Awareness is Step One...

“So, what do I do about it?”

When we work with our executive coaching clients, we have a pretty structured approach that always starts with gaining a mutual understanding of the “current state”. The most important part of this initial stage of the engagement is to deepen the client’s self-awareness. Ideally, we want to dig deep into strengths, styles, and preferences. We want to expose the internal wiring and the pipes. We want to see those vibrant patterns and triggers for what they are…the habitual responses...the inner critics...the things that drive them crazy…the things that help them cope. Self-awareness matters because awareness is the gateway to change. Without awareness, we can’t even see the door, never mind find the keys to unlock it.

Increased self-awareness can be a very exciting phase for clients. They are seeing patterns and understanding their behaviors better than ever before. Often they are realizing the origins of things that have dogged them for a long time. They also are learning to appreciate their wonderful strengths and values, and to see them more distinctly. They have super-awareness of their emotions, thought patterns, and actions. It’s a time of insight.

Then, everything stops.

And there is a moment in nearly every coaching engagement when they suddenly stop recounting their insights, their new awareness, the stories of how their current state is showing up, perhaps holding them back from the goals they have set…and they look at me and say:

“Ok, I understand it. So, what do I do about it?”

What they are really asking is “How do I change? For real, this time?”

Experience has shown me that intellectualizing change is not enough. We really can't think our way out of things in all cases. The mind and body need more help than that. In order to have transformational results, clients need to employ two very powerful elements in addition to self-awareness: creating new patterns (which include mindfulness practices, breathing, positive bias techniques, exploding competing commitments, etc.) and employing self-compassion (therefore minimizing the negative effects of the “inner critic”, which can thwart change). We’ve found that without these three elements in play together, only surface-level, tactical change generally takes place.

As you might expect, it’s those clients with the interest (and courage) to take on their habitual tendencies and patterns with new tools and compassion that see the biggest gains in their personal and leadership effectiveness.