Personal Change — A Secret History

Before my coach training, a few years ago, I had spent most of my career in management consulting. Naively, I thought I already knew a good deal about reading people, listening to them, and supporting them. I couldn’t have been more wrong. After my first coaching practice session I was in a state of shock. My notes at the end of the day read:

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“I’m much too afraid of silences. I just want to get the details of the problem, solve it in my head, and then ‘tell them’ the answer. I’m even a little fearful of getting them to explain it”

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My career-long tendency to ‘tell’ rather than ‘ask’ had to be beaten out of me over the course of the year-long training and coaching practice that followed. But I was on the path — I was moving from ‘unconscious incompetence’ to ‘conscious incompetence’, and would eventually reach the heady heights of ‘conscious competence’ as Maslow’s Learning Curve has it.

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The enduring value of my coaching training — and actually of coaching itself —went beyond simply providing the coaching ‘content’ and a safe space to talk. It gave me a profound, and quite disturbing insight into my own behaviour, and the beliefs and values that drove it.

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In coaching we call this simply ‘raising self-awareness’. Quite a gentle term for what can be a deeply uncomfortable and emotionally challenging process.

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And this ‘discomfort’ is the engine that drives real progress in coaching. It’s why coaching achieves something few, or no, other workplace interactions can: enduring personal change.

Personal change is the holy grail of coaching — individuals changing their assumptions, their beliefs, and ultimately their behaviour in order to help them better achieve their goals.

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Organisations talk about change all the time. They are always re-organising, reforming. They want to be seen to ‘embrace change’, claiming variously to have become ‘agile’, ‘flat’ or ‘virtual’.

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But at the personal level, another game is going on. A struggle to recognise, and start to deal with, the consequences of real self-awareness. One recent HBR study found that only 10–15% of people meet the definition of self-aware, even though the majority of us like to think we are just that.

I think this paradox can be seen in many organisation’s 360 degree feedback programmes. They have become increasingly difficult to administer. Numerous articles recount the failure of 360 programmes. One of my clients has, this year, decided to remove all the commentary from their 360 reports, owing to some members of staff seen as exercising vendettas in their feedback.

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When it’s done poorly, 360 programs create mistrust, anger, conflict and can leave a team with lower morale than when you started the exercise. (Forbes)

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Amongst the many reasons for these failures, one core one is simply that development feedback — “what can I do better?” — is often painful to listen to, and to process.

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We’re ‘wired’ to avoid or minimise painful experiences, so we ignore the feedback, or we dismiss it as unrepresentative, or become defensive. So this inner game of ‘wilful ignorance’ produces some real challenges for the individual, for the organisation, and for the coach.

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Individuals are not aware that they need to change, nor what. They are stuck. They might conclude that they don’t need to change at all, it’s the people, and the systems, around them that’s the problem.

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But put simply, as Taylor says, “it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me” (Taylor Swift, Antihero)

This issue is not new. Johari’s window, a model of self-awareness in relationships, was developed by Luft and Ingham in 1955. They observed that we all have an ‘arena’ which contains elements of our psersonalities that are out in the open, and we have a ‘mask’ which is what we deliberately keep hidden. But what can hold us back is the ‘blind spot’ — traits that others perceive about us, but that we can’t see, and the ‘unconscious’ the undiscovered areas of personality.

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I’m going to let you into a (coaching) trade secret here. Clients with major blind spots present a real coaching dilemma. If coaches are too ‘soft’ on them, and allow them to avoid self-awareness the sessions become a mere talking shop, with little real change. But if we push them too ‘hard’ we risk losing their trust by scolding them, and making them feel shame.

One of my earliest coaching clients lacked self-awareness. He was a very capable, and immensely tough senior executive in a particularly cut-throat industry. He said he needed to get coaching on his transition to a new role as a business unit-head. But in our first two sessions, he closed down any discussion on development topics —such as improving his management style, his communication, his time management — claiming that he was already doing these successfully in his current role. He was a typical ‘be strong’ type, and couldn’t really see any need to change. He had a habit in our sessions of blaming his challenges and frustrations on the organisation and management.

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By our third session I suggested we reflect on where we were going. We both agreed that the sessions were turning into a ‘nice chat’ but not much more. He had mentioned that he had a strained relationship with his chief executive and, as a sort of ‘last ditch attempt’ I suggested we role-play three perceptual positions: from his perspective, from his chief executive’s and from an imaginary observer.

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When he reflected on his and his CEO’s meetings, as an outside observer, he became very downcast. He reflected that his conversations with his CEO were shallow, and not meaningful or truly honest. He suddenly became much more emotionally frank. Choked with tears, he reflected that he “just wasn’t happy” but wasn’t able to say so to his CEO. He shared that he had felt this way for a while, but had supposed the best policy was to keep it bottled up, and this was “exhausting”. He admitted he had been avoiding honesty in coaching as it triggered these emotions, and he had preferred to “keep them in a box”.

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After this exercise his attitude to me and the coaching was transformed. He became much more open and communicative and much easier to connect to on an emotional level. He reflected that this had also changed his relationships at work where he felt more able to express his hopes and fears to his immediate colleagues.

What to do about it? In coaching we really care about the journey into self discovery, and self-awareness, because we have observed that this is the catalyst for personal change.

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But as we can see, this is not easy. Many of us have kept functioning very successfully whilst keeping true self-awareness ‘in a box’. It takes a great deal of trust-building before our coaching clients will ‘go there’.

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However every little step is positive, and that is why coaching’s unique personal, confidential ‘trust bubble’ provides one of the rare places where progress can be made. This progress follows three steps:

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1. Awareness. As we invest in understanding ourselves better, our first Johari quadrant grows…through feedback. We do recommend getting feedback, but not in the anonymous 360 ‘all staff’ programmes of old, but in a much more personalised process.

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2. Openness. Secondly, we encourage clients to experiment with greater self-disclosure. It’s an archetype — the British stiff upper-lip — but I still find it remarkably alive and well in some executives. This reserve isn’t arrogance, as many assume, it’s self protection. It’s psychological safety. So I encourage clients to open up, by making coaching a non-judgemental space.

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3. Self-discovery. Finally, we help clients through their self-discovery by developing ways of tapping into their core beliefs. Together we find out what really drives them, what matters to them, and how they can link their day-to-day job with their dream

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All of this takes courage, and real commitment. But boy, is it ever worth it.