(interview blurb)
Marcia: There’s no destination to master. You don’t reach a point and then that’s it, I’m the best coach I can be. It’s an ongoing journey and that we can all move forward together on this path toward this thing where we feel we’re gaining mastery.
(intro)
Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is no newcomer to the coaching.com community. She’s the president of Covisioning LLC, a consultancy that provides training and coaching for leaders around the world. She’s also the creator of Breakthrough Coaching, the popular WBECS by coaching.com program. In addition to authoring three bestselling books, this world renowned thought leader was the fifth global president of the International Coach Federation. Her work has been featured in major global publications, including Psychology Today, Fast Company, and Forbes. Please join me in welcoming Marcia Reynolds.
(interview)
Alex: Welcome, Marcia.
Marcia: Thank you, Alex. Nice to see you.
Alex: It’s great to see you. So, as you know, Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, but we don’t always drink coffee. What are we drinking today?
Marcia: I start my morning off with coffee but that’s like 3:30, 4 in the morning. I already recorded a podcast this morning at 5:30. So then I switched to tea so I’m drinking green tea, Tulsi Green, and I’ve got it in this attraction cup. If you notice, it’s Coach U, my school back in 1997. They were teaching irresistible attraction and I got my attraction cup but it was such a great foundation of understanding that our energy is not only is that important in a coaching session but for our entire business, that you have to have attractive energy so that was a great foundation for me and my coach training.
Alex: Thank you for that. Yeah, I’m drinking some Japanese Sencha green tea, loose leaf, that I just put together before we started recording today. So, I want to talk about coaching in 1997 but before we do that, can you tell me how you manage to wake up at 3 in the morning every day to start work? Is that just today or is that your usual routine?
Marcia: No, no, no, I told you that I’m in Phoenix, Arizona. Growing up, my father had a produce company and we had to go down to market and know that, in the summertime, even this morning when I got up, it’s like Fahrenheit in the 80s so we’d have to get up at 3, 3:30 just to make it to market. And then when he shifted his business, he would still just get up and exercise. So, all my life, in order to get out, take a walk, which I’ve already taken three-mile walk today too, that you have to go out early. People always think, “Oh, that’s awful. How can you do that?” but it’s normal here.
Alex: No, that makes sense. What time do you go to bed?
Marcia: About 8:30, 9.
Alex: Okay, okay, that makes sense. Cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. It’s great to have you on our podcast today.
Marcia: Thank you.
Alex: You’re the fifth president of the ICF, you have this longstanding career, you’re one of those people that we talked to and you’re one of the founding members of the coaching profession. Not a lot of professions have founding members walking around. Coaching is a relatively newer profession. So, let’s go back to 1997 and even beyond that. How did you get started in coaching?
Marcia: Well, Alex, I was talking this morning to this guy about how oftentimes we have accidental careers. Most of the time, we have accidental careers, it’s never what we started out in and my first master’s degree was actually broadcasting. That’s why when you said you have any questions, it’s like, “No, let’s go for it, I’m pretty used to it.” I ended up — my first job was the audio-visual coordinator where I pushed around TV sets and film projectors in a psychiatric hospital but it was for a training department and my boss didn’t like the trainer, she fired him, and then she decided to get her doctorate and she dumped the whole department in my lap. I was, what, in my 20s, and my first assignment was management training. And I loved it and so I went back, got a second master’s so I would know how to design instruction and know what I was doing and, from there, I went into high tech and worked for a couple of tech companies and helped them change their cultures and ran training departments, but I was always really curious what does it take to change people’s minds, to actually have them change their behavior in a long-term way, not just because you tell them to and then they do it for a while and then they go back to old behavior. And I was always researching and I was curious, I was curious, and my classes got better but they still didn’t make the changes I wanted. So, it was actually the day I resigned from my last job, I got this article about this thing called coaching. It was 1995. And I said, “Well, this sounds good,” and so I signed up, and I went through coaching school with Thomas Leonard, he was actually the founder of the International Coach Federation as well as Coach U. So I just got very involved and helped to put on the first coaching conference and it was passionate ever since. So it was, again, you knew when I went to school that I would end up here.
Alex: Thank you for sharing the beginning of your coaching journey and the beginning of your career. It’s always interesting how careers develop, how you — they don’t seem to be very linear, it’s always an interesting journey. So, how has coaching changed in the last 27 years since you went through coach training?
