Coaching is a Creative Process

A few years ago, the head of a coaching company looked at the feedback from my coaching clients and asked me, “How is it that you have such an impact on your clients?  The clients talk about how you are changing their lives.”  This person is well-educated from an Ivy League school and evidence-based in their approach to coaching.  I was even asked to write an article about my approach to coaching.  With a new venture beginning for me, it seems the right time to reflect on this.  

I often don’t know the impact I’m having, and sometimes clients don’t know the true effect of coaching until after the coaching has ended. While how I show up in the world and who I am as a person, human being, coach, creative, mom, etc., is of critical importance to me, when I’m working with a client, all that fades to the background, so that I can be fully present to them and their needs.

I haven’t found a simple response when asked about my coaching but there are pieces that I can speak to with authenticity. 

I’m educated, but I don’t have a PhD. I embrace evidence-based approaches and have studied with leading schools in coaching and human behavior, though I don’t believe these are the differentiators in my coaching impact.

I’m flexible and willing to work creatively with clients – this may be a big piece.  I’m reminded of a client who didn’t have a boss for the entire year we worked together.  No one to orient them to being a leader or to bounce challenging situations off. So, in addition to being their coach, I was often a surrogate boss.  They brought questions to coaching that they might have taken to their boss if they had one, and we worked together to test possible solutions. In this situation, my 30-year corporate career in leadership roles, combined with coaching, allowed me to have a unique approach.

I don’t coach with a particular model; instead, I take all the training, models, and coaching methodologies and let them sit in the background, knowing that they are filters and tools to help me understand different situations my clients experience.

The client is the only expert on their experience. This is a fundamental principle of adult development—not just coaching. I see my job as a coach as giving clients the space to express who they are without judgment.

I see each person as a thinking, feeling, and spiritual being. I remember that each person lives within the context of society, which sets a background of rules that shape behaviors and attitudes at very early ages—and that that context may be very different from my own. 

I have learned that no matter the age or stage of life, all humans have been bumped and bruised along life’s journey, and those bumps and bruises can result in adaptive behaviors that mask and hide the hurts, vulnerability, and blinding beauty within them.

Rather than side-stepping the bumps and bruises and making them “part of the past,” as a coach, I notice how these may be manifesting in the present and invite clients to notice this, too.

I love my clients.  Yes, the love word.  When I coach and walk with others to their deepest places, helping them face their fears and, even more frightening – their potential, I can’t help but fall deeply in love with them.  I often see their blinding beauty before they do.  They become a part of my heart. 

I am intuitively connected, and I wonder if this isn’t my coaching superpower (it has undoubtedly saved my life on more than one occasion!).  My intuition seems to have always been with me.  It’s not like there was any one day that I woke up and discovered its presence.  I didn’t have a language for intuition until my twenties when I was exposed to the MBTI, and I got so excited to learn about this aspect of myself.  My intuition is my GPS.  It guides my decisions.  When my intuition and empathy engage in my inner world, a powerful dialogue informs the coaching conversation. 

As I’m writing this, I’m reminded of another client I worked with recently who was going through a major career transition. It was unexpected and disorienting. But rather than jump into “what are you going to do next?” We noticed together the fears that were surfacing and gave those worries a voice and a chance to be expressed. Once those fears were worked through, this client eased into “finding a new job.”

So, what does this creativity have to do with coaching?

As coaches, we can get nervous about “what might come up” during a coaching session.  It’s happened to me many times.  Will I ask the right question?  Will I help or hinder? 

I no longer see myself as someone in the “business of coaching”.  I see myself as a facilitator of self-expression – mine and others.  By finding creative ways to encourage self-expression with my clients, they can heal themselves and restore their spirits.  Being able to work with clients in this way requires that I have done my own deep healing work and that I attend to being activated when it comes up, particularly if it comes up during a coaching session.

I am a work in progress.  What I know today will be replaced as I learn new things.  I expect to keep making mistakes, dusting myself off, and starting over again.

Like every individual, coach, healer, teacher, visionary, therapist, and leader, we each have our own secret sauce that makes our touch and approach unique. We are neither less than anyone nor better than anyone.

What I do know in the deepest core of my being is that once a person has begun to experience the healing, restoration, and freedom that comes from self-expression, the window of possibilities swings wide for them. I hope I never forget this.

What is in your secret sauce?  What makes who you are and what you do a unique expression of yourself?  Isn’t it time you said this out loud, too?