I know, because it happened to me
In the mid-1990s, when life coaching had barely been heard of in the UK, one of my friends had signed up for distance learning with a training institute in the US. She needed clients to build up her coaching hours, I was curious about this new phenomenon (and whether it could add anything over and above my newly-acquired NLP Practitioner skills), so I agreed to become one of her practice clients.
For context, I was a single guy in my thirties renting a pleasant flat in a nice though occasionally edgy part of London. I was in reasonable shape (running, cycling, gym). My hypnotherapy practice was slowly building, but luckily I had quite a bit saved from my previous undistinguished but stressful career in IT. I felt pretty good about life on the whole.
One of the forms she gave me to complete was called the ‘Clean Sweep Program’. This was a checklist of 100 items covering the areas of physical environment, health and emotional balance, money, and relationships, and designed, it said, to give one ‘complete personal freedom’ when completed and go towards establishing a ‘Strong Personal Foundation’.
I noticed immediately that it was, by its nature, a very prescriptive list. “I drink purified water” – well, if London tapwater could be so described. “I rarely use caffeine” (less than 3 times per week) – I was in trouble. “I rarely drink alcohol (less than 2 drinks per week) – oh dear.
It’s when I got to the ‘Money’ section of the checklist that my heart really sank. “My income source/revenue base is stable and predictable” – er, no. Some weeks, lots of clients, others, just a few. They got fixed, then they moved on. “I have a financial plan for the next year” – whaat? I just didn’t think that way! “My earnings outpace inflation, consistently” – definitely not, at that time.
But of course they should, according to the checklist. With a growing sense of despair I went back to other areas of the list that I’d been able to laugh off previously. “My bed is made daily” – well, maybe if I was expecting company. “My car is in excellent condition” – I didn’t even have a car (living in the city, it wasn’t a priority, which was fortunate given that I couldn’t afford one). “I know how much I must have to be minimally financially independent and I have a plan to get there” – well, possibly, in my dreams.
To be fair, that last one did say “This exercise has been designed to shock you into reality.” Well, that worked! Or at least the ‘shock’ part did; I felt like I was carrying a cold, heavy stone around in my stomach, utterly demoralised and feeling somewhat incompetent at being a grown-up. I dropped out of coaching soon after, and eventually lost touch with the friend.
You might be saying, “Well, clearly you needed that wake-up call”. But did I? I wasn’t shocked into action. If anything, I was less motivated for a while, because I was feeling somewhat of a loser. All the deficits that the checklist identified, whether real or prescriptive according to a particular (and very ‘American’) view of how life should be lived, obscured the things that were working in my life.
In retrospect, there were quite a few of those; the (mostly) pleasant area I lived in, with lots of bars and restaurants and easy access to parks and the river, the many clients I had helped to overcome life-ruining problems, my growing skills and confidence, an active social and dating life, the voracious reading that opened up areas of knowledge that I’d never had time to pursue in my previous day job. Life was actually pretty good moment to moment, and improving.
None of which is to say that this assessment might not be helpful to some clients – it just wasn’t helpful for me at that moment in my life.
What if we focused on strengths and positives instead?
I wonder what the effect would have been if, instead of identifying deficits in my life, the checklist had helped me to recognise my strengths and build on what was working. I’m pretty sure it would have worked better, both in terms of morale and actual objectively-measured achievement.
I’m not just guessing here. There is some research evidence to back it up. In the coaching-adjacent field of therapy, a study by Christoph Flückiger and Martin Grosse Holtforth found that getting therapists to focus on a client’s strengths for just ten minutes before the first five sessions of psychotherapy improved relationships with the client, and led to greater improvements by session 20.
Why does this happen? A plausible explanation is provided by another study, by Richard Boyatzis and Anthony Jack, entitled The Neuroscience of Coaching. This studied the effects of two styles of coaching: ‘coaching with compassion’, which focused on the test subjects’ ideal vision of what their work and personal life would look like 10 to 15 years in the future; and ‘coaching for compliance’, which instead focused on the focused on the challenges and problems facing the test subjects, and how well they were handling the expectations placed on them. The ‘coaching with compassion’ subjects felt more motivated, more positive, and much more inspired by the coach, while the ‘coaching for compliance’ process tended to induce feelings of guilt, being judged, and obligation.
The authors concluded that:
“the best way to engage a mind-set that will lead to sustained effort in learning or change is to coach in a manner that first engages and then sustains the individual’s own vision of his or her dreams and aspirations.”
In contrast, focusing from the start on problems and challenges “tends to activate a mind-set that results in defensiveness and the closing down of the individual’s perceptual, cognitive, and motivated openness to change. In other words, it only increases the psychological burden on someone who is already feeling challenged by life circumstances.”
Too much focus on problems and threats leads to overwhelm, and shuts down the creative thinking that’s needed to deal with challenges that the individual hasn’t faced before. Given that our brains give more weight to negatives than to positives anyway, we need a coaching approach that focuses on our strengths and achievements, and encourages us to redress the balance by looking up from the problem to see the opportunities that have been there all along.
We need, in fact, an approach like Appreciative Inquiry.