Marcia: Well, Alex, somebody asked me, “How do you find that topics for your books?” and the thing is that I write books based on what I see is a problem out there that needs to be addressed. And, of course, coaching has grown and it’s much more visible in coaching in companies and global companies. I’m doing a lot of leaders’ coach training and coaching cultures is now becoming very popular, to really integrate coaching into the culture. But the thing is that since then, there was a lot of distortion as to what is coaching and people would get caught in looking for the powerful question and coaching from memory and not from presence in the conversation. And so my last book, The Discomfort Zone, the book before, Coach the Person, was both of them were problems I’d seen that, in the coaching world, that people were losing the essence of what coaching is and trying to coach from a checklist and from what somebody told them, they saw me do a demo and said, “I’m gonna coach like Marcia,” and I’m like, no, no, no, you coach like you. Learn from me but do your own thing and just be there. The whole bringing coaching back to the powerful impact we can make, I’ve seen it, like it was powerful and then it’s dipped and now it’s coming back as people come back to what coaching is supposed to do for others. So, besides that, it’s growing and continues to grow in the world. That constant look at what is mastery is an important perspective to have.
Alex: I love — so many things to unpack but I love the name of your book, Coach the Person, Not the Problem, and that connects to being present as a coach and having your formula be able to be in the moment with your clients, not necessarily follow a formula, which are two very different things and that’s something that you’re very aware of. When you’re working with coaches, how do you enable them to develop a way of coaching that is about connecting with the client and not following a specific formula?
Marcia: Yeah. Well, there’s two things, Alex. First off, both in the book and in my programs, I’m always looking at who are you as a coach, not just what you do. And I’ve done a lot of research on what creates people to feel safe in the moment so they will open up with you quickly, because coaching can be actually very quick if this is a really safe, dynamic interaction. So I always teach the opening the nervous system of receiving, not judging what people are saying, and not trying to remember it, which brings me to the second piece is everyone knows that I push reflective inquiry, that coaching isn’t just about asking questions. In fact, it never was just about asking questions. If you even look at the original ICF competencies, reflection was an always important piece, like summarize, paraphrase what they’re saying, notice their emotional shifts. And there’s coaching schools that teach you can only ask open questions. That’s not true and that becomes annoying instead of helpful. And I have found that it’s the reflection that helps people pull the thinking out of their brain and look at it where they can actually see the gaps in their logic and the crazy assumptions they’re making with no evidence and how their fears are holding them back by just sharing back with them, “So here’s what I hear you saying,” even I’ll ask the question, “What do you think about that? How does that relate to what you wanna create?” but the power of the question comes because it’s paired with the reflection. So, again, I see that people have long forgotten that this is a reflective inquiry process and the only way I can fully reflect is if I’m fully present with you so I can pick up what’s most important and the things that you repeat, that it’s important for you to hear them. So they go together. They go together. And that’s what I tried to blend then in Coach the Person, Not the Problem.
Alex: You say that coaching can be quick. When I hear that, I think about sometimes you might be 18 minutes into a coaching session and you just hit that point where that person just had this moment that’s going to lead to reflection, maybe the reflection happened in the session, maybe it’s going to lead to this opening where reflection happens and then the right action, right behaviors might be in line for that person to work on. Is that what you mean by that?
Marcia: Yeah. I mean, if you look at all the demos I’ve done for you, I don’t know, there’s like many demos…
Alex: Many, many coaching demos. People love those, by the way. People really love those. Yeah.
Marcia: I mean, rarely do they go beyond 20 minutes. We are driving to that breakthrough moment, which is that aha, that new awareness, and then, actually, what happens, it’s a middle brain process. It’s like any creative moment where you go, “Oh,” and it rewires the brain and things connect differently and, in that moment, if you capture that, so what’s coming up for you, what just emerged, and sometimes we have to help them articulate this new awareness, but that’s the moment that they build the actions on the new awareness. You don’t keep going into the coaching, that’s the moment you grab and then say, “Okay, so does that resolve your issue so you can get what you want? Or is there something now new that you want to create? And what’s the next step?” That’s like the tipping point of the coaching session, that we can then move into actions.
Alex: Value creation is such an integral part of successful coaching and we have this predetermined condition, almost, about having coaching sessions that are 60 minutes and sometimes the value creation differs from the structure and you’ve been talking about the structure and following maybe a task list to coach. So much of coaching is being in the moment and, sometimes, you might be 30 minutes into a coaching session, the value creation is there, perhaps the client will do better by spending the next 30 minutes doing something else, going back to work, reflecting. To me, that’s mastering coaching where the coach doesn’t necessarily have to abide to these predetermined standards around a good coaching session is 60 minutes. It’s hard to go out of going to like the uncharted territory of doing things differently but it’s so valuable for your clients. It’s almost paradoxical in some ways, the way we think about value and the way value actually is created.
