Personal & Professional Development Meets Transformation

Coaching can build skills, and good coaching can support your growth as a human, beyond the default programming that keeps you stuck. 

Consider the amount of advice and content readily available to us through books, websites, blogs, podcasts, and courses. For instance, we have access to an incredible practical skill knowledge base of how to build, scale, and manage a startup. There’s no knowledge shortage. 

The difference though, between reading a book or listening to a podcast and executing those ideas in your company is all mental and emotional. If it was as easy as reading the book and executing, we’d have cities filled with world-class CEOs. But that’s simply not the case. 

What gets in the way is our default programming as human beings.

Learning to Speak a New Leadership Language

It’s a safe bet that if your family spoke English when you were a child, your first words weren’t German. You can only speak the language that your brain has heard. And it’s the same with any kind of behavior–including the behaviors of leadership and running a company. 

Here’s an example.

Once we were facilitating an offsite for a well-known Bay area company. We asked the executives in the room to tell us about conflict in their homes growing up and their strategies for dealing with it. The head of customer success said, “You know, my dad drank a lot and so we always needed to make sure we didn’t upset him. The way I dealt with it was I would proactively go and solve problems that weren’t problems yet because if they became problems it was going to be really, really bad.”

We asked the head of customer success how that behavioral pattern might be showing up with her coworkers. She said, “They often think I don’t trust them because I’m always solving problems that aren’t there.” 

You can read every management book under the sun, but at the end of the day, if your default programming for solving conflict is to solve invisible problems, you’re going to be doing that in your work life and it’s going to be having an effect on your relationships. 

The head of customer success had a tense relationship with one or two executives in particular, and we saw that tension begin to dissolve right there in the moment. They both responded with something like, “Oh, that’s why you do that. It’s not about me.” Suddenly there was compassion where there hadn’t been. This is an example of radical self-inquiry. 

From there, we talked with the executive team about a set of practical skills for when that internal alarm went off and the head of customer success wanted to go start solving invisible problems. But if we’d started with a practical communication framework, it would’ve been like expecting a child from an English-speaking family to suddenly converse in German. 

Again, there is no shortage of information on what to do when running our businesses. What gets in the way is who we are, how we think, and how we feel. Often, we need skills and tools to help us navigate our way through specific situations, and we need to understand how we get in our own way (or, how we are complicit in creating the conditions we say we don’t want).