Systems Are Greater than Goals
Here is my take: goals are a future state, a point to which you are navigating. Systems are the present, the right now, built of your daily habits or practices. Goals are what I want to achieve, and systems are how I will do it.
I Walk the Line, or How to Ask Provocative, Disruptive Questions
Have you ever looked at something so long that you stop seeing it? You know what I’m talking about—that pile of unread books on the shelf, the bags in your garage that need to go to donation, those items in your backlog that are good ideas but remain stuck in the good idea phase. We all have them in one form or another, and generally, whatever “it” is has been there so long that we stop seeing it. How do we get from “Everything is fine” to “housecleaning of the soul” to examining the unexamined?
Answer? Disruptive questions, questions so brazen that they are a shock to the system. They are that just-above-freezing, open-water winter swim. They are the thing that pulls you up short and suddenly, you can’t stop seeing what has been right there all along.
How Do I Practice Global Listening, or the Convergence of Attention and Awareness
As we closed the Agile Coaching Circle for Europe time zones for September, this question was posted in the chat:
How do I practice global listening?
Great question, and one that we should have answered a long time ago. You see, in each of the coaching circles, we do a bit of teaching up front about some coaching basics, namely a coaching arc, powerful questions, and levels of listening. We then hold practice coaching sessions with a debrief of what happened. However, we’ve never written about practice tips or suggestions on how to work on a specific skill.
Let’s fix that, starting now.
Role Nausea, or How to Not Get Sucked Under
Just as families do, organizations and teams have roles, too. Leader. Fixer. Communicator. Follower. Questioner. Avoider. Philosophizer. When someone joins the organization or team, the system shifts slightly. People may retain the roles they had occupied, adding or shedding new aspects of new or vacated roles, they might step into new roles altogether, or they might exit the team. Systems, be they familial or organizational, are not static.
Relationship systems rely on roles for their organization and execution of functions. Roles belong to the system, not to the individuals that inhabit the system.
To tie this back to coaching, I have pondered relationships, roles, and what to do when tired of and overwhelmed by a role. So, this month, this almost August, I’m writing to work through these questions:
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What are the roles in my system?
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How am I playing into these systemic roles?
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How do I step out of one role and into another?
Emergence in Systems, or the Crisis that Heals
I’m spending my summer hot, dusty, sweaty, and covered in things I don’t even want to imagine. And cursing. Lots of cursing. You see, I’m trying to help my parents clear out some of the “stuff” they have accumulated after a 52-year marriage, a ranch, teaching, and a rural veterinary practice. Thus far, I’ve rehomed 45 years of equine veterinary magazines, and I still have more to go. There are old textbooks, slide collections, bones, hats, journals, equipment, stories, tools, mementos, pictures, cards, photo albums, clothes, decor, and still boxes to be opened. There are barns, trailers, and places I probably don’t even want to think about. It’s a cruel, cruel summer.
Now might be a good time to mention that my dad was a veterinarian for over 40 years. He practiced in rural Montana, serving three counties and as any states. That meant that he saw a bit of everything: horses, dogs, cats, cattle, swans, elk, bison, large game cats from Zoo Montana. He still does a bit of consulting work, serves as a veterinarian for endurance rides, plus takes care of the horses, cattle, and dogs that he and mum still have. And when he isn’t a veterinarian, he ranches, keeping a close eye on his hay fields and rain clouds.
You’re starting to understand the cursing now, aren’t you.
When I’m honest with myself, I’m angry and resentful over having to do this work. For the past decade, I’ve been asking my parents to go through their “collections,” but to no avail. They always chuckle and agree that it needs to be done, but something else always comes first. My parents are unhappy with this summer’s purging activities, especially my father. He feels that I’m throwing away his life, and I’m unhappy that thus far, they tell me that they won’t leave me this to clean up but haven’t really done anything about the problem. We’re both digging in our heels. And this leads me to the question I’m grappling with:
What is happening in my system?
Who's Got the Monkey? How Healthy Boundaries and Responsibility Help You Help Yourself
What do monkeys have to do with boundaries? So much, as it turns out, and now is an excellent time to identify what boundaries are and what boundaries are not. Plainly put, boundaries are the limits we set with other people that indicate what we find acceptable and unacceptable in their behavior towards us. As Henry Cloud says, “Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership. Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me a sense of freedom.” My own father says, so very wisely, I might add, “You get what you tolerate.”
Meet, Reveal, and Align and Act: Embodied Action and Generative Change
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Barcelona for the first of a two-part training in embodied leadership. The training was also a good excuse to catch-up with a longtime friend, Dino Zafirakos and to meet his wife and two other coaching colleagues there in Spain. Dino is also a coach, and we co-lead, co-teach, bounce ideas off one another, and talk through scenarios and viewpoints. I’d recently been asked to think about the three iterative phases of relationship systems—Meet-Reveal-Align and Act—and a rainy day with forced sofa time was perfect to do just that. When I said, “Dino–help me think of a metaphor for “Meet, Reveal, Align, and Act,” he pushed it back to me and said, “What is a physical action you could do to embody that concept.” (So yes, he is a bit of an eye roll, but that is a story for another day.)
The thing is, Dino’s pushback was remarkably helpful, and it helped my thinking to move in new directions. “Meet,” “reveal,” and “align and act” are all verbs, and our verbal sparring reminded me to treat them as such. Thinking this concept through helped me to ask these questions:
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How can we embody the iterative phases and wisdom of Meet-Reveal-Align and Act?
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How can we share that learned, physical wisdom with the systems we serve?