Marcia: Yeah. Well, Alex, most of my clients come to a session with more than one issue. It’s like they have, “Okay, here’s what I wanna start with.” Knowing it’s only going to be 15, 20 minutes per issue, they’ll have three which will take the hour, or they’re busy leaders and executives and giving them an extra 10 minutes on their own, they’ll say, “Okay, I’m done. Thank you.” So I would say that most of my sessions really only run maybe 45 minutes and we get three issues accomplished and then they’re happy, but they’re always happy with what we’ve achieved at the end. So, you’re right, it’s really, “Did we achieve what they came to get?” not, “Did I use up the time and they’re gonna feel badly if I don’t give them that full hour?” I’ve never had somebody say, “Well, she didn’t give me the hour so I’m mad at her.”
Alex: Absolutely. So, tell me more about Breakthrough Coaching. So that’s something that we actually — I’m very not salesy at all, our podcast is about getting to know the people that are leading the coaching profession, but we do have this program that we just launched and so not all our guests, we have collaboration to the extent that you and I have so I’d love for us to unpack a little bit about what is Breakthrough Coaching?
Marcia: Okay. Well, it builds on what you were asking about before, that how do we coach to that moment of, boom, new insight, new awareness, we’re breaking through the frames of the stories they were holding, that they were acting on, their past experiences, not what’s present and what’s possible. And so when I did the original breakthrough coaching program two years ago, a lot of it was taking from Coach the Person, Not the Problem, but because I’m an ultimate researcher, even the new self-study program is different from the original program because I’ve added in new things and new things I’ve learned and how to really help the coaches get to that amazing moment that we’re trying to create. That’s the gift of coaching. And so many people in the first program, they’re like, “Well, the time zones didn’t really work for me,” or, “I couldn’t follow along on the dates that were given,” so, this way, they have a self-study program with tons of work, it took me 8, 9 months to create the videos, the tools, and the practice exercises that they can go through at their own pace and join the community and really support each other in their growth. So I’m really proud of it and excited it’s going to become a book next year, even.
Alex: Congratulations, that’s amazing.
Marcia: Thank you. Just like, again, we’re constantly — there’s no destination to master, you don’t reach a point and then that’s it, “I’m the best coach I can be.” It’s an ongoing journey, and that we can all move forward together on this path toward this thing where we feel we’re gaining mastery.
Alex: That’s why we call them coaching practices.
Marcia: Yeah.
Alex: It’s just like yoga.
Marcia: Well, I learned that from doing martial arts, Alex, that, yeah, there’s really never any like, “Well, you’re the master,” it’s like we’re constantly having to practice the art. And it’s the same with coaching. Yeah.
Alex: Yeah, like meditation yoga, the moment you start calling yourself a master, that’s the moment you stop growing, which is interesting.
Marcia: Yeah.
Alex: I love that Eastern philosophy and very integrated way of looking at the world. It’s always appealed to me and the concept of coaching as a practice, that you can go up and be at a mastery level of practitioner but you’re still always a practitioner, you’re always practicing, you’re always trying to understand what you can do better. Thinking about coaching in that way, what do you think are some of the ways in which coaching can positively impact the world at scale? We’re going through a tumultuous period in humanity’s development. We’re in the 21st century, we have all these problems, all this technology that can help us reduce the child mortality rates, feed more people but we’re still seeing increasing complex, difficult problems to solve. And we all love coaching, we breathe coaching, we think about it every day, you and I and a lot of the people listening, and there’s a sense that coaching can have a tremendous positive impact in the world. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Let’s unpack that.
Marcia: Yeah. Alex, it was interesting, because I’ve been teaching for coaching school in China for now, what, 14 years, so when the pandemic first hit them, months before we acknowledged it here but they started asking me, “Can you create a program of how to coach through uncertainty and fear?” and what I find is interesting because I have one I’m doing tonight on how to lead in these crazy times and…
Alex: I hope not too late since you’re going to be up 3 in the morning tomorrow.
