CHAPTER 23
STAYING THE COURSE ON THE JOURNEY TO MASTERY
Senge (2006) reminds us that staying the course on the perpetual road to mastery is perhaps one of the greatest goals of any accomplished and conscientious professional: “People with a high degree of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them. In effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own life long learning.”
The work of coaching is both art and science, and there is no one right way or a final arrival point of mastery marked by a degree or credential for any of us. Instead, the mastery journey is fraught with challenges and failures along the way and the sheer exhilaration that comes with growing mastery. Beware of the coach who has a singular method, technique, or categorization of behaviors that he or she uses to understand and approach work with every client. This is not mastery; it is clinging to a singular perspective in a world and field of study that has much more depth and complexity.
Practitioners on the mastery journey will find that continued cultivation and practice in the basic areas evidenced in the elements of masterful coaching (Figure 4.1)—self as coach, knowledge and skill-based competencies, and coaching methodology—are inextricably interwoven with each layer of development and mastery uncovering another layer of subtle intricacies: with self, the working alliance, or the growing ability to facilitate lasting change.
It is helpful for coach practitioners to overlay the developmental progression outlined by both Howell (1982) and Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) relative to the key areas covered in this book in order to map their own developmental pathway. Consider Chapter Eleven on coach methodology, including the thorough discussion of the Hudson coaching methodology (Figure 11.3).
For novice coaches, this chapter will likely appear both formulaic and a soothing source of a step-by-step process. However, any good methodology is meant to be an agile and flexible framework that provides support for coach and client on the path to reaching reliable outcomes. Experienced practitioners will quickly see that rather than a step-by-step process, a methodology represents a general flow to the coaching engagement that includes essential elements that may occur and reoccur in a much less predictable fashion in real life than the model suggests. Part Two on the self as coach and the model for the self-as-coach domains (Figure 4.3) can be viewed in the same manner.
Novice coaches will interpret the domains of the self as coach as more simplistic and concrete than experienced coaches will, and the progression from the simplistic to the complex is part of the joy of the journey to mastery that Senge (2006) refers to in the quotation at the start of this chapter. It’s only when we’ve experienced a failure in our coaching because we didn’t attend to or notice an important boundary that we begin to viscerally understand the layers at play in the development of our boundary awareness. Range of feelings appears straightforward to coaches, but as the journey progresses and the conscientious coach engages in a reflective practice, she might begin to notice how often she moves away from certain feelings—angry, sadness, tears—with her clients and contemplates the limitations her own range of feelings creates in the coaching work. And of course, we could continue around the wheel and peel the layers of complexities found in each of the domains.
Embrace the path you are on, and view it as an ever-unfolding process. Perhaps the following strategies will support you on this journey to mastery:
Ten Strategies to Stay on the Journey to Mastery
1. Know yourself. Inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, this wisdom has been passed along through the ages from Plato, to Hobbes, to Benjamin Franklin. Leaders and thinkers through the ages have imparted this sound maxim that we must always start at home with self-knowledge before we seek to know and understand others.
2. Develop yourself. Continual development is an important ethic and mind-set for every coach. Coaches from novice to experienced are well served by routinely setting development priorities, seeking feedback to uncover the most important areas of development, and creating mechanisms for accountability. It’s hard to grow alone, so support yourself by seeking coaching, creating collegial development groups, or joining a supervision experience.
3. Take care of yourself. The work of coaching inevitably leads us into difficult terrain—sometimes painful, other times deeply challenging—and it’s likely you’ll leave some sessions and engagements feeling discouraged, lost, and at times inadequate. This is unavoidable, and it requires a thoughtful plan for regular self-care. Self-care will include different practices for each of us. Perhaps it is the ability to reach out and sit in conversation with a fellow colleague, or the ability to say no when it matters most, or the routine of setting aside time for leisure or cordoning off space in life without technology at our side. Learning to take care of self is a perpetual challenge for many of us. Set routine goals in areas of self-care that are most important and engage in your own self-coaching to stay the course.
4. Engage in reflection. Schön (1983) taught us about the power of reflection-in-action—that ability to think and reflect while we are engaged in the act of doing, and Clutterbuck’s work covered in Chapter Seven examines seven layers of reflective conversations a coach might engage in from the moments before a coaching session until well after the coaching concludes. Reflection is foundational to learning: learning about self (feelings, biases, reactions), learning about others, and learning about the world around us. Experiment with a reflective practice that works for you, and engage in this practice on a regular basis. Maybe it’s time alone in nature, a long walk in a restorative setting, a meditation practice, a yoga practice, time alone in a sacred space, or regular journaling—and stay the course.
5. Know your fields of study. Coaching is far more than a set of skills; it’s an emerging field built on the shoulders of giants (many of them discussed throughout this book) with an ever-increasing volume of research and writing specifically focused on coaching. As coaches, we must be literate in the fields that inform our work and remain up-to-date with research and writing in coaching, as well as peripheral fields that are relevant to our work. Make a list of key relevant readings at the beginning of each new year, and stay the course.
6. Read outside your field of expertise. We learn about the vicissitudes of life and our universal human dilemmas through literature, history, fiction, poetry, art, and more. Branch out, and expand your thinking, your emotional terrain, and your being.
7. Regularly engage in a form of supervision. Whether you are at the early stages on the journey to mastery or are an experienced coach, you will inevitably encounter moments of doubt, coaching failures, coaching dilemmas, and ethical puzzles in your work. A coach without a supervision relationship in one form or another is left to make sense of these situations using only his or her own frame of reference, experiences, knowledge, and understanding of self. Such a choice is perhaps how we might define arrogance, and it surely speaks to a cautionary comment by Manfred Kets de Vries (Kets de Vries, Korotov, and Florent-Treacy, 2007): “I have come to believe that any coach who does not take supervision is bordering on irresponsible. No coach has the monopoly on wisdom and an experienced coach is a sine qua non, an extra mirror to the work.” So whether you find a respected colleague or join a formal supervision group, if you want to provide the highest-quality service to your clients and simultaneously build your own capacity, this is an essential part of the journey.
8. Respect your clients. Our clients are often our best teachers. If you find it difficult to maintain a respectful position about a client, you probably shouldn’t be engaged as that person’s coach. A fundamental respect for those we are working with is at the core of the working alliance and essential for great coaching to occur.
9. Maintain hope and optimism. Richard Davidson says, “Hope is the comforting, energizing, elevating feeling that you experience when you project in your mind a positive future” (quoted in Groopman, 2003, p. 193). A growing body of research in the area of hope and positivity teaches us that hope rapidly leads to other positive emotions that have a direct impact on our behavior and the way we think and act. Monitor yourself for a week or two, and pay close attention to the level of hope and optimism present in your life on a daily basis. If your findings surprise you, make some adjustments in order to build a stronger reservoir of optimism and hope.
10. Humility matters. Humility fosters the working alliance, and it empowers the client’s ownership of change. Robert Quinn (2004) speaks to it in this way: “Being humble is often associated with weakness or lack of power. Real humility comes when we see the world as it really is. The real world is a world of connectedness, of moving flows of power. When we transcend our own egos, when our outer self and our inner self connect, we experience increased integrity, increased oneness, greater connectedness. At such moments, we feel greatness.”
As coaches, we all find ourselves drifting toward arrogance from time to time when we get too attached to models, concepts, assessments, and more, sending a message to our client that we know better than the client what the best next step is or what the accurate interpretation might be. Yet the work of fostering humility happens when we are engaged in a conscious journey to mastery knowing we’ll never arrive because that’s not the goal. The goal is the journey.