How Not to Coach Like Your Parents: 4 Things You Need to Know

What’s your response to the title of this article “How Not to Coach Like Your Parents”? Are you offended by the assumption that you might coach like your parents? Are you intrigued by the possibility that you might be and not know it? Or are you thinking “What does that even mean?”.

It’s likely that your response to the title is somehow shaped by your parents' impact on you.

Why Would Our Parents Impact Our Coaching?

What could be the relationship between our parents and our coaching? Most coaches would agree that the foundation of coaching is the relationship between coach and client. If the relationship between coach and client isn’t secure, attentive, trusting, and intimate, then it’s unlikely that the coaching will find purchase within the client.

We first learn how to be in the relationship with others, ourselves, and the world from our relationship with our parents/caregivers. 

You are probably familiar with attachment theory and how our relationship with our parents, secure, insecure, or fragmented, impacts our adult relationships. But the myriad ways in which our parents and our relationship with them take root within us are nuanced and varied. 

How Do Parents Impact Us?

Our parents and our relationship with them impact multiple dimensions of our internal experience. Even if our relationship with our parents was secure, their influence on what we see or don’t, how we see, how we make meaning of our experience, what we believe, and how we respond to our lives is pervasive. Our experience of ourselves, others, and the world is shaped by what our parents paid attention to or ignored, rewarded or punished, accepted or judged, attuned with or resisted, appreciated or devalued. 

For example, if it wasn’t OK to be angry, we may learn to repress or simply not access our own anger. If our caregivers couldn’t tolerate our anxiety, we may learn to bury it. If our parents, in some way, didn’t pay attention to some aspect of our internal experience, our emotions, our thoughts, our desires, we may not pay attention either.

The parts of ourselves that were ignored or unaccepted by our parents, we will be blind to. And what we are blind to in ourselves, we will be blind to in others, including our clients.

Wouldn’t We Know?

You might be thinking, “If my parents (and their influence on me) were impacting my coaching, I’d know it.” And you’d be wrong.

The shaping impact of our parents on us occurred at a neuronal level. Our brains literally wired together to exclude or deemphasize what was ignored or unaccepted. And it happened during a time for which we had no explicit memory. 

How Might Our Parents Impact Our Coaching

The most common impact we at Learning in Action see of a parent on their adult child’s coaching is in stepping over one or more distressing emotions. For example, the parent was intolerant of their child’s anger and the child feared for the relationship (and therefore their survival) if they accessed and expressed their anger. So they learned to suppress it. 

The child grows up and becomes a coach. When their client expresses anger, they may redirect the client or silver-line the situation or attempt to soothe or rescue the client or try to coach them out of their anger or toward the “wrong-headedness” of being angry or prematurely coach them toward taking action.  

How Not to Coach Like Your Parents

Given that our parents' impact on us will likely show up in our coaching and we won’t know it, what do we do about it?

Learn Where to Look for Your Blindspots - Do self-exploration exercises like this Early Learning and Shaping Exercise to see how you may have been shaped in your earliest relationships. Then consider how your shaping may show up in your coaching.

Track Your Coaching Formulations - As you coach, attend to your internal experience, noticing where you become uncomfortable. Then track your coaching formulations. We’ve found that many coaches, from their own discomfort, will tend to coach their clients toward solutions or action prematurely, as a means of self-soothing.

Get Feedback on Your Coaching - Record multiple coaching sessions, obtain transcripts and have them reviewed by peers, mentors, or coach supervisors. Ask them to look explicitly for what you are stepping over or being blind to, and look for trends. When we get feedback on our coaching, we’ll tend to assume that the feedback applies just to that one coaching session. And we all have patterns that reflect our internal experience and our blindspots will show up in consistent ways in our coaching.

Never Stop Working on Yourself - Finally, and this is something you probably don’t need to be told, never stop working on yourself, looking for edges, noticing what you avoid and what makes you uncomfortable. We won’t be able to see, accept, be with and explore every aspect of our clients' experience until we have done that for ourselves. Every minute we spend exploring and developing ourselves will show up beneficially in our coaching.  

And one day, we can show up to coach and know we are leaving our parents out of it.

Published in, and reproduced with permission from, choice, the magazine of professional coaching  www.choice-online.com