When what’s got you here is no longer enough

I was working with a client a few days ago: she is an incredible woman, (a leader, entreprenuer, visionary) who is humbly making an incredible impact on New Zealand, and she is gathering even more momentum.

(As an aside, as a coach, I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to support people like this, because, who else can they talk to, and get the support and the challenge they “need”? And, the conversations are enriching for me too! One essential element of coaching is to offer a safe space to invite reflection. This space enables us to sit back and look at patterns and the stories we are telling ourselves about what, why, and who we are being).

Many high achievers, however, hit a wall of sorts. Their approach has been very effective at getting them to where they’ve got, but it’s not enough for the next phase. They are probably great at lots of things - technically, with people and leading teams. They may be fast decision makers, action-oriented, great at getting things done, a safe pair of hands, able to roll with the punches, think strategically, have the charisma to pull people in, and still able to see landmines down the line. These are my clients who experience an uncomfortable sense that there’s something they can’t quite see or put their finger on, but they know it’s there. Ironically, not being able to put their finger on it, and the desire to do so, is part of the issue.

(To add another layer of complexity, some high achievers get to a point where they start to realise that the ugly stuff they’ve perhaps buried in their past, has not actually gone away. That their unconscious strategy of just getting busy, achieving great goals, doing good, is not a substiture for inner work and healing. Their achievements, as wonderful as they may be to the outside world, feel somewhat hollow to themselves.)

You can see it is complex! And, in coaching, it is absolutely impossible to predict where a conversation will go. As Marcus Buckingham explains, every person’s brain is completely unique:

We have one hundred billion neurons in our brains that link up to form a network of one hundred trillion unique connections […] How big a number is that? Since there are approximately four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and there are a thousand billions in one trillion, your brain has more connections within it than five thousand Milky Ways. 

Five thousand Milky Ways! It is perhaps no wonder that coaching conversations are unpredictable and can also go very deep in surprising directions, quickly.

That said, some of the lines of inquiry I quite often chew over with clients include:

• How are you showing up?

• What kinds of things do you habitually pay most attention to? (e.g. external world, systems, emotions of others, power - who’s got it, who’s playing with it?… or something else?)

• What’s at stake if you continue as you are or perhaps accelerate into your current habits and ways of working?

• And what’s at stake if you don’t? (Say if you experiment with a different narrative or approach?)

• How might continuing as you are limit or expand your development opportunities (and your toolkits)?

• Who are you being as a leader and, most importantly, who do you want to be becoming? (Another aside: interestingly, there’s a thing called “The end-of-history illusion - a psychological illusion in which individuals of all ages believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment, but will not substantially grow or mature in the future.”)

These conversations are fascinating.

Are you curious about your own rich inner world? A simple exercise mooted by Bill Torbert in his book, Action Inquiry (p. 56), suggests setting an alarm every hour (work and home) and taking 30 seconds to notice how you felt emotionally, mentally and pyshically at the moment the alarm went off (including any irritation about the alarm going off!). If you’re curious about the term “action logics” here’s a one minute clip of Bill Torbert explaining the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av5FDqYPxXE

References:

https://hbr.org/2022/04/marcus-buckingham-why-love-is-the-key-to-career-success

http://www.williamrtorbert.com/action-inquiry/

https://www.porchlightbooks.com/blog/staff-picks/love-and-work