Sabotage! How you’re stopping your clients truly succeeding

Guest Post provided by Leading Coach Michael Bungay Stanier

You’re FABulous

You’re a senior coach, wise and subtle, well trained and with many hours of coaching conversations under your belt.

It’s both a rewarding and comfortable place to be, and we do good in the world. (I’m taking the liberty to count myself as one of your peers.)

And I suspect you don’t need me to stroke your ego. We get our share of that already.

Hence the title of this post – I think the interesting place is when we can stir things up a little and ‘pop the trunk’ to see what’s really going on.

Let’s get juicy

The question I started with was how do I take my coaching from Good to Great. (You’ll see why in the bio below.)

That led me to ask about further tricks and tips and techniques, further ways of knowing more and more about less and less until I knew everything about nothing. (I stole that line from a t-shirt I saw a PhD student wearing once.)

But the question I ended up with, which I found more useful and is somehow related, is this:

Let’s assume that in some ways I’m sabotaging my clients. If that was true, how would I be doing that?

Mmmm. Interesting. Here are three things that come to mind for me.

1. Loss of focus

I show up with the best of intentions, and our early conversations are fantastic. We talk big picture, we tap into values, we plan change.

But then the mist of familiarity swirls up and gets in my way. And I lose sight of why I’m doing this coaching. Is it just for the money? How does this work shape me and change me? Does it? Do I want it to?

2. Loss of courage

I talk about the “fierce love” I have for my clients, and by that I mean a willingness to challenge them and provoke them, support them and push them when fear or comfort or trumps the desire for change.

And then I find myself colluding in the conversation. Going “u-huh” rather than “really?” Accepting it as true rather than asking, as Byron Katie would, “is that really true?”

Perhaps the opposite of courage isn’t fear but comfort.

3. Loss of resilience

Mary Beth O’Neill in her terrific book Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart talks about the importance of presence, the ability to retain your sense of self in the midst of ambiguity. And I think that requires resilience, an ability to keep going.

A mentor once said to me that the longer you can hold your breath underwater – swimming through ambiguity – the more interesting a place you tend to pop up.

But sometime my needs for certainty gets in the way, I push to make things real that aren’t, push to pin things down and find the answers (through cunningly directed questions of course – I wouldn’t be so foolish as to appear to give advice.)

Is this Good Work? Or Great Work?

It seems to come down to this question after all. If I say coaching is Great Work for me – work that stretches and inspires, work that has meaning, work that makes a difference – how will I step up the edge of myself and stand in the ambiguity and discomfort of it all, the same discomfort we expect our clients to embrace.

What about you? How do you limit yourself? Or perhaps, if you’re circumspect about publishing what’s in your shadows, let me ask how you manage your way through it?

Thoughts in the comments below…

Michael Bungay Stanier’s new book is Do More Great Work: Stop the busywork and start the work that matters. As well as providing 15 practical, coach-based exercise to find, start and sustain Great Work, it has guest contributions from people such as Seth Godin, Dave Ulrich and Leo Babauta.  The first edition was enthusiastically endorsed by 11 Past Presidents of the ICF. Michael is the Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. He was the 2006 Canadian Coach of the Year and was a Rhodes Scholar.