Tom Henschel is an executive coach and the president and founder of Essential Communications.
Coaching was a challenge for Edward. More comfortable in the realm of analytics than self-reflection, he wondered if perhaps our coaching conversations were venturing into territory better left to a trained therapist.
I've discussed this topic so often during my twenty-five years of coaching that I've developed a little spiel about it. Edward was eager to hear it.
Coaching and therapy start with the same premise, I told him. Each presumes that all of us, in the natural course of life, experience events that wound us psychically when we are young.
As we grow, some people's wounds remain raw and painful. Those people often act defensively, protecting their wounds from further injury. Other people grow healthy callouses over their wounds, protecting them from everyday buffets and blows. These people are often seen as resilient and high functioning. But, in truth, both types of people, the raw and the protected, have wounds in their systems.
The natural outgrowths of these wounds are self-limiting beliefs. These beliefs, born to protect our younger selves, often create some degree of self-sabotage as we mature. Consequently, people may find themselves hitting the same pothole over and over as they drive along the paths of their lives. At some point, desiring a different result, they seek help. Perhaps coaching. Perhaps therapy.
All of that — primal wounds developing into self-limiting beliefs which become sabotaging patterns — is common ground between coaching and therapy. It is a shared point of view.
But now the roads diverge.
In a therapeutic relationship, the therapist first helps the client identify the pothole — the wound causing the self-sabotage.
Then, metaphorically, the therapist and client drive together up to the lip of the pothole. They stop the car. They get out. And, together, they look down into the pit of the pothole. This act alone can be transformative. But many people fear it. People often avoid therapy because they'd rather not look into the hole.
The client's task now is to climb down into the pit and repair the very bottom of the pothole. The therapist, never leaving the rim, shines as much light into the pit as possible. Even so, the client's progress is often slow since the work is unfamiliar and the terrain discomforting.
At some point, the first layer of repair is complete and another is begun. As layers build, one upon the other, the task gets easier. Repair becomes routine, until one day, the pothole's surface is seamless with the road around it.
Once filled in in this way, the pothole no longer has the power to generate self-sabotage; self-limiting beliefs diminish to background noise. The client experiences rejuvenation. The therapist, all the while, has been seeking only to help the client heal.
Coaching, on the other hand, does not pursue healing. Coaching has a quite different goal.
As in therapy, when self-limiting beliefs interfere in a coaching relationship, the coach helps the client identify the pothole.
As the client and coach approach the metaphoric pothole, the coach asks the client to stop. But now, rather than looking down into the pit, the coach and client keep their distance from the pothole. Together, the client and coach plot paths around the pothole.
Corporate coaching engagements go quickly. Usually the engagements are driven by goals from the organization. Even when the coach is a licensed therapist, the pace of corporate coaching doesn't permit the time required for healing.
In pursuit of the coaching goals, the coach provides as many tools as possible so the client can learn to stay out of the pothole.
So while the goal for coaching may not be to heal, it is to keep the client out of the pothole. Ultimately, coaching and therapy share that objective.
As our coaching ended, Edward revisited the metaphor. He suggested that since he had learned to drive around the pothole, rather than heal it, his pothole remained. I agreed.
Was that open pothole a threat? he wondered. I suggested that at the moment, the pothole was present but dormant. He knew how to stay out of it. But he was correct: The pothole remained, available for healing at any time. But that would not be the work of a coach.