You Could Coach Yourself, But Will You?

One of my early coaches used to say to me that his main goal was to show me how to coach myself. I haven't forgotten this inspiring vision, and it has integrated with my thinking to this day. But even though I have learned how to coach myself, without a coach in front of me, there are many thought patterns that I bail out of instead of doing the hard thinking that would require holding my own feet to the fire.

It happened recently, for example, when I was in the shower thinking back to a recent coaching session during which I was happy with the level of coaching skill I brought to the conversation.

You might relate to this by thinking of a recent occasion when you had to perform as a leader - running a meeting, giving a presentation, or answering hard questions.

It went like this:

I thought, "That was a really solid session."

Then I thought, "How can I more consistently perform at that level?" I wanted to capture some of the techniques so I could more consciously carry them forward into other sessions.

So I asked myself the next natural coaching question, "What made it a good session?"

And then . . . it was like the screen went blank on the television. A big void of thinking ensued. I suppose a neurologist would tell me that that brain circuitry didn't exist yet and I clearly wasn't up for laying down some new neural networks during my relaxing shower.

But, if I had been asked that question by a coach in a live conversation, I would have been accountable to doing the new thinking that I was too lazy to do in the shower. And then the new neural networks would have started to get established. 

My coach would have waited patiently while I hemmed and hawed about my answer to what made it a particularly good session. I would have stumbled over my thinking and bumbled around in a stream of consciousness way, just like one would expect when exploring new territory.

Then my coach would have reflected what she heard in a neater, more organized way and the new fledgling brain circuitry would have lit up and said, "Yes, that's it!"

So in one sense it's funny how, even though as a coach I know the good coaching questions to ask myself, without a coach I don't always succeed in answering them.

Then again, as I tell my leadership coaching clients, there is power in sitting with a question for a while too. So I'll do that for now - until the next session with my coach.