Offering a perspective is a judgement call

by Dr Tim Williams

In supervision, it’s often our role to offer a perspective from our own experience in support of the coach (and ultimately their clients) – ideally this is when it’s asked for, to maintain equality with the coach being supervised.  In coaching, I think it’s more of a judgement call.

Sometimes, when we’re listening deeply to a client, we sense something that, perhaps, they’re missing. Initially we may let this go, but then sometimes, as they continue to explore their situation and we continue to hold the space, that niggle comes back.  The question then, is what to do with this.  Do we ignore it and hope that they will discover it for themselves.  But, what if they don’t?– will they miss out on a transformative revelation and seismic shift that will catapult them into their new desired future?  Will they just stay stuck?  

Personal discovery builds self-confidence

I’ve heard it said and repeated several times on health coaching courses “Don’t let your knowing, get in the way of someone else’s discovery”.  In other words, avoid jumping in with advice and solutions and let clients come up with their own ideas and a way forward. There is definite power in people discovering things for themselves – it builds their confidence and self-belief in their own ability to grapple with their current and, importantly, future challenges.   In addition, in my experience, their ideas are often, much better than the ones, I’ve been desperate to share. In practice this looks like encouraging the client to go first and go as far as they can go, before I’m even tempted to add anything at all.

Adding a ‘vice’ to some else’s thinking

 We know that advice is generally unhelpful in coaching, unless there is an emergency, in which case, assuming you know what you’re doing, advise -away!  Otherwise, giving ‘advice’ is like ‘adding a vice’ to someone else’s thinking (keeping it still) while you do your thinking on them or their situation.  People, in my experience, don’t need that.  We want their own thinking to soar!  For that to happen, the people we support, might need some information – not everything we know about a topic, but just the right amount of information delivered in a way that they can absorb it and make use of it…and only when they are stuck.  We want to maintain equality, so the conversation might go along the lines of the one in last month’s blog:

Coach (Asks for permission):           

“Would it be ok if I offered an observation here? or

“I have some information about this, would that be useful to you?”

Client  (Gives consent):                                                               

“Yes”

Coach (Offers observation/Information):                

“What I’ve noticed is…., The information I have for you on this is…”

Coach (Checks back with the client):       

“What do you think about that?”

In this way the observation or insight is offered as potentially useful information to support someone’s best thinking.  I would also say that we need to be prepared for it not being useful at all and therefore hold the intervention, lightly.

Concern about taking the lead and a judgement call

There is of course a valid concern about taking the lead and we need to make a judgement call.  We know that health coaching, at its best, is non-directive and that is certainly how I prefer to practice.  However, people struggling to think through an issue with incorrect, incomplete or totally missing information, is also not very supportive. 

In a recent supervision session, a coach talked about whether it was right to ‘open the door’ to a yet unexplored area, which the coach felt would be useful.  Personally, I think this is fine and potentially very helpful, when used with care.  Opening a ‘door’ or ‘window’, for that matter, to show another perspective, I believe, is very different to dragging the client up to the ‘door’, opening it and pushing them through it, whether they like it or not.

In conclusion then, I’d suggest that we consider the reason for offering a perspective or information.  If it’s to support the clients best thinking, then perhaps proceed with care.  If it’s to satisfy our own curiosity, or we just to share what we know, stop right there!