How a burning desire to help gets in the way of my coaching practice

When I am coaching or facilitating, my desire to help clients see their blind spots, and find completion is immense. How I long for them to find their wholeness, their inner freedom, so that they can connect with their ease and greatness.

I can see their limiting behaviour patterns so clearly.

For example:
Poonam is so intent on being the good employee, the good daughter-in-law, the good wife, that she is feeling squeezed, claustrophobic. In the 2nd or 3rd coaching session, the tears don’t stop as she acknowledges the automation of her life, she is running on a program set by others. In the process, a part of her soul has been lost, and the grief is about the loss, the stuckness. Part of her journey is about setting boundaries.

Rukmini is struggling to learn to garner support at work. To protect herself, her learnt behaviour is that of judging others. She doesn’t realize she comes across as arrogant and she has to learn humility and collaboration.

Sanjay is avoiding the human encounter—which requires him to have difficult conversations with his vendors, subordinates and superiors. In being reasonable, polite and soft, he is avoiding his task as a leader- to communicate consequences of behaviours and deliverables not aligned with organization.

But this longing to help becomes the biggest hindrance to becoming an effective coach.

Because in coaching, and as in life, to imagine that I am to ‘reach somewhere’ or to ‘lead the other somewhere’ is the biggest fallacy.

Bruce Lee in his book, ‘The Tao of Jeet Kune Do’, states that his style of fighting, called Jeet Kune Do, requires both the study of martial arts techniques and the development of spirituality.

And the engagement requires three principles to be kept in mind:

1. Stop anticipating the outcome of the fight
2. Forgetting about all that is known by knowledge
3. Flow freely in the present, the here and now; and discard any past memories and future expectations .

I find that in a good coach or facilitator, exactly the same principles are valid.

1. Stop anticipating the outcome of the coaching conversation

Bruce Lee constantly asserted that one of the biggest mistakes a fighter can make is to anticipate the outcome of the fight:
“Do not think about winning or losing, do not think about pride and pain. (…)You should not think about whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your weapons will be used at the right time.”

My psychodrama teacher Dr Jochen Becker-Ebel has always said, the coach (or trainer) has to empty herself in the process of facilitation. If the interaction becomes fraught with coach’s anxiety about proving her brilliance, or demonstrating her ability to bring up startling insights, or about end-results, the session is about the coach , and not the coachee.

While the coach has to be fully present to the minutest of signals and responses from the coachee, which become the cues for the conversation to move forward, and she has to be constantly training to sharpen her skills, but in the session itself she has to let the ‘ego die’. It means to act like a “wooden puppet: she has no ego, she thinks of nothing, she is not greedy or attached to anything or anyone.”

“Desiring is a bond. ‘Desiring not to desire’ is also a bond. To be detached, then, means to be free, at the same time, of both, positive and negative. That is to be simultaneously ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ which is intellectually absurd. But not in Zen.” Lee writes.

2. Forgetting about all that is known by knowledge

As per the guidance given by Lee for martial arts practitioners: “The skill and knowledge attained must be forgotten so that you can float comfortably in the void without blockages. Learning is important, but do not let yourself be enslaved. (…) Any technique, however valuable and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind becomes obsessed with it”.

There are many skills and techniques taught in coaching—one can use for example: psychodrama; dialogue between the protagonist and antagonist using the empty chair; realtio-gram where the client puts on the table different objects from the room which represent the people involved in his dilemma to get a picture of how each element is connected to the other; voice dialogue; NLP, etc.

But while meeting a client, our work is to be present. To be receptive. To experience. To be able to be there.

In essence, I like this quote attributed to Jung: “Learn your theories as best you can, but lay them aside when you touch the miracle of the human soul.”

What Bruce Lee says of Jeet Kune Do is exactly true for coaching. “…all techniques must be forgotten and the unconscious must be in charge of dealing with the situation. The technique will be displayed automatically or spontaneously. To move with totality, not to have technique, is to have all the techniques.”

3. Flow freely in the present, the here and now; and discard any past memories and future expectations

A good coach meets her clients afresh; without notions about what the person was before; allowing herself to be surprised in every meeting.
“To express yourself freely, you must forget yesterday. From the ‘old’ you get security. ‘New’, you gain fluidity.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti, who greatly influenced Bruce Lee, held this view: “Desire is always of the future; the desire to become something is the inaction of the present. Now is more important than tomorrow. All time is the now, and to understand the now is to be free of time.”

So in essence, my job as a coach/ facilitator is not to reach somewhere; display my prowess; to hurry my coachees; or even ‘help’ them. It is to trust their own soul’s urgency for growth which will lead them to finding their highest potential. This encounter, the very heart of coaching, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other.

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 If you like this approach, which is taught in our Psychodrama Certification program, it will help in bringing new spontaneous and creative attitudes to your coaching and facilitating practice. Or if you would like your executives to be coached, leaving them incharge of their own growth.

Write to us at Rashmi.datt@gmail.com

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