coaching and facilitation as improvisation
Transcript of this video:
I was talking with a friend this morning about our
experiences of one-to-one coaching.
I found myself reciting a story that I first heard
as a kid many years ago.
It’s one of those sort of brothers Grimm-
style, children’s stories.
And in, in it, a widow sends her son to the market
to buy a donkey.
And he arrives home many, many hours later,
laboriously heaving the donkey in his arms,
in a great sweat.
And she chides him, “Fool
You don’t carry the donkey in your arms.
You should attach a string and lead it home.”
And then the next day she sends him to the market
with instructions to buy a cabbage.
And you are smart people,
you’re probably ahead of me here.
He arrives home later with the brussels-sprout-size remains
of a cabbage on the end of a string,
and she chides him for that.
And there are several iterations of the story,
but I think you get the gist. I mentioned it to her
because I think in facilitation, in coaching and in,
and, you know, any, anything else,
I suspect involving human beings, it’s very easy
to apply a simple formula as if it’s always going to be true
and inadvertently end up pulling on a cabbage on a string.
Now, some of these formulae are often helpful.
So for, for example, many coaches
and facilitators will tell you some version of,
the client or the group already has the answers.
And it’s your not, not your job to try
and do the work for them.
But that’s not always true.
And sometimes in, in a coaching relationship,
if I think I’ve got an answer
and if I think I understand the problem, I’ll suggest it.
And then others, will tell you to not to,
not to bring your own emotional
experience into the conversation.
And in many contexts, that’s wise advice,
but I don’t always follow it.
And I’ve often shared often quite a vulnerable emotional
experience of my own because I’ve sensed
that it will be helpful to the other person.
And I think there’s a slight danger in this notion
of the client having all the resources,
of not actually trusting them to have the intelligence
to perhaps make their own decision about what use or to make
or not make of whatever it is you share with them.
And I think what I’m driving at here is
I think a facilitation
or coaching relationship is a relationship.
And good stuff happens in that space between people.
And if you get too fixated on somehow staying outside
of it, you might be depriving the relationship
of the very thing that makes it work.
Now, I know that social science research has all sorts
of issues of replicability,
but there’s reasonable evidence from the world of therapy
that the key thing in successful therapeutic relationships
isn’t so much the specific technique that the therapist uses
(or if you drill down into the detail of the technique
that they claim to be using). And it’s
actually actually much more to do with
what you might call the shared faith of client
and therapist in each other.
And I think that that would map onto
group work and coaching work.
It’s fundamentally relational.
And I think my approach is really to see it as
a careful improvisation, not in a sort of comic
or performance sense,
but a continuing series of exchanges in which we are
seeing how this relationship will work
and seeing if we can discover things together.
And often seeing if we can keep each other company
in uncertainty without grasping for the easy answers
that any formula
like a cabbage on a string can end up being.
Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash
