Coaching is an amazing experience on both sides of the proverbial coin. For the person receiving coaching, it can be a transformative process that inspires action and tremendous growth. For the coach, it can be just as informative and inspiring to help leaders clarify goals, develop strategies, and move throughout the coaching relationship.
These relationships are circular. They’re about commitment to truth and honesty, and genuinely benefit both parties in a feedback loop of growth and understanding.
To put it bluntly, coaching makes you honest. For coaching to be truly helpful, I depend on clients to provide visibility into their goals, their struggles, their lifestyle… Every factor that contributes to the potential for High Level Performance.
When you commit to telling the truth – actual truth, without exaggerating or minimizing – you not only lay the groundwork for receiving helpful help from a coach, you also set the stage for the coach to be truthful in return, offering real, practical guidance that isn’t sugarcoated or avoiding sensitive subjects. As the scriptures say, the truth shall set you free!
You can think of it like gathering intelligence. It’s about objective observation and honoring reality as it is – not the way we want it to be. The coach’s job is to enlighten the leader, to help the make sense of the data and develop plans of action, but just like military strategy, good plans have to be built on good intelligence.
But gathering this kind of reliable, objective information requires getting outside of assumptions, generalizations, and biases. This starts with your personal experience, of course, but that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We often don’t fully perceive the interconnected systems at play, from our habits and thought patterns to factors totally outside of our control. And so, we have to go DEEPER to examine below the surface.
Our attitudes and behaviors are living systems of internal and external elements. To get to the truth, we need to develop a fluency in these systems. How? Through open conversations, humble inquiry, and honest reflection. I dig into this even further in the video presentation below.
Receiving help is a skill. To actually get helpful help, you need to allow others (like a coach) to bring their curiosity to the table, and participate in the process of defining needs. The skill, then, lies in a space of honesty and vulnerability too. It’s being open enough to receive helpful help in the first place, and being honest enough with yourself AND the helper about where you are, where you want to be, and what’s getting in the way.
It’s also essential to recognize that help is a process. It’s a relationship, a collaboration, a unique canvas that we paint together. I’ve learned that providing real help doesn’t start with me having answers. In the marketing world (and even in presentations like this), we’re used to coaches and experts of all kinds making sweeping claims or presenting “one size fits all” guidance… In fact, we’re told over and over to paint ourselves as experts. The irony is that no one, and I mean NO ONE, can fully understand your unique situation and experience without doing a deep, one on one, dive into what makes you who you are.
Helpful help, then, from a coach’s perspective, means not trying to “be somebody” with all the answers, instead focusing on presence, collaboration, and comprehension… And getting there by fostering reciprocal honesty and vulnerability. It’s our job to observe and collect data, and it’s your job to be transparent
Providing help and receiving help are two sides of the same coin. Each relies on the honesty and earnest efforts of both parties, and the point of their intersection – truly helpful help – is an opportunity for growth and understanding for everyone involved.
