Aboodi Shabi

My focus last issue was on the coach navigating between attention to, and experience of, the client. This issue: What does the coach care about?

So what do we care about? It seems an odd question – coaches should serve the client’s agenda, not their own. Yet when I train and mentor coaches, we spend lots of time looking at just that – why we do this work, what we are passionate about, what we long for.

It matters because what we stand – and care – for, shapes how we connect with clients. Are we neutral observers? Can we really be unattached to outcomes? Is it even beneficial to be so? Or are we passionate citizens who came into coaching for something more than just another job to do? And how do you make it a strength without it getting in the way of your coaching?

If coaching were simply a mechanistic, formulaic process, who we are would be irrelevant. But coaching is a relationship. If coaching is to be about (and I really believe that it is and has to be) more than simply “tell me what you want and I’ll help you get there”, it needs to explore the deeper concerns that we as individuals, and as a collective, are facing.

For me to be able to accompany others in that enquiry, I must acknowledge my own experience and concerns about the world we live in – a world with all kinds of turmoil, facing uncertainties and issues of meaning, where all of our external progress and development has produced less, not more, happiness.

Coaches are not immune to those concerns – we live them. We cannot just put on our “happy, positive-thinking, professional” face, and leave those concerns behind. They shape us, in our thinking, our emotions, our being.

When we work with clients, we need to be curious about the deeper concerns they face, the questions beyond the presenting issues. What bigger questions form the background of their concerns?

Sir John Whitmore has said that a coach cannot go into emotional territories with a client without having faced their own experience of such territories. I’d like to extend this.

We do not coach from our knowledge of the world, but from our wisdom – how we deal with our life, making sense of it, learning from it. Just like our clients, we have an experience of living in the world, facing the concerns of making our way, navigating relationships and challenges, joys and suffering, feeling what we feel in response to the financial crisis, and so on. It is being steeped in of all of this that makes us the coach we are.

We tread a fine line – almost like the Buddhist paradox of being in the world, but not caught in it, and, by extension, of being with clients where they are, but not being stuck in their narratives.

Perhaps the bigger, and more important, paradox is that we need to know how to meet these universal concerns from our own experiences of them, and to listen for them, but not to drive the coaching from them.

As the Hasidic Rabbi Shlomo said: “If you want to raise a man from mud and filth, do not think it is enough to keep standing on top and reaching down to give him a helping hand. You must go all the way down yourself, down into mud and filth. Then take hold of him with strong hands and pull him and yourself out into the light.”

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 6, Issue 4