Change Through Self Coaching – does it really work?

A few years ago I remember working on a change programme with a client who ran a Marketing and Public Relations Agency. He worked with a number of blue chip clients, helping them position their products and reinforce their positioning in their own particular markets.

The problem he came to the meeting with, would you believe, was that he wasn’t happy with his own company’s positioning in the market place. He wanted to change it and didn’t know how to go about it!

He felt that the perception that some clients had of his agency was that they had confidence in him for minor projects, but even though they had the capability and expertise, they didn’t see them as ‘big players,’ able to take on major projects.

I asked him naively (it’s the style of detective Peter Falk used as Lieutenant Colombo and one that the Scots call ‘the daft laddie’), ‘Sorry but I thought that was the kind of thing you did for your clients – or am I missing something?’ ‘You are quite right’, he said. ‘But that’s different’.

No matter how I approached it, he was quite convinced that it really was different.

I asked him to stand up, vacate the chair and move to the other side of the table. ’Now imagine that you have a client sitting in the empty chair and you are giving them advice about repositioning their Marketing and Public Relations Agency business in the market’.

He leaned across to pick up the cup of coffee that he’d left by the empty chair. ‘Get your own coffee’, I said. ‘That belongs to your client’.

My client was soon entering into the spirit of things and for the next half hour gave himself some expert ‘coaching’ on his company’s problem.

In his book 581/2 Ways to Improvise in Training, colleague and Associate, Paul Z Jackson, has an exercise titled ‘Consult the Consultant’. In it he invites participants to each access their own wisdom. By taking a current problem, he asks them to imagine that they are a wise, experience and sympathetic consultant brought in at a vast fee to advise on the issue. By simply asking ‘what the consultant says to them’ and revealing the answers, he then takes them a step further and asks, ‘How can you access this more often’.

Coaching is widely acknowledged for its effectiveness in performance improvement and positive change programmes. It’s assumed that the scenario usually comprises the coach (the person doing the coaching) and the coachee (the person being coached).

However, the coach is completely ineffective without some acquired tools and techniques and the coachee wasting their time unless they are open to change. On the other hand is there any reason that given the right tools and techniques the coach cannot at the same time become the coachee (provided they are open to change), and in specific instances really can coach themselves to success?

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