We want to support people we care about.
I believe most of us want to be kind to people in general. In the last year, I think all of us have felt called upon to do this more than ever this year.
This can be hard to know what to do or say when someone has a problem or is in pain. Even when we want to do something we often get held back by the fear of saying the wrong thing or wanting to find the perfect thing to say or do.
We often tend to fall back to our default helping mechanism.
Advice.
One of the four key cornerstones of the Co-active Coaching Model is that people are naturally creative resourceful and whole. This implies that people have all of the resources needed to solve most of the issues in their lives. It also takes the complexity of humans into account which makes giving advice not super useful and almost impossible (despite what we may think).
Shifting from the ‘problem solver’ to ‘coaching the person’ perspective has been challenging for me as a coach. When I first started coaching, I focused on solving the person’s problem in the effort to deliver ‘value’ to the relationship and make me look good. In reality, I helped the person more by letting them solve their own issues.
During the last year, I have unlearned a lot of my problem-solving instincts and shifted my mindset from ‘helping’ to ‘service’ instead.
A Service Mindset
During my coaching training, I was introduced to the work of physician, educator, and writer Rachel Naomi Remen.
To be of service to someone is to see that person as a whole — heart, body, mind, and spirit. In other words, people are not the problem they are going through. Your parent is not cancer. Your friend is experiencing unemployment; she is not unemployed. Seeing someone as a whole helps to explain why service is a relationship of equals. We all experience suffering just as we all experience joy.
As adults, we gain satisfaction from fixing problems and providing answers. This is something we have been taught to do early on in schools and the workplace. Having the answer was rewarded. Rachel Naomi Remen points out that helping this way makes us feel better but it often really isn’t what is needed.
Dr Remen noted that helping is based on inequality. When we help, we use our strength to aid someone of lesser strength, someone who is needier than us.
People feel this inequality. When we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity and wholeness.
I have a hard time eliminating using the word help in my conversations. I find replacing it with ‘serving’ seems uncomfortable and too ‘coachy’ for some. In my heart and mind, though, I focus on service.
Fixing is based on the notion that someone is broken. When our goal is to fix, we don’t see the other person as naturally creative resourceful and whole.
There is the distance between ourselves and whatever or whomever we are fixing. Fixing is a form of judgment. All judgment creates distance, a disconnection, an experience of difference.
Fixing and helping detach us from the person and the relationship is the direct opposite of what you want to achieve in a coaching relationship.
Dr Remen sums it up nicely:
I am as served as the person I am serving.
When we serve, we view others as collaborators.