3 lessons I learned from my coaches
Some people say coaches are like superheroes. I don’t know about that. What I know is that, over the years, I have worked with some amazing coaches who have helped me realize things I never would have discovered on my own.
When I first started working with a coach, I barely had time to listen to myself — between work, parenting, and all the other things I do, there just was no room. Someone else holding space for me to say what I needed to say, and actually listen to it, was remarkable and powerful. It was through this active listening, I heard my own voice.
And so when I say I learned the following from my coaches, what I mean is: they listened it out of me.
1. It's all about me.
The first assignment from one of my coaches was daily journaling for a month. I remember being super diligent about it, writing for the assigned 10 minutes every day, and then spending time to summarize the journal entries on the day before my next session so I could properly present the outcome to the coach.
Looking back, I was treating it as a school assignment I needed to ace. More to the point: I “knew” I was acing it. I did the work as assigned, plus a summary and presentation for extra credit. But the coach never asked to see the homework, and the session was not so much about what I had intellectualized my way to, as about what I had learned about myself in the process.
At the time, it felt singularly frustrating. It felt as if the questions had changed midway through the exam. It felt as if I had been cheated out of my A+.
But over time, the big revelation was that my growth and improvement needed to be driven by my own values and desires, not by others' expectations.
2. Self-awareness is a journey.
We all have a tendency to prefer things in neat packages. Stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Presentations that summarize learning in clear buckets. How-to guides that parse out complicated processes in 10 basic steps. But that’s not how we actually learn, and certainly not how we learn about something as complex and in-motion as our mind-body-soul complex. That kind of learning is iterative and infinite.
This took me time to realize. I expected coaches to give me a clear timeline: this is how long it will take you to get over your imposter syndrome or whatever else I wanted to change. I hear it in my own coaching clients now: how long will this take? When will I be done?
But self-awareness is like yoga: not something you can “win” at. Self-awareness (and yoga) is not about showing off what you already know. It’s about learning what happens when you try. Finding that next layer of self you never even knew existed.
It’s about integrating that not only is it OK to be in that process, being in that process is the goal.
3. Knowing and doing are two different things.
There have been definite moments of clarity in my coaching processes. Aha-moments I still hold as almost absolute north stars for what I know I need to do. And still, I don’t change. Why? Because change is hard. I have recently gotten a lot out of Lahey and Kegan’s Immunity to Change approach, which I think is where I got hold of this nugget of wisdom: everyone wants transformation, but no one wants to change.
We all wish for a quick-fix, diet-pill like approach to transformation: if I journal every day for a month, I’ll magically be transformed, right?
No one will be surprised to learn that the only magic is in ourselves. We need to change in order to transform. And yet, knowing is not nothing. Knowing is the element that helps us start exploring what it is we do to hold ourselves back, and why.
Sometimes coaching is about reaching this knowledge. Sometimes it is about transforming the knowing into actual doing. Either way, it’s all about you, and it’s a journey.
