Time

What time would you call this?

Why becoming a forward thinking leader takes so much time.

To an onlooker, one of the surprising aspects of coaching is the length of time it requires. This is especially puzzling because as an experienced coach I can typically identify the essentials of a person’s business and personal challenges in one session. And yet a collaboration can last 6 months to a year, sometimes more, at a rate of one session a week.?

As I see it, the main difficulty is not to identify someone’s challenges, it is to help them see, feel and accept them properly.

Coaching includes helping clients understand their unconscious minds, and how the past contributes to their present if it limits their potential and holds them back from achieving their goals.

Were the truth to be boldly and laid out plainly before clients, most would feel dejected, overwhelmed or angry: they have only limited capacity to hear that, for example, their inner doubt, imposter syndrome, and limiting beliefs might be connected with the small town where they grew up and were supposed to blend in, or the family where others looked askance at their ambition and accomplishments, ‘don't brag, don't toot your own horn.’

Understanding the unconscious meanings and childhood?origins of a client's behaviour isn't necessarily my focus, but in my experience it is almost always extremely helpful in guiding the work.

What I've come to know is these stories of self doubt can - and must - be rewritten. With support.

Coaching is goal-oriented, achievement focused and co-created, aimed at getting you to where you want to be next.

The trick is to cut up the inner work into such small portions that it can start to sound like common sense and be gently absorbed around aligned actions over a period of time.

A good coach knows that trust is essential too if the truth is to be heard and made acceptable.

Clients have to like their coach, and have experienced them across a range of topics and developed a comprehensive faith in their personality, in order that - when it comes to truly confronting ideas - they can maintain a belief that I am on their side and that I am not simply putting certain thoughts before them in order to cause pain and bewilderment.?

Clients need a thinking partner to have shown them repeated kindness and forbearance before they’ll listen when I tell them important but confronting things that their colleagues or best friends never dared to raise with them - not because they were any kinder, but because they didn’t care enough.

Clarity and accountability are a significant benefit found by most coaching clients; I walk with my clients on a journey toward self-awareness and we collaborate on concrete action plans that move them forward.

Coaching is a school of patience.

It changes clients’ notions of plausible time-frames. In a coaching-minded relationship, a CEO client is not going to be outraged that after a few weeks with the business and two long conversations, a new member of their senior leadership team still avoids certain responsibilities and can’t shed certain social inhibitions. These challenges are conceived of as embedded in emotional dynamics that might - quite reasonably - take months to fully dislodge themselves.

With the example and experience of coaching in mind, client will in their own relationships – at work and in their private lives - look for small signs of progress rather than rapid, radical change around all those behaviours and thoughts that we so wish could vanish at a stroke.

I personally work with you to compassionately confront the stories that hold you back from realising your human potential that might have sat dormant for years.

That's why my approach emphasises uncovering and moving past inner blocks as well as delivering practical business skills.

There's much more to say about working together to support your journey towards developing the unshakeable self-trust required to share your leadership gifts than I can write in a post. I’m inviting you, if I have piqued your curiosity, to learn more over a virtual coffee call.

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Ruth Ewan’s decimal clock divides each day into ten hours, each hour into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds. The artwork – on free display at Tate Britain – is a direct reference to the attempt to recalibrate the day along decimal lines during the French Revolution. As old regimes were dismantled and discarded, and as the appetite for new beginnings grew, time itself was briefly reordered in an expression of revolutionary optimism. On 5 October 1793, the decimal French Republican Calendar became the official calendar of France. During the Paris Commune in 1871, the clocks were shot at to symbolically put an end to the time of rulers.

We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be (red version), 2011.?