Being your own coach

How can I be my own coach?

This is the desire of many of my clients once they pass the threshold of belief that coaching is only for the weak or the insecure, and once they see the extensive benefit received throughout all sectors of their life. 

Suddenly, for them a new door of awareness opened, and they realise how better off their spouse, their adolescent or adult children would be if they would also have access or exposure to it. For not mentioning they realise they can even more accelerate their positive impact in their organisation, by adopting a more flexible management style with a strong coaching component.

Hence my blog article of today.

Self-coaching is when you cultivate your own personal development by accessing your inner wisdom.

If you wonder what exactly personal development means, I wrote another blog article here.

Wisdom is often a word that produces the rise of an eyebrow in our society. We learnt about intelligence, smarts, wits, abilities, skills, knowledge, courage, leadership and so on, and so on. 

With so many stories and movies influencing our understanding and perception of the world, we attribute wisdom almost exclusively to older people - belonging most probably to our family or to a very few outstanding people in our society. Somehow, we are even more inclined to attribute it to fictional heroes than to real people. 

We also shyly exclude ourselves from the set of people whom we grant with wisdom as if, as of today, “we are not enough” and “something is still missing in us” to really BE WISE.

The question then is:

Can anyone cultivate anything when they believe the seed or foundation is missing or, somehow, is incomplete?

And because of that, we are unsure or lack confidence about whether we have everything within us to apply self-coaching.

Another definition for self coaching I found often cited is “the process of self-guiding our growth and development, particularly through periods of transition, in both the professional and personal realms.” (Batista, 2013)

I appreciate this definition underlines when it is mostly useful for us to apply this self-coaching: in periods of transition, irrespective whether it is about personal life or professional life. You can find here more about transitions and change, and the positive role coaching has in this.

At a first glance this definition sounds very logical. Simple and easy. But is it?

Imagine you are transitioning in your first senior executive position and, as a new director in your organisation, you participate in your first organisational budgeting exercise and should influence your CEO about next year’s budget.

And, it seems to you that your CEO - who was your fervent supporter in your new role nomination - suddenly becomes your “adversary” in the first internal senior management meeting on the next year’s budget. You see your CEO asking you more information about your proposal and being reluctant to include it in the next year's budget. You also have seen the faces of the other senior managers, neither having a clue or even not understanding what you were presenting. 

You feel pressured to give up advancing your proposal, even knowing that your suggestion has a strong value added for the organisation overall and many of the organisational stakeholders. And this frustrates you and makes you feel angry your CEO do not see that value, furious for the ignorance of the other senior managers, anxious for not being able to advance in the next year’s budget a project your team is expecting and you managed to make them enthusiastic about, frustrated about “you looking stupid in that meeting”. And suddenly, you decide to not talk anymore and to let them do “whatever they want”.

In the “heat” of THAT moment, will you be prepared, ready and open to coach yourself?

What I am saying is that you need to learn to “fight” during peace times to be ready to apply it when challenges appear at your horizont. Therefore, any moment of your peaceful life is as good as any other for you to start practising self-coaching.

Self-coaching will not be just another method, it will be a new way for you to live your life.

Why new? Because there will be several things you will need to pay attention to and execute differently.

What do you need to pay attention to?

You need to pay attention to WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO and make informed  adjustments with this information.

Self-coaching covers your whole self and all areas of your life. If things are good in one area, that’s great, but if you are dissatisfied or unfulfilled in another area, this should be your focus — especially because it can impact the other aspects of your life.

There is a tendency when things are good to or for us, to believe this is NORMAL and, because of that, to have no trigger to remind us to pay attention. We enjoy those moments and let them go without learning much out of them. Of course this is a generalisation, because you still learn something out of these moments, but chances are good lessons have been lost for not paying enough attention to the circumstances that allowed for things to be good.

At the opposite end, when things go BAD for us, we start to notice them better. And to emotionally “survive” those moments we rationalise our circumstances, and label them as being “bad”.

Let’s assume in the example above, the (neutral) circumstances are the following:

You are presenting for the first time your project idea, and it is for the first time such an idea is presented in your company. You documented this project idea alone, and no one in the senior management team has knowledge about it or had a say in it. In fact, your project is about implementing a new technology, hard to be understood by either the CEO and the other senior managers for objective lack of professional background. The rest of the senior management team is not as technology conversant as you are. This technology promises a significant economy to the company annual expenses, however it also requires a significant shift in how the company operates, raising therefore important operational risks. In consequence, the CEO asked you to have a separate cross functional discussion with other directors impacted, and to generate the project charter. And for not impacting the normal budgeting process, your CEO asks for this initiative to be treated as a separate project from the budget, maintaining the openness to consider it in accordance with its total impact over the estimated annual profitability.

