What does coaching look like?
People often ask me what is coaching? How can it help? What makes it distinct from Counselling? Or for that matter any other forms of talking therapy? Why would I need coaching?
All these and other questions often stop people from investing in seeking coaching as an option to address whatever it is that they’re grappling with.
This month is World Infertility Awareness month and so I wanted to share a story (with permission) of a lady I coached last year. This lady was some way through her infertility journey but wanted to talk it though with someone outside her situation, outside the family, outside her friendship group, away from her husband. It is a hard subject and one which is rarely talked about openly. What has been inspiring to me is that, despite the difficult journey, it is one that she continues to walk with dignity and disappointment, with pain and yet with purpose.
We met in the corner of my favourite café – surrounded by books and plenty of cake. We had never met in person before but had chatted a few times on zoom and exchanged emails. Both of us knew we were there with a purpose and sense of wanting to make the most of our next hour together.
As we talked and I asked her what she wanted to think about during that session. I could sense the pain that she and her husband had already gone through, were still going through and would probably have to bear for the rest of their days. It’s hard when your friends are having children, and this has been something you’ve always wanted but can never have. It’s hard when your friends are complaining about the sleepless nights and not able to find a babysitter to meet up, when that’s something you’d trade your infertility for in a heartbeat. It’s even harder to realise that your friendships are changing and possibly what your felt you shared with those friends pre-kids is less and less obvious as that friendship group moves on and you feel left behind.
She wasn’t really clear about how to focus her thoughts, so I simply listened as she tried to organise them into a sense of what she was feeling and how she wanted things to be different moving forward. I asked her how she wanted the session to move forward and what she wanted out of it. Without asking, how would I have known?
As we sat together and she talked we explored what her future might now hold, how she might address some of these issues and how she could reimagine possibilities in the pain. She wrote down several ideas and we focussed on the one or two that she felt might make the most difference for her. She invited me to challenge her and push her gently where she needed to move to a place where she had something tangible to work on after we parted.
After an hour together, she left with all sorts of ideas still buzzing around in her head and different possibilities about what she might do and how she might move things forward. Dare I say it, she seemed to have found both hope for what her future might look like and also a sense of peace and being settled in what she couldn’t change. As with any coaching sessions she had come up with the ideas during our conversation, but needed reminding of what she had said before she left for home. She also would need time to allow them to settle and the important things to take shape for her in a specific way.
I compared this experience in a previous post to the many fluttering butterflies I then witnessed after that session on my walk back home. I knew some of these ideas would settle for her and she would be able to move them forward, although which ones I couldn’t say! I also knew she was determined to do more work on them, either on her own or with her partner. I also knew some of the other ideas would simply fly away and not be important for now – or possibly ever - maybe to pop back in the future, maybe never to be considered again. As with the butterflies though, there was a lightless as she left and a sense of freedom and hope about the future.
Yes, the pain was still there, but there was also a sense that reimagining the future had some potential for her. Yes, not the future she had imagined for herself when she had got married all those years ago, but a future with promise and possibility.
We set up another meeting a few months later to give herself enough time and space to further explore what had been raised. However, through illness and thwarted attempts we finally managed to meet up again for a further coaching session about 6 months later. I was tempted to find out what had happened in the interim and decisions she reached. I could easily think she might have wanted to explore the same issues. But coaching is not like that. What was important to her then had been worked through and what she brought to the coaching space the next time felt like very different issues. She was imagining and considering something totally different, and she brought to the conversation new avenues to explore. There seemed a sense of calm and excited anticipation about what the future might hold for her.
So it is with any coaching session, I am there simply to hold the space for someone to think things through so they can work out the stuff they need to work out in a supportive and safe place. The focus of each session is all on that person and their issue and what they bring that day. I never know what will happen during that time, I never know or direct the conversation in any way. Instead, I must trust the process and live in the moment, being attentive to whatever the individual needs to process on that occasion. With their permission, I will challenge some thinking and encourage them to go deeper, but not unless they are wanting to go there – and often they do! There are always insights, sometimes big and sometimes small, and that individual can always take away something new from the session. Even if the transformation doesn’t happen in the conversation, it can happen afterwards as the person thinks on and unpacks their thinking over the course of time.
This month, as we are invited to focus on those who may be unable to conceive or carry children to full term, please be kind and look out for them and remember they need to be supported and they are likely to carry with them a lot of pain and heartache.
If that person is you and you know you need to be seen and heard in your pain and sorrow and find some hope for your future, please DM me to find out more.
As you go about your day and wonder might coaching be for you with whatever stuff is challenging you from making progress and whatever your particular issues are, why don’t you give it a try?
Consider the transformation from a caterpillar to a butterfly, Consider the change from not knowing how to move forward to having some ideas that might just work in changing what your future looks like.
I hope to hear from you soon.