What a Master's in Coaching Taught Me About the Skills You Already Have.

I was asked to speak at the Independent Theatre Council (ITC) recently, to a room of people from right across the arts. Different organisations and disciplines, all of them responsible for other people in one way or another.

They hadn't asked me to talk about the arts. I'd have been the wrong person, I chair Zest Theatre, and I'll happily tell you I know a great deal more about people than I do about the business of putting on a show.

What they'd asked me for was the skills. How do you have a conversation that gets the best out of somebody.

And it was one of those sessions where you watch the room lean in, because almost nobody there had ever been taught this. Not one of them had been given the actual mechanics of how you talk to a person so that they come out of the conversation clearer and more able than they went in.

Which is not a criticism of anyone in that room. It's just how it goes. You don't get naturally taught this stuff. It’s common for leaders to be good at what they do, so they end up being promoted and managing others responsible for people doing it - it’s rare within that promotion that anybody sits you down and teach you how to have a conversation that helps other people do what they do as their best.

I had the raw material and no idea

In my early twenties I was headhunted by Dale Carnegie International. I remember being genuinely baffled. As far as I could see I hadn't done anything clever. I'd just been talking to people the way I'd always talked to people.

They'd spotted a set of attributes I had no words for. I wasn't coaching, as far as I knew. I was just genuinely interested in other people, enjoyed listening and enjoyed within that conversation holding people up to be their best.

Years later, in one of the first sessions of my MSc, a tutor told me he'd never seen somebody arrive already doing what they were there to be trained in. Lovely thing to hear. Also slightly disorientating, because my honest reaction was…doing what?

That's the gap I want to talk about. You can hold a real ability for twenty years and not be able to name a single part of it. And that’s tricky because what you can't name, you can't then choose to do intentionally. You can't repeat it on purpose, you can't teach it to anybody else, and you absolutely can’t reach for it on a difficult morning when you need it most.

So what did the master's actually give me? 

Three things. I still use all of them most weeks.

The discipline of being non-directive.

Not the instinct. I had that. The discipline. There's an enormous difference between naturally not telling people what to do, and knowing how to hold a conversation that opens things up so somebody can genuinely become aware of what they are thinking. Playing back what they're saying and thinking and feeling. What's going on, and how they feel about that. With none of your opinion or bias in there.

A conversation model.

Most people arrive at a conversation knowing exactly what they don't want. The skill is helping them travel from there to what they want instead, without you supplying a single piece of advice guidance or help along the way. Having a roadmap for that conversation means you can take someone from stuck to better, to moving, in their thoughts, their feelings, and in what they actually go and do, without ever grabbing the wheel or putting petrol in the tank.

Being the lamplighter and the wayfinder.

Walking shoulder to shoulder, not a step ahead. The positive, movement-orientated person in the room whose job is to help them find their own way through whatever it is.

And the thing I had to unlearn 

My own thoughts.

I’ll never forget the class where we pulled this apart. It’s completely natural to have opinions about what somebody is telling you. We all do it. Somebody describes a situation and within seconds there's a little voice going ‘Oh, I relate to that’ or ‘I know what to do’.

That voice isn’t coaching. Even a thought about what they're saying, not spoken, just held in your mind, changes how you listen. It bends the next thing you say. It puts your fingerprints in their thinking.

I came out of that session having had the way I approach conversations rearranged permanently. Not just at work. Everywhere. It was a game changer for me and for the people I was managing at the time.

Why this matters if you're responsible for people 

This is the part I most wanted that room to take away, and it travels well beyond the arts.

If you're directive by default, you're running on two beliefs. The first is that your way is right, and fair enough, it might well be...

The second one is where it comes undone. You're also assuming they have the same capabilities you have to do that thing in the way you can do it.

They never can. Not because they're less able than you. Because they're not you. Different strengths, wiring, and routes to a good answer. Hand somebody your method and the very best outcome available is a slightly lesser version of you.

Which means that fairly often, the thing getting in the way of your people performing is you.

I say that with enormous affection and zero judgement, because I have watched some genuinely excellent people become the bottleneck in their own team purely by being ‘helpful’. The alternative isn't standing back and leaving everyone to it. It's finding a way to be ‘skillfully helpful – to unlock their brain using the power and resources that's within them.

If you've got the instinct already

Then you're holding something valuable, and I'd say three things to you.

Work out how you do what you do. Watch yourself in the conversations that land well and notice what you actually said or did. You have a method in there, even if nobody taught it to you.

Break it down. Name the parts.  Capture the strategy. The moment a thing has a name you can choose it deliberately, instead of hoping it turns up.

Then get properly good at it. Because a natural ability you've examined and practised is a completely different instrument from one you've simply been lucky enough to own.

Becoming aware of mine and knowing how i do me was the most affirming and outcomes enhancing thing I've ever done professionally. 

If you’d like me to be a speaker for your event or your curious about coaching or even exploring and capturing how you do you at your best, then get in touch – I'd love to help.