Coach as Instrument: When the Past Is Bound up With the Present, Coaching vs. Therapy

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar for the Institute of Coaching (IOC) entitled “Our Client’s Past Need Not Foretell Their Future: Coaching to our Client’s Patterns and Attachment Styles.” (BTW, I have LOVED my relationship with the IOC. Check them out.)

I’ve been talking, writing and teaching coaches about topics in this space for so long that I’d forgotten how provocative it can be to coaches hearing it for the first time. Because it was a webinar, I couldn’t see the faces of the coaches attending, and I sensed from what was written in the chat, the questions asked, and some feedback I received afterward that there were a fair number of eyebrows raised in response to my talk.

In fairness, I covered a significant number of concepts that I suspect were new to coaches and strung them all together pretty quickly. It may have been a bridge too far to expect the audience to absorb it in an hour.

That said, I suspect that there’s something more to be explored about the reaction to the content beyond the volume of it. After working through these concepts with coaches for the past decade, I’ve learned that many coaches have strong reactions to something that sounds like psychology and like it could be construed as therapy.

To a degree, I can understand the consternation. Here is the throughline of my talk...

• We are each shaped by our past relationships (especially our earliest relationships).
  
• We are shaped neurologically, psychologically, socially, and mentally by these relationships in ways we don’t know, can’t remember, and didn’t choose (because much of the shaping occurred at a time for which we have no memory and had no language).
  
• We are shaped by our earliest relationships in predictable ways, as documented in the research on Attachment Theory, and this shaping stays with us into adulthood.
  
• How we were shaped by our early relationships impacts not only how we relate to others into adulthood but also how we relate to ourselves and our world.
  
• Our relational shaping results in patterns of thinking, feeling, and wanting, which make up our internal experience (in other words, we’ll tend to experience others, events, and ourselves in ways that follow predictable patterns).
  
• We reveal our internal experience of ourselves and others and the world around us in how we narrate our experience.
  
• Our clients come to coaching with these patterned ways of narrating their issues, opportunities, and challenges.
  
• Our clients are not able to discern their own patterns of experience.
  
• When we can detect our client’s patterns from their narratives, we can work with them in deeper and more profound ways than if we work with them on one issue, opportunity, or challenge at a time.
  
• When we coaches work at the level of the pattern, how the client sees, feels, and experiences themselves, others, and the world can shift.
  
• We can coach each client’s pattern relative to how it formed.
   

Here is how you can detect and coach the most common patterns we see in clients.

OK, that’s probably too much for a one hour talk. I can see that now. :)

And hopefully, I’ve strung the ideas together in a logical enough fashion that it makes sense as you read it (If not, I’d love to hear your feedback).

So, if that amount of information is overwhelming, that is understandable. It IS a lot. And I’m intrigued by the questions and concerns I got along the lines of “This sounds more like therapy than coaching” and “Alison is asking us to diagnose.”

In my experience, when we start talking about psychological concepts and referring to our clients’ past, many coaches can have strong reactions. I honor the intention behind these kinds of questions and reactions. Most coaches have strong ethics and boundaries around what is theirs to do and what they feel qualified to do.

Ethics and boundaries can be healthy for us coaches and our clients. AND sometimes, our reactions can become obstacles to working with our clients in deeply meaningful ways.

Every human I’ve coached and every human I’ve met is shaped by their past, and that shaping shows up in the present. Our past is bound up with our present (unless maybe you are a Buddhist monk, but I’m guessing they rarely pay for coaching) :) Yet, when we start talking about a client’s past, it can trigger a coach to think we are referring to therapy.

We coaches are working with and coaching our clients’ pasts in every coaching session (whether we realize it or not). That doesn’t mean we are digging around in their childhood or asking them about their past experiences, or engaging in therapy.

It means that every story our client tells us reveals a narrative pattern of how they are relating to themselves, others, and their lives today, which was shaped by the experiences of their past.

And becoming familiar with the predictable patterns that humans have for relating to their lives and listening for these patterns in our clients doesn’t mean we are diagnosing.

It means we have a powerful lens through which to see our clients and what is unconscious to them about how they are experiencing their lives in patterned ways.

And when we work with our clients at the level of their patterns, at the level of their non-conscious material, we can support them in making profound shifts that allow them to re-author themselves. And THAT is the work of coaching.

The more mature the field of coaching becomes, the more we coaches ask ourselves about our role as coaches and what is uniquely ours to do.

If this intrigued you and you’d like to explore the questions about the roles and responsibilities of coaches further, join Dr. David Drake and me for Finding Ourselves and Our Way Forward: A Safe Space to Ask the Big Questions beginning in January 2023.

We are working together to offer a restorative, generative and safe space for coaches and other practitioners like you to openly discuss our experiences, hopes and fears, and needs. And we want to explore who we need to be to meet our clients and the world where it is.

Learn more here.

Until next week,

Alison Whitmire