What should a coach know?

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Deep and Narrow or Broad and Shallow? Let’s try for broad and deep! – where we can add value.

I’m delighted to have passed my written assignment and achieved the “Primary Certificate in Psychodynamic Theory and Practice”. Many thanks to fabulous Course Leader Kate Williams and the Temenos team.

As a coach, I’ve always thought it’s important for my clients that I maintain a solid regime of learning – cognitive, emotional, somatic, embodied, transpersonal, spiritual learning. It’s a hard slog over several decades, but worth it!

So…should a coach be deep and narrow? Or broad and shallow? Ot the best of both, as far as posible?

They always say a PhD means you know everything about very little. And ‘broad but shallow’ means you are “Jack of all Trades and Master of None” (and it can trigger the Dunning-Kruger effect of thinking you know more than you do!).

And then there is the issue of engaging in non-directive, self-reflective techniques. Executive Coaching often uses this, to a point. Is it better that the coach knows nothing or little of the client’s agenda, to keep the interaction ‘clean’ from their own biases, and to promote the wisdom of the client’s own semi-awareness and bring it to the fore?

So what SHOULD a coach know? Maybe nothing of the client’s technical knowledge – the coach isn’t there to compete in this area, but maybe to help the application of that expertise to hit the road effectively through relationships and communication.

But a coach should know a LOT about the coaching process and how it might work well or not. While the client may lead the presenting conversation mostly, the coach manages the meta-conversation – the helicopter view of where we are in the conversation; where we are relative to the client’s stated goals; where we are relative to a longer programme of overall purpose of the coaching programme; when best to speak and not speak; how to manage time in the session, relative to the client’s emerging energy and directions; reading body language and emotional content; looking out for ethical bear-traps; noticing what it not being said; linking the intrapersonal to the interpersonal, to the managerial to the organisational to the wider social, physical environment and strategic future; understanding one’s own unusual feelings as a coach and what that might mean that can be played back to the client; how goalsetting works and what gets in the way of behaviour change; holding the client to self-account; when to support and when to challenge, etc etc.

The coach does actually need to know a lot – and be skilled at managing and delivering all this in context. And I think they do need to know themselves quite deeply.

So I believe in coach education going broad enough first, to understand the landscape we may be inhabiting when trying to help others, and then deep enough within the landscape of process management to be a net benefit and not a danger. This is what the coach accredition schools do in their basic training offers.

And then a coach can become a deep expert in some areas of process (eg consellations, systems, psychodynamics, parallel process) that can be of help, while being careful not to replace the client’s own knowledge and journey (the content).

These strands of deep coaching ability then combine factorially as they interact. As we synthesise the elements of knowledge and experience, we synergise and integrate them into a more profound and valuable ability for the client and theor needs, and their system’s needs.

But then a humility check – even then you “Can’t please all the people all the time”! Occasionally the rapport isn’t there (this may be due to various psychodynamic processes that need to be respected); or I may judge that the client and I are too alike and at risk of groupthink (though I think I’m pretty good at learning and appreciating views different to mine and hence can play Devil’s advocate and oppose my own biases pretty well!). Some people will oppose your efforts no matter what, sometimes driven by other systems out of our inflience. That’s a fact of life too, that has to be recognised in a coaching career.

But better to transcend the dilemma of ‘broad’ or ‘deep’ and try to become a multi-specialist, if we want to really coach well.

Being a multi-specialist also means that we can shift more easily from Coach to Consultant. Clearly in consulting it’s OK to have an expertise and a view. That’s what the client often wants. So we can do that too, while managing the clarity and positioning of our role over the client engagement. But then for Coaching, we need to know what expertise we have that we should leave outside the room.

One vital point on learning – it’s hard and insufficient to learn alone. We are subject to our own blind spots and biases. So we need to find great mentors, coaches, facilitators, trainers to learn from and observe. To ‘keep us honest’ on our journey. Somehow I’ve been monumentally blessed with fantastic mentors in many areas. I studied table tennis in the same training halls with European Top 12 Champion Desmond Douglas and Jill Hammersley-Parker over many years; I played alongside Matthew Syed in our British League Championship side years before he became famous and wrote Bounce etc; I had fantastic philosophers teach me how to develop coaches from the age of just 20 years; I had Baroness Sue Campbell, Richard Young, Rosie Mayes, Sir John Whitmore, Tim Gallwey to sit with for hours and exchange ideas; Peter Hawkins, Robin Shohet, Judy Ryde, Nick Smith, Gil Schwenk trained me in Coaching and Consulting Supervision; David Clutterbuck et al taught me Executive Team Coaching; Gregg Hunt taught me Mediation skills; Eve Turner and all took me through scores of short courses on everything from Neuroscience to Critical Theory to Family Loyalty effects; Glenn Doman and Matthew Newell taught me Child Brain Development; I gained psychometric qualifications in many personality tools; I was taught hot-air ballooning by geniuses Chris Kirby and Robin Batchelor (the guy who taught Richard Branson to fly the Atlantic in a balloon); the brilliant Noreen Tehrani and David Lane taught me psychotraumatology – and many, many others. I am so grateful to you all. And to the clients who are brilliant in many fields, or overcome so much, that I learn so much from.

Now I hope to use more psychodynamics when appropriate, to help clients progress.

Let’s keep learning the “right next thing”!

Onwards!

Colin

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