Trump Vs. Zolensky

How a coaching conversation might have got a different outcome.

What I am about to write today may sound pompous, flippant, possibly trite or even downright bonkers. ?

Yet what I say is rooted on more than 20 years of using coaching tools and principles in leadership roles and seeing their effectiveness in generating better outcomes; and, observing time and again the negative outcomes that are generated as a result of a lack of awareness and an inability to operate from healthy ego. ?

What happened on Friday is what happens when leaders don’t engaged in coaching or other forms of leadership development.

Benefits of coaching

Had President Trump and President Zelensky engaged in some coaching and professional leadership development through the course of their careers, the outcome from Friday’s infamous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons meeting, would very likely be very different.

In addition to the many and varied benefits that coaching generates such as clarity, peace and certainty of mind, agency, autonomy, motivation, satisfaction, changes in negative beliefs which result in tangible changes in behaviour and crucially and simply; results, coaching also achieves two other fundamental outcomes:

Increased awareness and Humility.

Let me explain how and why these outcomes are so essential in high pressured negotiations where the potential for conflict is high if not certain, and the stakes are high.? And they have never been higher.

Awareness

We each live in our own brains.? We only ever see the world through one set of eyes, ours.? In a world of 8.2 billion people, that means there are at least 8.2 billion perspectives and world views. ?

Who is to say one is more valid than another?

When we really start to appreciate what this means, we start to cultivate awareness about the deeper meaning which underpins our own perspectives, as well as cultivating increased awareness of the perspectives of others and of the operating context we find ourselves in.

Most people, when confronted with something they don't understand, do not realise they don't understand it because they are able to come up with an explanation that makes sense based on their own unique perspective and experiences of the world, however limited those experiences are, We all want the complicated world to make sense. So we tell ourselves stories to fill in the gaps of what are effectively blind spots.

When we really start to appreciate what this means, we start to cultivate awareness about the deeper meaning which underpins our own perspectives and of the stories we tell ourselves to try to make sense of the world. When we appreciate that our perspective is just that, it is ours alone, we also cultivate increased awareness of the perspectives of others and the stories they tell themselves to make sense of the world.

Morgan Housel "The Psychology of Money"

When we operate with increased awareness, we are able to operate with a greater degree of objectivity and neutrality. ?

And when we operate from a neutral place, our emotions are in check and we can see different courses of action that may otherwise have been obscured by the mists of heightened emotion.

This leads to the second point.

Humility

The inevitable corollary of increased awareness is increased humility.*

Greater self-awareness means a person is capable of generating greater levels of empathy and compassion (for themselves and for others) and with that comes humility.

*Humility isn’t achieved overnight. In fact it may take some considerable time to arrive at a state of humility.? To be humble is a practice, a discipline and the likelihood of it being arrived at is somewhat predicated on the starting point of the person being coached, in terms of their own self-awareness. Coaching isn't about working miracles, but it does work!

Why does humility matter anyway?? Let me talk about Ego.

Healthy & unhealthy ego

You see we all have an ego.? We each have a healthy ego and we each have an unhealthy ego. ?

A healthy ego keep us safe, stops us from taking excessive risk and prevents us from walking out blindly in front of that proverbial bus.

Unhealthy ego on the other hand can keep us playing small; or to the contrary, keeps us playing big where the circumstances don’t warrant it; or keeps us stuck in procrastination; keeps us busy doing the wrong things; generates our negative and limiting beliefs; causes us to judge, blame or even manipulate others.

Unhealthy ego means we get defensive when we hear a viewpoint that we don’t agree with and that we falsely believe is a threat to our identity, when we think we won’t get out emotional, physical or even safety needs met.? Unhealthy ego is driven by our wounded inner child, manifesting as harmful adult behaviour.

Which type of ego do you think President Trump was operating from on Friday?? And what about Vice President JD Vance when he lashed out about President Zelensky’s wardrobe during a conversation about war and peace?

We all are prone to default to unhealthy ego when we are threatened, when we are challenged, when we believe there is something we value that we may loose.

Whilst I am not condoning the behaviour we saw, if we want to change it, if we want better, we must first seek to understand it.? And that requires cultivating some objectivity and some compassion.

Can you consider these prompts for a moment:

• What might have been the unsaid hidden meaning beneath President Trump’s behaviours? ?
• What might have been his deep rooted fears and limiting beliefs when going into that meeting?
• How might these fears and limiting beliefs been cultivated?? Consider what his upbringing may have been like?? What kind of relationship might he have had with his caregivers and what expectations (conscious or unconscious) might have been placed on him as a child that he has taken into adulthood.
• What might President Trump’s narrative of the world be, and how he has to operate to survive, based on his upbringing and how conscious of it do you think he is?

Rewiring our brains

Coaching is a way of rewiring our brains. We are not born with our belief systems. Our beliefs take shape when our brains are developing as children. These beliefs may serve of for a while. But as we develop and the world around us changes, so too must our beliefs to better serve us in in new contexts. Coaching means we get to update our operating system, replace outdated assumptions and beliefs with ones which better fit our current situation and creating new neural pathways that generate different and better outcomes.

Coaching is a practice, not a quick fix

But coaching isn’t a silver bullet to preventing this, but it does, with repetition, consistency and with lots of practice diminish the intensity and likelihood of us reverting to our primeval lizard brain in the heat of the moment when it matters most.

And if we genuinely want better outcomes, we must accept that there are no quick fixes, but that doesn't mean there are not quick wins to be had.

So you might think I am bonkers but if all global leaders and heads of state, captains of industry and shareholders of massive international corporations and institutions who yield excessive power over how we live our lives each invested in leadership development, and coaching especially, how different do you think our world would be?

Might we wake up one day without the threat of war, or imminent economic or financial ruin, or impeding doom?

I’m not saying that a few coaching sessions would have generated a different outcome on Friday, but if our leaders place investment in their leadership capabilities as highly as investment in profit, might we, for a minute be able to conceive a different and more positive world?!

Something for you

Are you feeling triggered by the behaviours you witnesses on Friday, or the state of the world right now (or maybe even by this post!)?

Why not engage in some reflection using these coaching prompts:

• What physical sensations do you notice in your body when you feel triggered?? For instance: tight shoulders, clenched jaw, knot in stomach, back ache, churning stomach, head ache etc. Label them.
• What thoughts (think about the actual words you hear in your inner voice or visualise in your mind's eye) do you notice that accompany these physical sensations?? For instance: it’s all bad, nothing is good, this is so depressing, it's so demotivating, I’m worried, it’s never been this bad before, I don’t know what we’re going to do etc.
• Notice if these thoughts are negative, limiting, disempowering, diminishing, unkind etc.
• How far are these thoughts true?? How far are they really true? (Our brains overestimate the negative and have a tendency to catastrophize).
• Look for at least one piece of evidence which demonstrates that the above is NOT true.? For instance: a neighbour offered to help you with something, a stranger smiled and said hello, you saw someone hold a door open for someone else, a family member did something nice for you, a colleague said thank you for something you did, you did something you feel proud of.
• What is one positive thing you could do for yourself in this moment?? For instance: working through these prompts is something positive because you are generating more awareness about how you are feeling; you could offer to do something for someone else; you could take the opportunity to thank someone for something they did; you could do something kind to yourself such as cook a healthy meal or go for a walk in the sunshine.
• Notice how you are feeling now.? Has your negative state shifted, even just a little bit?!
• How likely are you to continue to do positive things from this place (compared to dwelling on negative thoughts)?