Snake Oil or Coaching

Let me start this essay by making it clear that I do not consider coaching to be snake oil.? More pointedly, my view is that coaching is good and snake oil is bad.

Just last week I took a call from someone I will call Joe Smith for the sake of this exposé.??He had reached out to me here on LinkedIn explaining that he was compiling a book to be made up from chapters written by renown executive coaches and asked if I would be interested in discussing this.??I happily took the bait.?

When we spoke, we exchanged some cheery introductions. He managed to drop in some big claims; the famous people who endorsed him, the tens of thousands of people he had trained, the impact he had had on their lives.??Then he started what I only later realized was a sales script.??It went like this:

“I didn’t go to college the way most people do, in fact I dropped out of high school, but one summer I had this insight about?how 80% of people don’t follow through; ?you know that 80/20 rule and it’s only 20% of people who follow through, and I figured out why.”?

I offer the reference to Vilfredo Pareto (the Italian economist who came up with the 80/20 rule) ?to show I am following along.

“I realized, you know, that we all have these experiences in childhood and these memories get associated with strong feelings and thoughts about ourselves.??Some of these experiences and thoughts get stuck because the feelings are unpleasant and so we suppress them. They form core self-limiting beliefs and that’s what holds people back from following through.”

At this point, I am on to his schtick but also curious and, if I am honest, I find him credible. I want to believe that he is sincere and has a helpful insight. So I play back that what he has said so far is a common theory in psychotherapy, but that the challenge is first to help someone recognize their pathogenic beliefs, and then to release them from these deeply buried aspects of our identity.??I ask him how he does this.

“Well, you have to uncover the self-limiting belief. Then you have to ask whether the person wants to change. Let me share with you an example from one of my workshops.”?

“I ask for a volunteer to demonstrate the process I have been describing and there is a woman, a large woman who says she is happy to volunteer.”?

At this point the story starts to show his gross prejudice against women and body size and I hope you will forgive me for repeating it even though my intention is to expose the speaker and what I have come to see as a common sales pitch that continues to dupe.?

“I asked this woman whether she wanted to change, and she said she did. Then I asked her if she was willing to change and she said she was.??Then I asked her when she was willing to change, and she said “Now”.” Then I drew on a flip chart all the reasons for and against losing weight.??The list of reasons to change was so long that we had to use multiple flip charts.??I kept going until we had exhausted all the reasons.??Then I asked her what the reason was for staying overweight and she told me that she wanted to share something that she had never shared with anyone.? That she had been raped as a child and she believed that being overweight would mean that she wouldn’t have to have sex again.”?

I really should have interjected to point out how offensive he was being and asked him to stop. But stunned, I let his tape roll.

“Once I had helped her realize the foundational belief, I asked here again if she wanted and was willing to change and she confirmed that.??Then I had her describe the experience and re-live it in as much detail as she could. Repeatedly. Finally, I had her associate the whole experience with an article in her mind, an article she could move.”

“And you know what? In a few months she had lost 75 pounds without even going on a diet and a year later she had lost 100 pounds! Her doctors were able to give her a clean bill of health.”?

I was both flabbergasted and repulsed by the pitch.??I told him, sarcastically, that he must be a miracle worker.??Then I reminded him that he had reached out to me and I asked how I could help him.??He replied that it was rather about how he could help me - and he did have a book series detailing his method that I could buy for $6k.?

Click.?

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As repulsive as this story is, it also contains the pitch of the personal transformation movement (and the current Manifesting trend); the idea that we have repressed pathogenic beliefs from which we can be instantly released by following their technique.??What we to make of it? Are there good parts that we can separate from snake oil or even emotional abuse???More to the point, how does this inform executive coaching?

The personal transformation movement’s particular claim is that we are authors of these self-limiting beliefs and, once we recognize this, we can choose otherwise. The typical multi-day large group workshops are carefully designed to help participants come to the mind or ego-blowing realization that the way they see the world, and themselves in particular, is a self-imposed construct. It’s like Aldous Huxley’s experience in the Doors of Perception but without the drugs.??Taken-for-granted meaning is dissolved for participants when they experience the realization that their perception of reality is actually a self and socially generated interpretation.??

This theory of reality as interpretation, how the mind creates this world view through accumulated experiences, some traumatic, and how we can re-construct our realities has been the common script since its formulation in the 60s and the launch of the industry (Mind Dynamics, Scientology, Dianetics, est/Forum, Lifespring, Exogesis) circa 1970.?

The transformation of Werner Erhard’s (founder of est) own identity is a good illustration.??Born John Paul Rosenberg to a working-class Jewish family, he did not complete his college degree but was keenly interested in the emerging philosophical, spiritual and personal development trends of the time, including Zen Buddhism, existentialism and Scientology/Mind dynamics.??He also worked as a salesman for W.Clement Stone a well-known motivational speaker in the insurance industry.??In 1960, he changed his name and left his first wife and children to become Werner Erhard.?

