What is meaningful coaching?

When I started coaching professionally over 20 years ago, everything was shiny-new. There was only one organisation that trained University accredited coaches and there was just “coaching”. Very soon there was life coaching, management coaching, inner-game coaching, coaching for performance, co-active coaching, NLP coaching, career coaching and what was called Executive Coaching. The words Executive Coach held up both a professional focus (it’s all about leaders, leadership and leadership teams) and an unspoken snob value (just as people would say “I’m a psychotherapist NOT a counsellor”, so coaches would say “I’m an executive coach NOT a life coach”). I even named my company The Executive Coach to make it clear that I did exactly what it said on the tin.  Since those heady days the world is now full of coaches who took on the title when they had left or lost their jobs, or therapists seeking to make a better hourly rate, and the world is now full of institutions that will train and accredit you as a coach of whatever flavour you choose.  As I enter into this new year and new decade, I have decided to launch a new brand of coaching and I’m calling it Meaningful Coaching. What is its USP? In essence it’s coaching for leaders that isn’t afraid to enter the conversations that leaders are desperate for, but their work colleagues aren’t providing. Meaningful conversations. Let me explain.

Over the Christmas break I was contacted by an ex client who wanted to have a crucial coaching conversation. Was it about work?  Yes and No. Was she unhappy in her job? No. (she is in charge of culture change across three large organisations) What she said was that things had been happening in her life over recent months that she could only describe as ‘spiritual’ and she needed to talk them through with someone who she trusted could help to make sense of them. It wasn’t that her job or some aspect of her job needed changing but she felt that who she was within her job was changing and she needed to recalibrate herself within her role to do it with increasing integrity. She was discovering more of herself and she wanted to be able to bring all of this new and older self to work. Up to the point of these unexplained experiences she was somewhere between atheist and agnostic in her life beliefs. She didn’t want therapy.  She didn’t want a priest. She wanted a coach who wasn’t frightened to have a meaningful conversation because, in her words, “no one in the work place ever talks about this kind of stuff”.  Then there was another very recent conversation with a young leader within a government department who wanted to explore coaching who confessed that since the birth of his two children he no longer felt as resilient at work as he had done and it was making him think about prayer for some reason. He also didn’t want therapy or a priest, he wanted a meaningful conversation. Or there was the Head of Division of a bank in the City of London who was as bright and successful as they come, but who recognised a dis-ease within himself that was arising from the realisation that he had gone straight from University into the financial race track but felt internally adrift, with little sense of who he was or what he really wanted to do with his life. No one at work would have guessed that any of these three example leaders had any of these underlying issues and questions, but the level of emotional and mental occupation of these questions was certainly affecting their performance in one particular way.  If you can’t process your deepest, most meaningful questions as a leader then you cannot bring all of yourself to work. It affects our integrity as leaders. Not having meaningful conversations insidiously erodes performance.

Accepted wisdom back in the day was that coaches should not stray over the boundary lines into therapy and neither should they stray over the boundary lines into spirituality.  “Coaches don’t do religion or spirituality” may well have been the mantra. They also didn’t do developmental psychology, life-stage development theory and environmental sustainability. I’ve always agreed and disagreed with this conventional wisdom. Agreed in that no coach should stray into areas that they have no personal experience or understanding of. This is true of leadership (many “executive” coaches have zero experience of being in a job of a senior leader and have no personal experience of what keeps executives awake at 2.30am), as well as therapy or religion. Disagreed in that coaching to be of any lasting value needs a deep theory of transformation behind it and transformation is a “whole person” experience – mind, body, emotion, soul and yes, spirit. There is a great danger that a coach can increase a problem by consciously or unconsciously avoiding getting into meaningful conversations.  This puts a great and necessary pressure on a coach to grow `and keep on growing in every dimension of what it means to be human within their own life first. If we want to help our clients further then we need to grow further ourselves. Period. 

How does this idea of Meaningful Coaching fit within the accepted definitions of coaching? My ex colleague at The School of Coaching, Myles Downey, defined coaching firstly as an art, not some mechanistic or scripted conversation.  He went on to say that coaching was about a facilitating conversation, making peoples issues and journeys of growth, as easy to navigate as possible, but not easier than they actually are. Struggle is the necessary dimension of the human condition.  Further, he said, coaching is about performance, learning and development.  Growing as a person is essential to releasing more of our potential to our performance. Entering into meaningful conversations, the conversations that leaders need and want to be having, the conversations that few people in the Board room or team meeting are daring to have, is the ground work of all performance, learning and development.

But here's the thing. There is more. The accepted definitions and best loved models of coaching only address the process or the structure of the coaching conversation, not its content - what do leaders actually want to talk about when the door is shut and the 'do not disturb' notice is put up? Maybe the content of Meaningful Coaching is best summed up by the words of the late Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said,

"Remember, there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, every word is power.....Above all remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art"

Meaningful Coaching isn't just an art, it's about helping clients to create their lives as a work of art, to find the meaning in the absurdities of their every day lives and to know that they are here to make a difference in the world, that their lives do have impact, that what they do matters. 

So, at the start of 2020, do you know of any leaders who need Meaningful Conversations?