0026 - 01OCT2013 - "So, what’s a coach, anyway?"

A few weeks ago a friend and I spent some quality time together; went out for dinner; went for a ride; got lots of time to talk. So we talked about many things and one of them was the situation of going back to work after ‘retirement’. Some people see it as a source of embarrassment since the inference is that they are not able to make ends meet; that they did not plan well; a feeling of inadequacy. Other folks see it as he saw it, a very positive event and a great opportunity; his point was (and is one I’ve advocated for years) that many of us – throughout our ‘productive’ years - have accumulated an immense amount of knowledge, experiences, and tricks-of-the-trade which are not taught in any school, at any level; that intellectual capital sits idle and unproductive (going to waste) as we are now retired; nobody is benefiting from all that wealth of wisdom. As an example, he cited himself as a business man, cited others on their known professions, and cited me as an IT guy… Many other folks would have taken offense at being referred to as an IT Guy; “Hey” they would have said, “I went to six years of school for - and became - a Licensed Computer Scientist, a Specialist in Cybernetics & Informatics, and a Systems Engineer, and you are referring to me as an IT Guy?” and they would have stomped out of the place all offended and in a huff. But that was not the case and that was not the point; the point was that I would have loved to be known as a coach, which is my passion and something that I am experienced in and trained on, instead of being known as an ‘IT Guy’, my old profession; and so I let him know… As the conversation progressed on to several other topics, he gathered the courage to ask me, “So, what’s a coach, anyway”?

I gave a good account of myself when it came to define that the type of coach that I was talking about was not the stereotypical sports or any other skills coaches (teach and drill is their model); the coaching that I practiced was oriented towards guiding and helping individuals find healthy ways to face and deal with their perceived or real shortcomings, self-defeating attitudes, and other factors that are on the way of fulfilling their full potential and producing their best, whatever that best might be. “Are you a shrink?” he asked; “No”, I replied, “Psychologists deal with the clinical areas of perception, attention, emotion, motivation, brain functioning, behavior and interpersinal relationships.” “Coaching is like – voluntarily - peeling the onion and understanding there is debris between the layers that may be getting in the way of it being a perfect onion; you get rid of nothing (that would be a job for the shrink); instead, you understand all that is there, value it for what it is – and what it is not, and move on accordingly.” I could see on his face that the whole subject was still obscure, confusing to him and that I had not really answered his question; so I proceeded to try to illustrate the whole concept with an example, oversimplifying the process and the details, and keeping the protagonists anonymous, as the code of ethics demands…

This is the case of a man who grew up in an environment in which knowledge was the most appreciated ‘currency’; there used to be a saying around his home about “Your knowledge, and not your holdings, is your worth”. So, from youth, he was a very avid knowledge acquirer. He read every book he got his hands on; if there were no new books available that he hadn’t read twice, he would read the dictionary end to end. Over the years this attitude persisted and by middle age, he was a walking throve of trivia. There is an axiom that says ‘an overused virtue becomes a liability’ and that was the case with this fellow; he was always eager to share his knowledge and to have answers for everything. At the beginning it all was well and everybody around him praised him for his knowledge and the contributions he made; however, as time went on, he started to be perceived as a ‘know-it-all’; he was still admired by all, but his contributions were not too well received any more. In the role he was expected to play he could not afford to be exiled from the rest of people and teams, so he realized he had a problem that needed resolution; and he did not know how! Through friends and acquaintances he heard about coaching and what it could do, and sought some help from a coach… After several sessions of conversations and information gathering the coach guided the man to come to the realization that his issue was not his needing to show his worth (knowledge); instead his issue was one of fear of obsolescence and irrelevance. The fellow feared to become irrelevant, of not making a difference. The coach helped him find ways to add value to people and situations by just playing his role as a leader and as a friend, and stop using his knowledge as the only tool in his bag. Instead, he tried (successfully) to stop volunteering answers when the question was not even asked; he learned how to either guide people to the answers or wait for the question to be asked; he learned to realize that if the question was not asked, it was not relevant to the situation… That made his job and relationships with others quite more normal and pleasant.

“Does that make sense?” I asked… “Yes, it does…” my friend replied. “Would coaching like that be of any value to you?” I asked… “No; I have no issues…” he replied. And I thought to myself “Right!”