For the neutral reader, the circumstances - as they are presented - are neither good nor bad. The circumstances just ARE there. 

It is only the way our new senior manager integrated these circumstances that gave them the flavour of “bad”. 

And because our manager perceived them as being bad or negative, he also judged the situation and the people involved (including himself) and, to emotionally survive the situation, he also put a final verdict “I will do whatever they want!”

Now, can you see where the attention of our new senior manager sat all along this episode?

Here there are several possible answers:

• What would the CEO think of him if, in the end, the project will be rejected?
• What sense does it make to bring more data to people that do not understand it from the first round?
• What did the other senior managers think about him?
• What will his team think about him, if he does not have this win?
• How good will he be as a director if he cannot convince anyone?
• What if the other managers will resist his idea?
• When will he have time to do all that new work he was asked to do?
• How is going to place this topic in the agenda of the other directors given they do not see it as a priority?
• How stupid was of him to go and propose something!
• Why should he be the one documenting and making the calculations given he will have just to purchase, implement and maintain in operation the technology and not to produce with it.

You get the idea. His attention (i.e. awareness) stood mostly on worrying about things that will happen or might happen to him in the future or things already happened in the past, about how others think, react, judge, and on his perceptions. 

What could he put his focus on differently? 

Here there are several examples of how he could have chosen differently. For example, he could have:

• Make decisions on observations and not on judgements or perceptions
• Grow awareness that he is using perceptions as facts (i.e. as the absolute truth) instead of observations.
• Acknowledge his own emotions, and accepted them.
• Understand how each of these emotions were pushing him to look into a wrong place, draw wrong conclusions and, ultimately, take wrong decisions.
• Let himself informed about his own way of reaction and understand what benefit he hoped to get out of it
• Check the assumptions he made about circumstances in relation to the result he obtained
• Visualise himself in the next meeting and play with different ways of engaging himself with the rest of senior managers
• Review what actually went well in the interaction, make conscious note of it and visualise ways to recycle it
• Identify how he can reformulate the idea of personal success and find a new way to measure it

Self-coaching requires a lot of awareness in the moment, letting ourselves be informed by that awareness and, instead of acting on an automatic response, choosing to close the loop differently, with a different type of action than usual.

So, what self-coaching would mean for you? 

1. Observe how circumstances triggered your thoughts.
2. Remind yourself that circumstances are neither bad nor good, they just are. Remind also that, with extremely few exceptions, it is YOU imprinting this flavour on them, and you end up believing it.
3. Observe the narrative (your thoughts) in your head. 
4. Observe the emotions this narrative triggers in you.
5. Observe the reactions this narrative pushes you to.
6. Assess whether the results of these actions are aligned with your objectives.
7. Examine the evidence you have and check the validity of your thoughts, assumptions and beliefs
8. Neutralise the narrative about circumstances.
9. Observe your new narrative about neutralised circumstances.
10. Observe how this new narrative leads to new emotions, perhaps in the positive spectrum (e.g. joy, happiness, curiosity, gratitude, pride).
11. Observe / Visualise / imagine your new reaction produced by this new set of emotions.
12. Visualise / Imagine what impact your chosen action or new way of action will produce when circumstances will be similar
13. Imagine the new results you get and assess how aligned are this time with your objectives

Learning about how we tend to think and react to those life circumstances we perceive as being challenging, understanding how we induce ourselves these emotions, what maintains them in place (thoughts, narrative, judgement) and how we are prone to react when they are in charge, and making appropriate shifts to serve us in long term is how we grow our wisdom. 

As you may realise, there is no limit one can grow their wisdom, however not actively doing it one leaves their life at chance.

I remember the first time when I realised how complex this cycle is, I felt overwhelmed. And I remember telling myself that in ages I will not be able to pass the first two items. And I was so frustrated.

And then, I remember how in the middle of my frustration a thought hit me: this is exactly one of those moments when I need to exercise and grow my awareness and allow myself to go through the whole loop. Bang! That was it!

Do you remember your first driving lesson? How overwhelmed were you when you got out of the car? 

Remember your journey of learning to drive? You had to be aware, make sense of the knowledge, intuition, reflexes, circumstances outside the car, circumstances in the car, circumstances linked to the car, your own reactions, your own emotions, your own perceptions etc in individual decisions you took second after second.

And who did you grow into while mastering this complex exercise: one month after you took your driving licence, 6 months after, 3 years after, and who you are today when it comes to driving a car?

I am sure now you are able to blend everything smoothly and you make relaxed decisions, fluently and with ease, even in the riskier situations.

If you could grow yourself into driving a car, you can also grow yourself into driving your growth!

I am here to guide your accelerated growth. So, why not book your discovery session? You can use a coaching program to accelerate the development of your skill of self-coaching.