THE TROGLODYTE
Hello, I am Roach the Coach and I will be your guide through the Coaching Chronicles. We’ve been around for more than 300 million years, but as you lot weren’t even Homo sapiens then, we’ll start the story a bit further on…
At the time of cave men and women – Captain Caveman, Fred Flintstone, Raquel Welch in ‘that’ bikini…
But these poor people had it bad. Theirs was a life of foraging for food, dodging dinosaurs (well, not really as they never co-existed, but let’s not ruin a good story with facts) and living in caves. So, how did coaching emerge during this time?
This group has characteristics that are similar to those of some of your modern-day clients:
- Low EQ
- Basic, unsophisticated communication consisting of grunts and prods
- Physically over-developed
- Tendency to ‘Group Think’
- Poor table manners
- Hairy
The basic Troglodyte DNA has survived over thousands of years. Today, it thrives in dark, dank uninviting habitats such as sports clothing warehouses, town centre information booths and a few IT departments.
Many modern-day coaching techniques have their roots in the Troglodyte era, namely the use of drawings to support coaching interventions. Coaching during this time had a very specific focus – survival.
Early cave drawings revealed that there was a hierarchy of needs developed by the early Troglodyte. They guided the context in which coaching was delivered.
Goal visualisations were often recorded too:
of dinosaur ‘redundancies’
Resolve team conflict
Coaching was, like the conditions the clients lived in, predatory. Permissions and boundaries were difficult to agree on during a mammoth attack.
Coaching was also a little more directive than you modern-day coaches are used to. Whereas you would ask questions such as: “What would you like to discuss today?” and “How will you know this has been time well spent?” to set a session goal, your Troglodyte colleagues would say things like: “Run!” or “Duck!” or “Help!”
Living in such a predatory environment meant that the brain (what there was of it) was in a constant state of alert. The amygdala was hijacked more often than the Black Pearl in Pirates of the Caribbean.
As you know, amygdala hijacks stimulate the fight or flight instinct, cause heart rates to increase and push self-protection and survival as the only priority – a bit like a banker on bonus day.
Being in a constant state of alert is not really conducive to idea generation so it was nothing short of a miracle that these guys invented anything at all. As you know, many great inventions are the result of a freak accident or unintended action. In fact, we roaches witnessed just this type of incident during a coaching session that resulted in one of the greatest inventions of all time: fire.
It came about while a Troglodyte was being coached on dinosaur avoidance. This chap had armed himself with two sticks against a dinosaur attack and was receiving some ‘on the job’ coaching. His coach shouted “RUN!” but he misheard him and thought he said “RUB!”
Before we knew it, fire was invented. Ahh, the beauty of coaching.
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 2