Whose agenda is it?

Wow! It’s nearly two-thirds of the way through the year already! Did we blink? I hope our colleagues in the northern hemisphere have enjoyed battery-charging breaks over this time and are ready for whatever challenges they face through to the end of the year.

I guess many of you, when you saw the title for this month’s newsletter would have reckoned that the answer is easy – we’ve been taught that it’s the client’s agenda, the session belongs to them. We may also have come across the dance metaphor for the coach / client relationship. I have always liked the synergy that this metaphor painted for me – until the other day when someone used it to claim that the client leads the dance. That made me think – and it made me curious why this claim would make me think.

The conclusion I arrived at leans on something I learnt as a leader in my previous life and then have used from time to time in coaching leaders. For me, it is important that we see meetings as consisting not only of content (the agenda) but also of process. Without going into whether this concept is right or wrong, I have consciously or unconsciously also applied this to coaching sessions where I am notionally responsible for the process – of course, I can from time to time ask my client if they would like to have a say in this – and they are responsible for the content.

This was confirmed for me when reading Robert Biswas-Diener’s wonderfully thought-provoking book on coaching called Positive Provocation. He used the metaphor of a corridor with a whole lot of shut doors and asked the question, who really chooses which door to open for clients to explore what’s on the other side? I get that the client normally chooses the corridor, but I think most often we coaches offer the door or a choice of doors. I say this because we don’t know what we don’t know – that’s true for all of us and it’s certainly true for our client who has brought an issue to the session. Moreover, one of our roles, after all, is to broaden and deepen our client’s perspective – otherwise they will have difficulty in going beyond their current narrative, opening the same doors, and finding the same answers and consequences, as they go.

So, I’ve decided to choose a different metaphor to depict our relationship with our clients, a different kind of dance, the dance of yin and yang, “two opposing energies in the world that wax and wane and represent the relative nature of all earthly things” (Blakey and Day). Yin and Yang are always in transformation and at their interface lies creative potential where they are in harmony and create conditions for new forms to emerge in the world. As in coaching, this is not a battle for supremacy as to who will lead and who will follow, and who should be dependent on who. It’s a dance of interdependence, a partnership of equals where the coach is largely responsible for the process and the client is largely responsible for the content.

I’d really be interested in hearing who you think is responsible for what in your coaching relationships. I hope that, at the very least, I have got you thinking, wherever that leads for you.

Let’s all make a world of difference in the world.

Until next month

Lauron

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Are these the things you are currently thinking about?

• Is it time to re-sharpen my coaching edge?
• Do I need to speak to someone about that coaching client?
• How am I going to get more clients?
• I really need to get around to my (first or next) accreditation.
• What am I going to do about CPD?
• I wish I could belong to a community of coaches that experiences the same things as I do and want to keep learning and improving.

If any of these resonate with you, or if you are looking for a mentor coach or a coach supervisor or other form of coach whispering, please use this link to my diary to set up a FREE informal Virtual Coffee Chat with me.

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