What Voice Am I Leaving Behind?

Leaving behind.... (photo credit: Jonathan Cooper)

A peer coach and I were recently comparing how we work. She described an intervention she used when a coachee is anticipating a difficult meeting.

She brings herself into the room. "If I were sitting on your shoulder in that meeting, what would I say?"  The coachee has found it very helpful in tackling the difficult situation.

I have been thinking about it since. Not so much about whether I would use it, but about what it assumes — that the coach is already in there, and that this can be put to work.

What We Leave Behind

The obvious value of coaching happens in the session. But something is also left behind: a voice the coachee carries into rooms we will never enter. In the language of my earlier post on Kohlrieser, it is close to an internalised secure base.

My peer's intervention makes that deliberate rather than accidental. What struck me is that the voice is there either way. I had simply never asked myself what it was saying.

But then…. My Suspicion

Doesn't this expand the coach's footprint and shrink the coachee's? If a leader in a difficult meeting is asking what David would say, they are not asking what they themselves think. That looks like influence dressed up as development.

I should also be honest about a second thing, which took me longer to admit. It is flattering to imagine that one lives in a client's head. Any coach who claims otherwise is not looking hard enough. Whenever an idea about my own usefulness arrives already feeling pleasant, I have learned to slow down.

But then, I think of how I have been influenced by others’ voices in my life – the teachers, bosses, colleagues, authors, even spiderman!  By now, for most of them, I have to work to tell what came from them and what was mine to begin with.  Now I think it is the point.   A voice that has been fully absorbed no longer has a name attached to it.

A Question, or a Conclusion?

A former coachee — an accountant who had become a general manager in retail — once told me why our work had stuck. At the moment of a decision, he said, he often hears me asking: 'Am I trying to be correct, or useful?'

He was not recalling my advice. He had no idea what I would have said about any particular decision, and neither did I. What stayed was an inquiry, and an inquiry can only be answered by reference to his situation.

This is what I find myself pondering. When a coachee reaches for my voice, are they reaching for a question of mine, or for a conclusion of mine? I suspect both happen, and that I have never been deliberate about which. ‘What would I say? — could go either way; it may invite the coachee to guess my content, or it may simply be the quickest route to a stance they have already made their own. I do not think there is one right answer here. I think there is a choice I have been making unconsciously.

Not Only Questions — Manner

The second thing that gets left behind is manner.

Coachees do not only take our questions. They take how we do things — how we sit with silence, how we say the unwelcome thing. Which means the coaching conversation is not only a place to talk about behaviour. It is a place to demonstrate it, and a place to rehearse it.

I have started doing this more deliberately. When a coachee knows he should disagree with his boss but doesn't, I try to stop treating that as a topic:

Him: I know I should have pushed back. I just didn't. Me: Then let me try something. I disagree with what you said a minute ago — that your silence in that meeting was about seniority. I don't think that's the whole story, and I could be wrong. What just happened in you as I said that? Him: …I braced. But you didn't attack me. Me: So now you have seen one way it can be done.

The material is not what disagreement is. It is what disagreement looks like when it is not an attack. And if he carries anything out of that exchange, it will not be a sentence. It will be an image of how it can be done. 

Conscious Choices

So perhaps the intervention I want to add is not on my peer's model but alongside it, nearer the end of an engagement: 'Of everything we have looked at, what is the one question worth carrying?' Then get out of the way while they forget where it came from.

A Caution to Myself

The pleasant version of this idea is that I leave good questions behind. The honest version is that I leave myself behind, and I do not get to control which parts.  The only thing I can do about it is to pay attention. That is what this post is for.