Aboodi shabi
In the first in this new series of columns to provoke your thinking about coaching practice, Aboodi Shabi examines a well-held tenet of coaching: the client has all the answers
In coaching, we often say that the client has all the answers. But is it really true? Dave Buck of CoachVille wrote: “If a coachee has all the answers, why do they come to us for coaching?” So, let’s start with that question: why do they?
Coaching is often seen as a way of helping clients achieve the results they’re seeking, or to address issues they’re struggling with. However, this “tell me what you want, and I’ll help you get there” approach is only a limited explanation of coaching. If we want to produce lasting, rather than transactional, or situational, change, it’s not enough just to focus on the actions we take.
If we want to deal with overwhelm we could buy a BlackBerry. But no sooner have we fixed one ‘problem’ than another occurs – and we all know BlackBerry owners still in overwhelm.
We need to go deeper to achieve lasting change, to look at the self we are and transform at that level – tinkering with surface actions will merely produce more of the same. For that kind of change, we need something different, such as ontological coaching.
Julio Olalla and Rafael Echeverria describe ontological coaching as “a process aimed at producing a change in a person’s soul, which only happens when we are willing to observe, question and be curious enough to change the self that we are”.
The way we see ourselves and the world, determines this ‘self’ that we are, and our capacity for action. By shifting and expanding how we see, we expand our range of actions.
We’re blind to our own blindness. We only notice the way we do something when someone points it out to us. For example, my client this morning was laughing as he talked about a serious matter. When I asked him about that his first response was, “I don’t know why I do that and, honestly, I had never noticed I did so until you just mentioned it.”
It emerged that he’d rebelled against authoritarian teachers at school, and spent the past 30 years “messing around, not taking anything seriously” – and not being taken seriously. When I asked how he thought he would build his capacity to command more authority, his response was: “I don’t have a clue.”
Our role as coach is to reveal to the client (through questions, suggestions, sharing intuitions and perceptions and even, sometimes, by telling) that which they cannot see about themselves, and then by a similar process help them design new actions towards building a different self – one that can, for example, be taken more seriously.
Coaches will sometimes push back at this idea, citing, for example, that “the client is creative, resourceful and whole”. I think we are caught in a paradigm that sees not having answers as some kind of weakness, rather than a case of cognitive blindness. You could say one of the reasons coaching works is that the coach is blind in a different way to the client.
Transformational coaching will open our eyes to what we were blind to and, of course,it will be as if it were completely obvious! As Ken Wilber says, “We don’t just need a new map; we need ways to change the mapmaker.”
Aboodi Shabi is head of coaching and training for Newfield Europe www.newfieldeurope.com. Read his (occasionally) provocative blogs at www.aboodishabi.com
Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 6