Two Coaches Walked into a Cafe…
by DR. SARAH LACKEY
Two coaches walked into a café. What do you suppose they talked about?
The assessments they use? Nuances about a method they found or tried? A challenging client?
How often, do you suppose, do they talk about the latest episode of vulnerability they experienced, what they learned from it, and how it changed their perspectives as a person and as a coach? It is an honest question; I really don’t know.
What we do is fascinating. Even though I have been in a service field for over four decades, and my chosen vocation involves psycho-social evaluation, care-planning, and interaction, I have never encountered anything that is quite so intriguing as coaching.
One of the profound realizations I had after finishing coach training and coaching a few clients, was that we, in essence, are actually facilitating conversations our clients are having with themselves. The most effective sessions for me at that time were those when I could get as ‘invisible’ as possible, allowing my intuition and perspective to guide the conversation.
After a few sessions with this experience of ‘invisibility’ (just enough to anchor the realization) and a few sessions without being so invisible, one thing was clear. I was going to have to figure out how to keep the edge sharp. That’s when I met Gregg Thompson.
Well, I didn’t actually meet him. I met his voice, in his book The Master Coach. It is not at all what I expected. While he does have a “Master Coach Model”, what snagged me were his first 9 chapters. He doesn’t talk about what a coach does. He talks about who a coach IS.
One of the themes he calls ‘the coaching perspective.’ It is something we develop, and usually that development is unconscious. But, he adds, consciously developing it is a discipline that needs to be intentionally adopted and rigorously practiced.
Call me an anomaly, but when anyone says ‘disciplined’ I am in. And ‘’rigorous practice,’ all the better. I was ready to find my answer, but how do you practice developing perspective?
Thompson’s book is full of rich information and thought-provoking perspectives worthy of study over time. At this particular juncture, I was drawn to one particular concept: vulnerability.
It made sense; we are asking our coachees to be vulnerable with us, to walk right up to the edge of the cliff and step off into that scary, unknown place. They don’t really know where the conversation will take them through the recesses of their minds, nor what they will discover, but they trust us nonetheless to walk through with them – and hold the space steady when they face what they would rather not.
If I was going to be able to reduce my persona to the degree where I was invisible, and my intuition and perspective were heightened to the degree that they lead the conversation, I had to regularly visit that place; I had to get in touch with where they went. I had to explore fear.
The rest of the story is too long for this blog, and probably not very interesting. But it brings us back to my original question above: how do we use vulnerability to develop ourselves as coaches, and in our conversations with each other, could that be a topic that serves each of us?
I’ll see you at the café…
More about Dr. Sarah Lackey, DNP ACC/ICF CMC CPQC
Sarah Lackey is a nursing leader and professional coach with over 40 years’ experience in healthcare. She has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, served as an advocate for nursing on boards and advisory groups, speaks broadly on a variety of topics, and recently developed an evidence-based, theory-based conceptual framework to assist the profession in addressing the challenging issue of nurse retention.
Sarah will be presenting the June TCC program: Essentialism in Coaching: the Marriage of Form and Substance.