A couple of months ago, a coaching client told me that working with me had been transformative. I was chuffed to bits, but I was also gratified, for her. Because I know how hard she’d grappled with the challenges she faced and also the enormity of change she’d experienced. But transformation comes with a health warning – it will change what it means to be you! In this blog, I’m going to share elements of my client’s story and also highlight the role of the coach. If it provides you with answers, that’s great; if it provokes more questions, even better!
Tranformational learning was developed by Jack Mezirow, and I’ll be honest, I find his work addictive. But not all coaching needs to be transformational. That’s a word I reserve only for the deep stuff, when it touches on our identity and our values. Other times our learning is less deep, though it has plenty of purpose. You may need to learn time management skills to balance new work/life responsibilities? Or perhaps your new promotion means you really do need to get to grips with strategy development? The learning you need to do is real, but it’s transactional – you’ll learn to exchange one set of habits for another. It will lead to incremental change, rather than transformative change.
When we use words like transformative and transformational, we’re talking about fundamental shifts in our understanding, in how we see ourselves and the world around us. So why the health warning?
A woman transformed
I’ll use my newly transformed client to explain what I think goes on. Like many of us she worked hard and did well. She achieved a promotion and we started our coaching journey. Shortly afterwards she took a nine month maternity break, and we picked up again just as she returned to work. The person I encountered after maternity leave was already a woman transformed. We spent some time mapping the nature and extent of the change she’d undergone – motherhood, adaptation – and agreed that it was, as she had anticipated, a fundamental shift at the level of her identity. That was the first transformation.
We continued to map how this change at her identity level was influencing things at work. Through her actions and behaviour her relationships, the speed of her decision making, her approach to management – in short everything – had changed. What quickly became apparent was an unanticipated dissatisfaction with the way things now were. The new job which had been so exciting and challenging before her break, now felt less rewarding and more draining.
Working with purpose
For a couple of coaching conversations we worked, purposefully, on shoring up her resilience. She got better at prioritising the work that mattered and learned to differentiate between this and all the other stuff that fills the day (and our inboxes), but doesn’t add value. This is the transactional work I alluded to earlier. Within a short while however, it became clear that my client now felt truly trapped. What had previously felt like meaningful work now felt meaningless. But the job hadn’t changed. She had. My only option as a conscientious coach was to ask a tough question: “What does it now mean to be you?”
In all change processes, there is a point where we have to let go of the way things were in order to create the way they’re going to be in the future. In a coaching context, that also means letting go of some part of our former self in order to allow the new self to emerge. Social psychologist Kurt Lewin describes this process as Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze. This was the point my client had now reached. Letting go of, or unfreezing, our old ways is not a pleasant experience. We don’t always know what shape we need things to be in going forwards. We have to be prepared to live with unknowing, or not knowing. For some people, working with a coach as a thinking partner makes the early stages of the change process easier.
What endures and what emerges
So what was I doing at this early stage of the game? Reflecting back on that month in the middle of our coaching relationship, I was doing two things. Firstly, I was reminding my client of her enduring qualities which would resurface once she’d worked through this difficult transition. My reminding served to bring her strengths into clearer focus. Secondly, I was reassuring her that the ambiguity of the present would not last. And my reassurance helped her identify and develop a new strength – resilience in the face of ambiguity. Some theorists call this “adaptive capacity”. I find that it’s less talked about in management training sessions because it’s a skill which has to be developed in practice. We cannot teach people how to adapt in the face of unknown change, we have to experience change in order to learn how to adapt.
A range of tricky emotions abound when we are experiencing change or transition – anger, denial, indifference and acceptance are all to be expected. Through our coaching conversations, I was able to help my client identify these and accept them for what they were – psychological indicators that her perceptions were shifting. Within a relatively short time, and following some honest conversations between my client and those closest to her, my client had reached a stage of acceptance. She was able to put some distance between herself and the decisions she was now making. A stronger self was emerging, one which was able to accept both the person she had been and the new version of herself which was now crystallising.
The “destination employer” trap
One of the hardest parts of this transformative process however was letting go of beliefs about the organisation for whom my client worked. For most of my clients, as for my younger self, our choice of employer is intimately connected with our identity. Many of my clients have sought out an employer for their intrinsically worthwhile purpose. They therefore believe them to be worthy of loyalty. I describe these as “destination employers”. In some ways the earlier in our careers we land a job with them, the more limiting our choices become, though this is rarely obvious at the outset.
The work of transformation often requires us to revisit the things we hold dear, which we believe to be true. For my client, there was sadness as well as anger as she realised that the employer she believed would value her, could not match her new expectations. It required objectivity and a great deal of letting go, to understand that what had changed was herself, her sense of self and what her new self wanted. Her employer was still one of the good guys, and their social purpose hadn’t changed. I was able to help her disentangle these concepts of worth, value, loyalty and fairness. I would say that this was the second transformation and we were well on the way to Refreezing.
Embedding change
Transformation is permanent, there’s no going back, hence the health warning. Part of the work of coaching is to cement transformation so that it becomes embedded in a good, conscious way. If you’re up for deep self-directed change and would like someone to accompany your thinking, drop me a line.