How Do You Feel About That?

From chapter 1 of Becoming a Life Coach: A Complete Workbook for Therapists by David Skibbins, Ph.D., CPCC

CONTRASTING THERAPY & COACHING: DIFFERENT LEVELS OF AUTHORITY

1. Where in the following continuum do you place your work as a psychotherapist?
Usually clearly direct the client.________________________
Usually consult with the client._________________________
Usually let the client direct the work.____________________

2. Where in the following continuum do you imagine placing your work as a coach?
Usually clearly direct the client.________________________
Usually consult with the client._________________________
Usually let the client direct the work.____________________

Some elements are common to all three of these approaches; for example, goal setting and accountability. One key practical difference, however, is that as coaching shifts from authoritarian to egalitarian, more self-management is needed on the part of the coach. Self-management in this case means restraining yourself from telling the client what to do and not sharing all the insights, assessments, or interpretations you may have.

It’s fairly easy to know all the answers and tell the client what to do. Working as a consultant with your client requires more flexibility—and therefore more self-management. You’re suggesting rather than telling. But to give up the role of expert completely, to see the source of all expertise as in the client, requires a great deal of self-management and trust. Most of us in the helping professions are quite attached to our identifi cation as expert helpers and are reluctant to give that up, even in the service of empowering our clients. It can be hard to discard your brilliance.

At first glance it may appear that the coach-as-consultant role is the best fit for a therapist looking to become a coach. After all, as therapists we have years of training in human communications, systems theory, psychodynamics, and behavioral change. We are preeminent experts in these areas. It would be a shame to give up all that hard-won expertise. However, I suggest you do precisely that. You need to give up your authority as an expert in psychology.Here are two reasons why:

Experts Can’t Be Trusted
Many mentally healthy clients distrust therapists. And not unreasonably—all our training in psychology has warped our point of view. We are experts in the assessment and treatment of psychopathology. And so we tend to see it everywhere: everyone is neurotic, corporations are dysfunctional, the government is addicted to power and control. Most people are mentally healthy. Until you wrap your mind around that fact you’ll be re-creating your clinical practice wherever you go. You’ll be unconsciously disempowering your clients by
finding problems they need to solve. They’ll sense that you don’t completely trust them, that you regard them as patients. You may get compliance or you may get rebellion—both of which are expressions of dissatisfaction

The Wrong Tool for the Job
It’s inappropriate to apply a therapeutic perspective to most real-life situations, especially work settings. Therapeutic perspectives are well-honed tools that are invaluable in assisting dysfunctional clients to become functional, but they are simply inadequate for addressing the dynamics of already functional environments. Of course, this hasn’t stopped psychodynamic and psychologically based systems theorists from analyzing the workplace. Indeed, these ideas have been elegantly applied to the workplace for years—with no apparent impact on work environments whatsoever. Pointing out the narcissistic qualities of leadership, analyzing top-down communication fl ow patterns, and discoursing on parentifi ed employer-employee relationships have all fallen on deaf ears. Having twenty-three names for snow doesn’t help you much in a jungle—and all that accurate clinical terminology doesn’t translate very well to corporate America. That’s because people at work have work to do and don’t have time for psychological mumbo jumbo. It’s simply the wrong tool for the job.

Functioning companies are intelligent, responsive, complex living systems. To superimpose a paradigm that evolved out of personal, psychological clinical work onto the richness of the minute-to-minute challenges and choices that face a growing corporate entity is absurd. The concepts of an outside expert—especially a clinically trained one—are going to have very little impact on that environment.

The Special Bonus of Therapy: We Know How to Control Ourselves
Therapists are particularly well suited to an egalitarian approach because of our training in self-management. The intensive interpersonal training we’ve gone through also serves to make us outstanding empowerment coaches. We’ve already learned how to moderate our responses in the service of the client’s needs. Other coaches-in-training also have to struggle with selfidentification as a helper and the habit of giving advice, but few of them have gone through the deep, insight-oriented inner work required of a psychotherapist. Thanks to our training as therapists, when we realize the negative impact controlling behavior can have on a client, we can modify our responses to better coach our clients. Once therapists stop trying to sneak therapy into coaching, therapists become outstanding empowerment coaches—primarily because of our self-awareness and our self-management abilities.

GIVING UP AUTHORITY
However, just reading a few paragraphs about authority may not be enough to persuade you to give up years of feeling in charge. So let’s see exactly what’s at stake here:
What do I enjoy the most about feeling competent and in control as a therapist?
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
Where else in my life do I think I need to be the one in charge?
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
What might I get from letting go of my authority role when I coach?
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________

Now that you understand how different coaching is from therapy—and why it should be—here’s an exercise to help you fully step into this new perspective:

A NEW PAIR OF GLASSES: WORKING WITH MENTALLY HEALTHY CLIENTS
(You can do this exercise in your imagination, but I recommend that you actually go to a drugstore and buy a pair of rose-tinted sunglasses and use them for a day.)

Imagine you have a pair of magical eyeglasses. When you put them on, you see everything and everyone as whole, perfect, radiant, and healthy exactly as they are. If they’re in pain, it’s a pain that teaches them important and necessary lessons, lessons they could learn no other way. If they’re dissatisfied, it’s a dissatisfaction that will eventually lead to growth. With these glasses on, you see nothing that you need to fix, help, correct, or make better. Now imagine looking into a mirror. With the glasses on you see that you, too, are whole, perfect, radiant, and healthy exactly as you are. Nothing to change or improve. Exactly where you need to be. These are the glasses you wear as a coach who empowers clients.

So let’s get back to the question that opened this chapter: what is coaching? In a nutshell,coaching is a profession that assists mentally healthy people to achieve their personal and career goals.

How Do You Feel About That?