What Is in a Voice, or How Systems Sing
A few weeks back, I caught a repeat airing of Krista Tippett’s “On Being” interview with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. Hempton travels the world, recording soundscapes like desert thunderstorms, the sound of wind in the grass, birdsong in deep forest. I remember first hearing this interview back in 2017 or so, and even then I was so struck with what Hempton was trying to do that I attempted to use his work with one of my teams. (Note: it didn’t go so well. The team called that experiment “log jam” and were kind of weirded out that I was asking them to listen to the sounds of the ocean inside a hollowed cedar log. But I digress.)
The repeated Hempton interview jogged another memory for me, this one of a choir of British military wives. Their husbands had been deployed, and to combat loneliness and to help them find home and connection, they gathered to sing. I don’t remember any of them being trained singers or even having much interest in singing, but coming together to raise their voices in loneliness, in longing provided an outlet that they didn’t even know they needed.
The combination of Hempton’s work with acoustic ecology and a choir of untrained voices made me stop and think about the concept of voice from a coaching perspective. What are the voices in a system? How do we listen to those voices? How do we lift those voices up? And lastly, how can we help people learn to “sing?”
Five Organizational Languages of Appreciation
As humans, we often teeter between connection and estrangement. When we don’t feel appreciated, seen, or valued, it’s all too easy to tip over into estrangement. By paying attention to how we appreciate one another in an organization, we stay out of estrangement and in connection. So, look around and pay exquisite attention to what you see happening around you. What do you see? What do you not see? What effect do organizational choices have on individuals?
Acts of Service, or the Doing in Our Being
To be honest, I’d not thought about being with my father in that cold, lonely hospital room until I heard Palmer talk about how a friend had helped him. That got me to thinking about how our feet are our connection to foundation, the ground on which we stand, and that led me to the questions I want to work to answer: How do we strengthen our foundations? How do we strengthen our community?
The Solace of Open Spaces, or Building Relationships of Trust
I like to use questions to challenge people and organizations, but questions can also be used as intentions to guide attention. When we use questions as intentions, we all look more closely, more deeply, finding solace in those open spaces.
The Softer Side of Psychological Safety
And me? I am a product of a very different time and way of working. I’ve done (and still do) my time in a therapist’s chair, I read studies and self-help books and practice practice practice, I let my clients and teams see my emotions. I’m an open book. Part of my strength as a coach is my willingness to be soft with those I serve. My willingness to be open started us off on equal footing. Because I had also stepped into vulnerability, it made it easier for them to wade into those troubled waters.
Cleaning Up Your Questions
Clean language is worthy of a deep dive all its own, and one day, I’ll get there. But today is not that day. This is the day to focus on how Clean language can help you to clean up the questions you use in coaching and mentoring sessions, in organizational retrospectives, and in any conversation with clients. Here is the question that drives this blog post: As coaches, how do we clean up our questions?
The Ugly Truth of Self-Management
I have what is politely called “a descriptive face,” meaning that whatever is going on inside of me, my face has already told you all about it. My mouth doesn’t help much, because whatever my face is telegraphing, my mouth likely has something to say about it. For me more than most others, self-management is not just an important coaching skill, but an important life skill.
How Much Is Enough, or Navigating Coaching Training and Credentials
Like so many others, I’ve doubled-down on education in 2020. A global pandemic seemed like the perfect time to focus on my skills. Finish a co-active coaching certification? Check. Finish the ORSC training series? Check. It helped that most of the training that I wanted to do was now being offered virtually, meaning that I could bypass travel costs, and more importantly, I could continue to work as the training was oftentimes split into half-day sessions. I could do training in the morning and then see clients in the afternoon. Win win!
But this leads me to the question that I seem to be fielding quite a bit of these days is this: What training or certification do I need to be a coach? What is enough?
Bouncing Back, or Building Resiliency through Adversity
The point that I’m trying to make is this: life happens. Stuff happens. It’s not personal, it’s just the way it is. But just because life gets shitty doesn’t mean that it will always be shitty. It will pass, but hopefully, the lessons we learn will not. As humans, we’ll bounce back more quickly and with greater resilience when we ask ourselves good, hard questions and learn to respond, not react to the challenges that come our way.
Three Types of Coaching Questions to Include in Coaching Conversations
I then asked this question, “What is it like to live amongst beauty?” The response from the client was immediate and powerful: tears.
But do you see what happened in that question? I used the client’s language about beauty and their home to ask a powerful, meaningful question. I played off their words, their imagery to deepen the context of the conversation. The strength of that first question helped us to have a meaningful, productive session, culminating in a course of action that brought them immense joy. I doubt that we would have gotten there, however, without that first, great question.
Permission to Fail, or the Best Gift I Ever Gave Myself
Permission to fail is a deep breath, a confession. Permission to fail is the covenant I build with myself. By making failure something to be accepted, I learn to trust myself to overcome that failure. I trust myself to survive failure because I’ve done it before. I trust myself to learn from my experiments, from my mistakes. I trust myself to do better the next time. I trust myself to get up.
Three Types of Coaching Questions You Should Never Ever Ask During Coaching Conversations
I’ve heard that said, many a time. And up until I began coaching and fell in love with questions, I believed that statement. However, while there may not be a poor question, there is most definitely a poor type of question. I should know—I’ve tried to ask those types of questions and had my coaching sessions fall short of where they could be.
As a coach, there are three types of questions I avoid in coaching conversations. By bringing them into the open, I’m hoping to help you avoid them, too.
Fizzy Pop Whoosh, or Why I'm Going to Celebrate
I’m often asked how I got from there (a technical writer for engineering teams) to where I am now (coach, mentor, speaker, <insert favorite noun here>). And the answer is simple: a whole lot of very hard work. And a lot of very expensive training that I go out of my way to practice and to use. But the answer goes deeper than that. I am here because my past experiences forged the woman you see before you. Who I am now is because of what I survived.