours that they exhibit which are met with negative responses. The rule here, though, is that instead of the negative reactions and feedback being seized upon and presented as “they’re so mean to me!” we look at the behaviour itself and seek to map that behaviour to various times in the client’s life where that behaviour served them well, at least at the time.
If we spend our life reinforcing a script that translates into “everyone is against me” or “I’m not good enough” or “I can’t achieve this until I satisfy everyone else’s needs beforehand” then we will reach for these behaviours as a defence whenever the need arises.
We won’t map them on to the situation at hand, which might have merited a completely different response. Instead, we will ram the square peg of our go-to behaviour into the round hole that was waiting from a much simpler and easier response.
It cannot be surprising to the client, once they realise this, that their behaviours, which served them so well previously and in a completely different context, are not working now. The question is, what to do about it?
Further sessions
It is essential for the client to have understood at this point that their default set of behaviours is not working in the workplace context in which they find themselves right now. It is further essential that the client understands the reasons for these behaviours are not “wrong” in and of themselves, but they are not the correct behaviours for the prevailing environment.
Note: “Behaviours for the prevailing environment” can sound like I’m envisioning a situation where a form of “groupthink” is at play and the client has failed to conform to it. This is not what I am talking about, and I will never work with a client to achieve this type of outcome. Not that it would work in any case.
If the client is an expert in their own lives, as I believe they are, then by extension, the client has a choice in how to live it. It is at this point that the client must make a choice in relation to their future.
A client has the agency and the freedom to choose to act or not to act. The coaching process as described does not “fix” a client. Nor is that the intended outcome.
My coaching process is designed to help a client, through a relationship of unconditional positive regard, understand who they are, what their drivers are, what scripts these drivers activate and how these scripts influence their behavioural responses in certain situations. This is achieved entirely through the client’s own understanding and realisation, not delivered as any type of lecture of advice.
Once this is understood, the client explores what behaviours, that worked for them in the past, in different situations and contexts, no longer work. Alternatives are identified and the client is invited to make a choice, completely independently and with as much information as possible, about their future.
The client, at the end of the process, will understand that if they exhibit behaviours that are received negatively, that these behaviours are no longer the supportive and safe scaffolding that they once were, and instead are hindering the client’s own progress and development.
Even without coaching, we have all had a road to Damascus moment, where we realised that our behaviours are not appropriate or productive to the current environment. Sometimes we choose to change our behaviour. Other times we choose to change our environment. That choice is entirely down to the individual and there are often solid cases to be made for either one.
The individual is resourceful. The individual has a choice.