What's coaching really about?

You're a developmental coach right? More than that- you're an Integral developmental coach? None of that 'performance coaching' for you?

It's easy to forget that ALL coaching is about helping someone make progress on something that matters. In other words improved performance may not be THE goal of developmental coaching - but it should be an outcome.

So what is the proper place of 'improving performance' if you're a developmental coach? And how do you 'thread the needle' between 'inner work' and action?

Remember that old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall? Yup, practise, practise, practise.

Other than being abducted by aliens and returned in some form of ‘upgraded’ way, our understanding of how we become new versions of ourselves (i.e. developing) necessarily involves doing different things and doing things differently.

In other words, ‘doing’ is at the heart of ‘becoming’.

Paradoxical huh? This is not to deny our neuroplasticity, or our ability to set a radically different course, or even the power of certain states and experiences to ‘change’ us in a fundamental way. But how we continue embodying changes is an ongoing process. Or what we might call a path of practice.

Why then do some coaches see developmental coaching and performance coaching as Either/Or rather than seeing developmental work as necessarily incorporating improved performance?

I have some theories based on conversations with coaches I’ve had:

It doesn’t feel like deep and satisfying work for the coach

Developmentally minded coaches often find more satisfaction in doing so-called ‘deeper’ inner work and sessions that result in cognitive, emotional or somatic ‘ahas’.

The word ‘performance’ sounds like we encouraging ‘performativity’

Improving a client’s performance, sounds like we’re trying to help them only to adopt new behaviours, whether or not those behaviours are intrinsically motivated and lead to results that are meaningful for the client

Performance coaching emphasises goals and we don’t believe in goals

For those who’ve read how goals - even so-called ‘self-improvement’ goals - are counter-productive in terms of long term change, incorporating goals may seem like a bad idea

And yet, it would be weird, wouldn’t it, if developmental coaches helped clients grow into less capable new versions of themselves? So all developmental coaching journeys lead to ‘improved performance’: but rather than taking the ‘straight road’ (sometimes called ‘horizontal development’), a developmental journey digs deeper and broader (’vertical development’) resulting in new capacities, which in turn results in improved performance.

So how do we thread the needle between inner work and action/improved performance? Describe the journey:

• Articulate the ‘red thread’: that’s the phrase we use for the relationship between a client’s presenting issue and the developmental ‘topic’. The red thread is like telling the client why you’re heading east first when they want to arrive in the north

• Include ‘performance’ in Purpose and Outcomes statement: If the purpose is an inviting description of what life is like as the journey unfolds, the outcomes are what a client can expect to observe, in themselves, others and the world as that journey unfolds

• Help insights lead to action: Remember that old saw: ‘give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for his life’. ‘Aha moments’ can be powerful - and slippery. Unless the powerful, slippery fish get off the line and into the pan: no-one’s eating. *

• Small is beautiful: Big G, destination-style goals may be counterproductive, but little-g goals can be small experiments in living differently. These can be life-changing.

*For a practice that can help cultivate a habit of taking insights and inner work into action, see the Tool Shed for the ‘Reversed SWOT’