Dogged persistence – fossil hunting

Often coaching is about finding the right question to ask: the one that opens your client’s mind to some completely new insight. To do this you have to keep approaching your client’s issue from all sorts of directions. It is a little like being a fossil hunter: gently tapping away at a stone until it cracks open to reveal a perfect specimen hidden inside.

 

I had an interesting experience recently with a coachee (she happens to be an experienced executive coach) who presented me with a personal issue that had bothered her for many years. I did not feel entirely comfortable with my ability to address her concern and wondered whether it might be something that I should refer to someone with different specialist skills to my own. Nevertheless I thought it worth spending a little time exploring before jumping to any conclusions. After questioning her closely for about twenty minutes I seemed to be getting nowhere and I was feeling more and more uncomfortable with the subject matter. Pulling myself together I put all my focus into thinking laterally about my coachee’s situation and I persisted with the questioning even though some of the questions I was coming up with could have seemed rather odd.

 

Then suddenly I asked her the “right” question and her whole demeanour changed. It was like cracking open the stone and finding a fascinating fossil inside. She had discovered that a critical assumption about her concern was not what she thought it was and that gave her a whole new perspective: we had broken through a barrier in her thinking. In itself this did not “solve” anything but it did provide us with a step forward in addressing her overall issue.

 

The lesson here is that it is not always possible to crack open a stone in twenty minutes but do not give up: keep coming in from different angles and you’ll get there eventually.

 

[Thanks to Cris Janzen for planting the seed that inspired this blog entry.]