Over the years, I have spoken at many international coaching conferences and been struck by the number of coaches eagerly searching for new tools and methods from the panoply of workshops on offer, while ignoring the most important tool and resource they need for their work, namely their own self.
All leadership happens through relationship, and the same is even more true of coaching. “It takes two to tango” and “it takes two to coach.” Rather than think that as coaches we are coaching the client, it would be better to think of how we are doing the coaching in partnership between the coachee and coach, facing the challenges and lessons that life is providing for the client. This requires us to listen, not just with our ears and our neocortex, to understand cognitively what the client is relating to us, but also to listen with our whole body, to listen verbally and non-verbally, to the lyrics and the harmonics, to what is in the story and in the room and what is excluded, not in the room, but needs to be invited in. This may include the wider stakeholders of the client, needs from the future, or shadow aspects of the client. As coaches, we need to be resonating echo chambers that are finely tuned to the faintest of signals, both from the client as well as from their wider stakeholder ecosystem. This requires a lifetime of practice, supervision, and discipline, where we not only develop a depth of empathy and compassion with the individual client, but also “wide-angled empathy” for every individual, team, and system in their story (Hawkins, 2018).
It is with this in mind that I was delighted to receive and read Pam McLean’s latest book, in which she generously offers her long experience of coaching, supervising, and training coaches, to how we can use all of our self, in service of the work of coaching others. She offers not only powerful disciplines and practices we can use to regularly tune up our self as instrument, but also stories from her own life’s journey and vignettes of work with clients, illustrating how she has applied her deepening sensitivity. This weaving by Pam of the various strands illustrates how coaching is not something you can just learn in an initial training and then apply, but rather a lifelong action learning journey, where the challenges and learnings that are brought to you by your clients, if attended to with quality reflection, deepen and hone your practice, help you unlearn your previous models and assumptions, and deepen your self as instrument in service of others.
Pam McLean has been a beacon in the American coaching landscape, quietly showing how quality supervision is essential in this lifetime journey of deepening your self to deepen your coaching. For many cultural, political, legal, and historical reasons, the United States has been slower than many other parts of the world to adopt and develop the importance of lifelong learning and supervision for coaches (Hawkins & Smith, 2013; Hawkins & Turner, 2017). The Hudson Institute of Coaching in Santa Barbara, which Pam leads and where she teaches, has not just built supervision into all their training courses, but has also developed a supervision and lifelong learning ethic into their alumni community. In this book, in her own quiet and clear way, Pam provides a whole book showing the essential ingredients of our internal landscape, which details the qualities we need to constantly refine and deepen to be an effective coach. She shows that to develop these qualities requires more than self-reflection; the mirror, echo-resonance, support, and challenge of others and particularly trained supervisors who are further down the path than ourselves is an important component, as well.
I would recommend this book to all coaches, wherever they are on their coaching journeys, for even those of us who have been coaching for many decades need to have a beginner’s mind that is learning afresh with each client relationship and a practice of daily tuning of the instrument of our being to deeper and more subtle levels of receptivity and resonance.
Professor Peter Hawkins
Author of Leadership Team Coaching and many other coaching and leadership-related books