Having written about the mindsets that a coach must unlearn in order to be an extraordinary coach, I got to wondering about the mindset of a thinker. How might the thinker show up to coaching in a way that would enable them to make the most of the thinking time.
Because that’s what coaching is: thinking time.
“Coaching is a joint endeavour to discover new thinking that energises the thinker to move forward”.
So often, I hear people say that they don’t give themselves this thinking time, except when they are with their coach. That’s a shame because they then get lost in the minutiae of daily work and life and start to feel overwhelmed. Thinking time is useful with or without a coach.
These mindset shifts that I will write about here in this series will be useful whether you are thinking with a coach or alone.
I’ll use my philosophy of coaching as a hook to hang these mindset shifts on. Here’s the first:
- We (coach and thinker) are co-travellers, travelling into the unknown together, designing the map as we go, because there is no map for this person’s unique journey.
- Every coaching session is individualised to the in-the-moment needs of the thinker with whom we are working. No two session outcomes are ever the same.
What do you make of that for yourself as the thinker?
How does this differ from what you might expect from coaching?
I encourage you to come to coaching without preconceived ideas about there being one right answer. There is rarely one single right answer. There are almost always more possibilities than you might think. And these possibilities are not of the coach’s creation. They are of your creation, based on your context, your personality, your stakeholders. Possibilities that are a good fit for you – not a good fit for someone else, because their context, personality and stakeholders are all different. Your coach is not a mentor, providing you with “best practice” because that best practice is not necessarily a best fit for you.
This coach has never worked with you before. You are unique. This is why you are travelling into the unknown together. Because what is a right answer for you is not a right answer for the next person they work with, or the next.
So don’t expect your coach to have the answers.
Please don’t try to hook them into giving you answers. Their job is to support and challenge you to strengthen your own thinking muscles. You wouldn’t expect a personal trainer to lift weights for you when you are trying to build muscles in your arms. And the same applies to coaching. Your coach does not do the heavy lifting of thinking for you. That’s your role in this partnership.
This may seem really odd to you, if you have never had coaching before. How can your coach help you to build those thinking muscles? By asking questions. By noticing the words you use, your facial expressions, the inconsistencies in what you say and and asking you to make meaning of those. By them taking responsibility for doing this, they will be challenging you to think for yourself.
Thinking for yourself might feel harder than you might like.
You’ll likely rebel against this, because it’s so much easier for you for someone else to give you “the” answer. But you won’t do anything with that answer, or you’ll try it for a bit and then slip back to old habits, because it won’t feel like a good fit for your context, your personality, your stakeholders. So that’s pointless. And you’ll feel under-resourced to think for yourself moving forward, because you’ll be creating a vicious cycle of dependence on your coach. The more dependent you become, the less you will be able to think for yourself.
Create your own map
Expect to do the hard work of thinking, to create your own map. Your coach’s responsibility is to make themselves redundant, once you have built the thinking muscles; or at least to reduce the amount of thinking time you need together as you build your own thinking time into your work schedule.
