Coaching isn’t always a comfortable experience. When it achieves most, it often involves an uncomfortable journey into ourselves and our motivations. According to research by Dr Paul Stokes at Sheffield Hallam University, coachees can be skilled at engaging with the coaching conversation – or at avoiding difficult issues. Engaging processes include scenario planning, remaining open to different processes and seeking to challenge their own thinking. Defensive strategies, however, such as deflection and diversion, can defeat the coach’s efforts to have a meaningful conversation. Stokes finds that these coachees can block even a skilled coach, who has a wide range of helping tools at his or her disposal. As he describes it: “the coachee was able to fend off the coach by moderating their responses, avoiding areas of greater depth and vulnerability, but still seeming to engage in a relatively open dialogue”.
So, how can you recognise this phenomenon and what can you do about it?
Recognising sabotage
The coachee’s behaviour may not be a deliberate ploy. Everyone has strategies to cope with mental discomfort and these are often expressed unconsciously. Talking around a subject, without confronting it head on, is one of the most common mechanisms. However, this is easily confused with the positive behaviour of talking round a subject to get a clearer perspective on it. The difference can be expressed by the metaphor of being focused in and being focused out. When we are focused in on an issue, we choose a position and try to understand what we see and experience from that perspective. When we are focused out, we move to another position whenever we don’t like what we are beginning to see from where we are, or when we feel we are getting too close for comfort.
You can sense the driving force behind a wandering conversation by noticing what triggers a shift of topic. Do you perceive a genuine curiosity to explore another facet of the issue, or an unwillingness to focus on anything that might require greater critical analysis or lead to uncomfortable insights? You will find clues in the client’s:
- Body language – are they truly relaxed and engaged, or do they show signs of stress?
- Pace of conversation – if they are truly engaged with the topic, they will take pauses to reflect on an idea (i.e. they will want to take in a new perspective)
- Emotions – do they express only a narrow, relatively controlled range of emotions, or a wide range as facets of the conversation provide different stimuli?
- Self-conversations – do they review and challenge their own thinking processes and assumptions, or are you the coach doing all the hard work?
Countering sabotage
Once you have recognised potential sabotage, you have several tactics at your disposal. Naming what you suspect can be effective, but runs the risk of pushing them deeper into denial and avoidance. If they didn’t want to face in before, the fear evoked by direct challenge can make them even less inclined to do so.
Other, more subtle approaches include:
- Where do you feel this conversation is going? What are we going towards and what are we trying to get away from?
- Ask them to stand up (this automatically helps to create a shift of perspective). Explain the metaphor of focusing in and out. Place an object on the floor to represent the issue and invite them to decide which way they want to face – towards or away from it. Restart the conversation, with them looking in and you standing diametrically opposite them (so the issue lies between you). As they begin to drift away in focus, shift your position, so they cannot look at you and the issue at the same time. Experiment with different positions to indicate where you feel they are focused (or unfocused). Positions may include being behind them (forcing them to look outwards at you), beside them facing opposite directions, or beside them facing the same way. The ultimate aim is to be both side by side facing towards the issue, with them feeling supported in facing up to it.
- Asking What is the challenge for you here? Explain that you have the impression the conversation is taking place well within their comfort zones. What could the two of you do together to take us into a place of less comfort but higher learning potential?
- Another way of getting to the same point is to ask How could we make this a more courageous conversation?
- Draw with them an issues map (a series of circles, each representing an issue, with circles either overlapping or not, depending on how interconnected they are) to capture the conversation so far. Leave an empty circle in the middle and draw a larger circle to encompass all the smaller ones. What is the issue in the middle, which we haven’t named? What is the bigger issue, which encompasses all these issues?
If, despite your efforts, the coachee is determined to keep the conversation at a superficial, intellectual level, that is their choice. A coach may open a path for the coachee to follow, but they cannot make them take it. Do not be impatient for them to become ready to focus inwards, but do continue to create opportunities for them to do so. In a coaching assignment of limited or fixed number of sessions, you can fulfil your duty by reflecting on your impressions in the wind-up conversation. In the case of a line manager acting in a coaching style, there will come a time when you need to confront the issue and this can be triggered by a lack of progress towards specific goals.
© David Clutterbuck, 2017