My own connection to the personal transformation industry and its group sales juggernaut actually started in 1972 when Werner Erhard came to stay at our country home when I was just a teenager.??He and a number of progressive thinkers exploring human potential, science and spirituality were speaking at the May Lectures in London.??A few of them came to stay with us for inexpensive but comfy accommodations as my dad was friends with one of the organizers. His name was John Whitmore. Yes, the same guy who brought Tim Gallwey's Inner Game to the UK and wrote the best-selling?Coaching for Performance?book. I need to underscore an important distinction here between the Inner Game approach which focusses on realizing people's given potential, and the Personal Transformation peddlers who claim we can change who we are.

The May lectures was a star studded cast including Fritjof Capra (Tao of Physics, Web of Life), Rollo May (existential psychologist), Buckminster Fuller (architect and environmentalist), Alan Watts (brought Zen to the West), David Bohm (theoretical physicist meets perception), J Krishnamurti (spiritual teacher) and Ram Dass (be here now!) I was too young to take in this high intellectual frontier, but I do remember the energy, the hope and the excitement of possibility in the air.??Actually, my best recollection was beating Fritjof at table tennis.??He got kind of pissed!?

A few years later, I took the est trainng in London.??Two years after that, my exposure continued when I completed their six-day course with my mother in California.??About this time, my dad who had been a successful entrepreneur and sportsman, took a job working for Werner Erhardt as his Head of Operations and moved to the San Franscisco Bay Area for four years.??And while I was at Cal Berkeley my brother and I attended the Forum, the rebranded version of the original training.??We left half-way through because it was so similar to the original training, just less exciting!

On est’s account everything, including who I am, is an interpretation. The upside is that in this view of self-as-possibility, I can choose to be anyone.??The downside is the hollowing out of the self, the insecurity and mania that can follow.??It reminds me of the haunting quote about achievement oriented American capitalism from Max Weber’s?Protestant Ethic ?“Sensualists without heart, spiritualists without spirit…This nullity is the hallmark of our modern world, in which people are reduced to empty shells of their former selves."??If there is no self, then what is there to value, and love, other than achievement?

I believe the better path to helping our clients overcome self-limiting beliefs is not to see themselves as an empty core requiring an adopted persona, to put on the psychological suit and tie, but to recognize and care for our true nature.??Interestingly, during Gil Amelio’s brief stint as Apple’s CEO, he mandated that the executives wear suits.? I wasn’t the only one at that time who thought it was a mistake. ?

My experience is that the people who are most inhibited by fear of failure, or even fear of success are those without a positive appreciation for who they are. As a coach, I often encourage my clients to try bringing their natural good-natured selves their work, and to their relationships with others, especially when the going gets rough and difficult discussions need to be had.??Self-esteem is positively correlated with so many characteristics of successful leaders; persuasive communication, innovation, risk-taking, morality, empowerment, learning, nurturing, self-care…

With this as background, I hope it's clear that I have a deep and personal connection with the personal transformation movement.? Like most est graduates, I was an acolyte for some years, and then I became disillusioned especially as I pursued my own studies at UC Berkeley and began to experience the unsavory side of cult-like behavior, and the emotional brutality of invalidating people’s feelings as mere interpretations, and the narcissism of a self without substance. ?

I am not at all sure that my closeness allows me to speak with greater authority. In fact, it may well be that I have formed an unfair bias.??What I can offer is my perspective, these many years on.??In brief, that there is something powerful and useful in terms of offering our coaching clients the experience of greater agency and power to change, but there is also the unhelpful idea that we might free our clients from the reality that they need to develop deep knowledge and skills to perform and succeed. Worse that they lose sight of their naturally good-natured selves.

In a sense this comes back to what I see as one of the limits of the Human Potential or what I call "Coaching 2.0" method.??There is no doubt that the right mental state, one that is able to overcome the “interferences” (as Gallwey would call them) of self-doubt, fear, anxiety, is necessary.??But it is also insufficient.? As coaches, we can play a powerful role in helping our clients express their passions and goals, and we have a vital role in helping them both recognize their self-limiting beliefs and put them in touch with their agency to overcome them. ?

But this is just the beginning, albeit an important one.? From here, we also need to help our clients both build on their strengths and also work on the areas where they need to demonstrate greater competence to compete and succeed.?

I know personally of two organizational engagements where literally millions of dollars were spent training employees on the personal transformation “can do” perspective to propel a commitment to compete.??I am sure the trainings were high quality and got people fired up.??But both of the companies failed.? Why? In one case because their shortcomings in the foundational functions of their business were poor; understanding their customers’ needs, designing, merchandising, packaging and distributing. In the other case because their offering, in-person training, had not adapted to the times. ?

Noah Lyles, who just won the gold medal at the Paris Olympics could not appear more motivated and committed to being the fastest man alive.??His raw physical talent is immense. Mentally, he seems to be imbued with the spirit of embracing the possibility of his dream even while he is repeatedly standing on the starting line and living with the fear and self-doubt that he may not win. Meanwhile he has been and will continue to work on his speed out of the blocks.??His strength is being as quick as Usain Bolt or better once he is up to speed.??Meanwhile, he is not yet as quick as others getting up to speed.??He was actually last in the Olympics final at the 30-meter line.??But he had been working with his coach trackside using real-time video feedback which compares him to the best of the best, so he could improve these skills.??Noah is just going to get faster because he is working on skills not just mental state.?