Peace, bearing witness and acceptance

How can clients really benefit from my coaching?

 

The starting point

The challenges that my clients bring to coaching cover a wide spectrum: how to address difficult relationships, how to manage a working life that feels overwhelming in the range and intensity of its demands, how to gain clarity on the career they really want (and a sense of agency in being able to make it happen), how to manage behavioural habits that they know get in the way, but feel powerless to change (including perfectionism, procrastination, overwork, micromanagement and others), how to build a business in the grip of tough market and economic conditions and a tough regulatory environment, how to manage poor wellbeing that is at least partly rooted in pouring so much of themselves into their work.  The list goes on.

Some aren’t able to articulate the challenge, but they have a deep sense that something needs changing.

All of these people appear to me to be troubled to a greater or lesser extent, sometimes exhausted, often frantic with no sense of where to direct their attention first, and they often feel that they’re failures, in both their own and others’ eyes.

But – and it’s an important ‘but’ – they’re not only willing, but also keen, to enquire deeply, to explore widely, to reflect both in the coaching sessions and between sessions, and to go on learning adventures that may take them into territory they’ve never encountered before and that may seem puzzling and confronting.  They really want to develop, and they realise that that development may be neither self-evident nor fast – and that it may manifest (at least to begin with) through what Jennifer Garvey Berger calls weak signals – subtle emerging patterns.  They’re willing to engage at depth, and to really commit to the journey.  They’re deeply interested in learning – not learning as acquiring facts or knowledge, but learning as applying themselves to the discovery of insights.

 

The journey

Realising that this is a journey rather than a tick-box exercise or a process of simply getting things done is an important first step – and most often that realisation is part of the journey itself.

Also important is, firstly, both the knowledge and the sense that they aren’t alone, but rather accompanied by me as coach, and secondly that the relationship with me is a relationship of trust, in a context of safety (no matter how scary the issues might be that arise), of lack of pressure, lack of rush to get anywhere, and lack of judgment.

In the coaching there’s no drive directly towards the client’s objectives, as this would risk missing the nature of their context, their history, and their underpinnings, which enable the sustainability of the achievement of the objectives.  Which means, in turn, that any solution would respond only to what shows on the surface and therefore wouldn’t necessarily be sustainable.

 

What’s at work here?

You may ask: if there’s no drive or push directly towards the objectives, how are the objectives achieved?

There are many factors involved here, but I’ll highlight just three.  As coach, I’m bringing deep presence, which – albeit imperceptibly – is nurturing and nourishing the coaching with safety, a safety that the client experiences without it necessarily being explicit, but which enables them to encounter thinking, feeling and realisations which might be scary, but which I’m facilitating them to work through and begin to enquire into deeply, so that they can understand what’s really going on.

The client experiences me bearing witness without judgement, but with compassion, to whatever they might bring. Sometimes their very awareness (not because I’ve pointed it out, but because it simply becomes apparent to them) of my bearing witness offers the beginnings of resolution, clarity, settling or solution.

Thirdly, clients being and feeling deeply accepted, as they are and for who they are, with no demands or expectations, or measurement by any standard of achievement, with all their quirks and foibles, all their qualities and peculiarities.

These factors sit alongside the client taking responsibility for expanding the boundaries of their learning, experimenting and curiosity.

 

Arrival – but not at the journey end

My presence and bearing witness bring to the client a sense of validation – and self-validation.  This can be powerful for someone who has consistently been blaming themselves for what they perceive as failure.  They become able to accept themselves as valid, not because they’re ‘perfect’ (by whatever measure) but because they simply are a human being with value – value which isn’t connected at all to their achievements or having to prove themselves.

Clients who have travelled this journey tell me that not only do they find peace (and are sometimes surprised at this discovery) but that this peace is ubiquitous in their lives, enabling them to let go of much of the self-judgment, and of the decoys that stand in the way of being able to effectively address their coaching objectives.  Letting go in this way, in turn, means that they have a new clarity of vision that brings a fresh and realistic sense of perspective; a sense of capability; what in other circumstances might be called courage, but which means the individual who’s been coached can address new experiences as energising and doable; and, importantly, a sense of calm, so their wellbeing improves exponentially.  Peace is a hugely important starting point.

And it’s this – the clarity of vision, the fresh perspective, the sense of capability, the ability to address challenges, and the peace of wellbeing – that means that along the path of their journey clients have invariably (and sometimes unconsciously) addressed the objectives that they first brought.  I can only say that, one way or another, if my clients have been engaged and committed, they always find either that what was a coaching objective has been resolved or is simply no longer there, or that they feel equipped to create a process for its resolution.

This is the beginning of change that is ongoing: a stop at a station, but by no means the terminus.