How I ‘am’ in the coaching relationship is much better managed with a light touch than studied preparation, bringing deep trust and insight from the client
by Lindsay Wittenberg
I recently had chemistry sessions with two potential clients who decided, on the spot, to work with me. Curious about how they had made their decisions, I asked each of them how it was that they had made these decisions in the moment. One replied: “You understand me” and the other replied: “I feel accepted. I don’t feel judged.”
Both of them were talking about their experience of me. Neither of them said anything about what I did, let alone refer to my skills, expertise, knowledge or experience. Both paid scant attention to my profile and my testimonials.
As my coaching practice evolves, I become more and more conscious that who I ‘am’, and how my ‘being’ shows up, have a significantly greater influence on my coaching impact than what I do.
I’m aware of this in particular at the beginning of a coaching relationship, when the groundwork is laid for whatever will happen between the coaching client and me, and thus for the learning that the individual will create.
How I am – nervous or calm, vulnerable or withholding, present or distracted by working to an agenda, and so much else – sets the scene for how the whole coaching relationship will develop.
And how I am can be managed much better, I find, with a light touch than through studied preparation of my behaviour. Judging by the outcomes I achieved much earlier in my coaching practice, such studied preparation can mean I fail to touch the coaching client experientially, emotionally or somatically – and therefore fail to build the connection we need in order to be able to encounter sensitive or risky topics in a context of safety and trust.
Coaching for me is about sustainable and sustained change, and in my experience that comes through experiential learning for the client. That learning is in turn connected to who I understand myself to ‘be’, what I understand to be my role as coach, how I relate systemically to the client, how I live my values – and how I am all
of that.
As Vivien Broughton says in her wonderfully accessible and insightful book, In the Presence of Many:
“… true change is an embodied experience of integration…. a transcendent shift in the whole person. It may only take a split-second, but in that moment everything changes, for that person nothing is ever the same again… As facilitators we are required to cultivate a high tolerance of uncertainty and the unknown,… a lack of intent,… a diminished need to be right”.
These reflections resonate deeply for me: they set out both what I believe and how
I aim to be, as challenging and difficult as that is in a coaching session when I find myself thinking I know how to enable the client’s path towards an insight or realisation.
There’s a tricky and inherent irony in letting go of ‘knowing’ and at the same time have my coaching depend on knowing something about the process of change.
And yet it’s affirming and liberating to be aware that a light touch and my capacity to be present are demonstrably effective when I’m in front of potential and actual clients.
And now I come to think about it, the same thing is at play whether I’m with the coaching client themselves or with the sponsor.
Here’s to being!
- Lindsay Wittenberg is director of Lindsay Wittenberg Ltd. She is an executive coach who specialises in authentic leadership, career development and cross-cultural coaching
- www.lindsaywittenberg.co.uk