Marcia: Actually, yeah, I’ll probably take a nap. The reality is life is always uncertain. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. What’s going on right now has taught us that, that it was an illusion to think that we had any control. So now people are facing that things are uncertain and uncertainty breeds fear and we’re accepting that as a reality but not sure how to deal with it. I see that coaching is one of the best ways to help people through these times of being able to, again, see what’s possible even though it’s not certain. I was asked to do something for a psychology group in Europe next month and it’s like even the therapist, like how can we make sure that we have lives of better fulfilling and joyful in these dark times. This isn’t something you can just tell people, “Oh, you shouldn’t worry. You should do this,” because that doesn’t change our brains. It doesn’t help us have new sight. Whereas since coaching can actually help us to move beyond where we’re stuck, that I see that it’s an important piece for everyone in the world. So, yes, I work with coaches but also leaders and therapists and all levels of people that we’re committed to expanding consciousness in the world because that’s what coaching can do. So I think it’s a very important time and I think that’s why so many companies are moving toward, “We have to create a coaching culture,” not just teach leaders a few skills to use but that everybody is being open and curious and really listening to each other, which that really can move a company forward in these dark times. So, yeah, it’s exciting, actually.
Alex: It’s very exciting. You talk about possibility and uncertainty. And when I think about those two, it is the interplay between that uncertainty and that possibility that creates anything of value. It’s that push and pull. And development is difficult, whether you’re talking about a company growing its sales through the difficult market, whether it’s an individual trying to improve and understand what areas of themselves they need to work on to enable that possibility. And growth is always uncertain. So having — I see the role of coaches as these people that go through that process with people and, over time, you develop some expertise around how to help people go through those periods of expansion. I love that you bring up the concept, the idea of coaching cultures and let’s expand on that a little bit. When you think about this very complex climate that businesses are operating under, this idea that you have a lot of answers but not all the answers and staying a little bit humble and asking the right questions, that all seems to be correlated and aligned with continuing to create or putting yourself in a situation where you can continue to create value. Coaching seems to be very in line with that approach. So, in your experience in working with organizations, is it a recent thing that you’re hearing about coaching cultures, how can they get operationalized, where’s the link between having a coaching culture and coaching at the individual level, where’s the link with using coaching as a foundational component of the culture and having better results? Let’s really unpack coaching cultures, where they come from, where they are, where we can go with them.
Marcia: Okay, well, the first —
Alex: The easy questions. I like to just throw you like, very easy, simple questions.
Marcia: I think that’s stacking questions.
Alex: That is definitively stacking questions but it’s a theme. I want you to explore the theme because you’re so good unpacking those large themes that have a lot to them, but, yeah, I’m not going to ask you just the easy questions, Marcia. You’re so good, I want you to unpack all these complex topics.
Marcia: The first contracts I actually had back in 1997 was teaching leaders coach for a semiconductor company here in town so it’s not new that leaders need to have more important conversations. Giving feedback is useless, it causes more stress than results unless somebody’s like desperate to know, “How did I do?” The research shows that if you say to someone, “Can I give you some feedback?” it’s the same result in the brain as if you held a gun to their head. But that was just a matter of giving them some skills to open a conversation and, again, what I had found in most of my training classes is that they try some things and they go back to old behavior and it was useful to a certain extent. And so it’s taken some years of companies recognizing that if we don’t have the culture to support the development, that everybody knows what coaching is, and everybody’s coaching, using at least a coaching approach to the conversations, then they’re not going to coach. And even this contract I just signed with this big company, I gave her an outline and was talking about how important it is in a coaching conversation that you got to determine what is the outcome, what is the desired outcome of the person you’re with, and she said to me, “Well, you know, the leaders usually start the conversation and they have KPIs to be met.” I say, “Well, yeah, that’s their desire, not the person in front of them.” So I’m not saying that the KPIs aren’t important, but what will meeting a KPI mean to the person you’re with? So if you’re coaching someone and you’re wanting to help them to grow, I mean, what is their goal? Do they want to be a leader? Do they want to be seen as an expert? What is important to them that you can tie meeting the KPIs into? You have to have both. It’s got to be something that’s valuable to the person that you’re coaching. And so, even now, getting people to understand what coaching is and what the value is and what’s different, that it’s not just a couple of skills you throw at somebody and you ask them a few questions and you’re done. It’s a state of being. Even a simple thing, like I used to teach with this guy that was a production manager for movies before he was a coach and he always told the story about the day that nothing was going right and the caterer wasn’t there, the lead actor was late, the script revisions weren’t done, it was just a mess so he went to the director and laid out all these problems and the director said, “Wow, I can’t wait to see how you handle this.” And he’s like, “Oh,” he had no choice and he went back out there and handled it because the guy knew he could, he was just stressed but that, given the opportunity, he could sort this out. So, I mean, it’s as simple as that. How much do you trust the people you’re with? Do they feel you believe in them? And that’s not — people aren’t going to be mad about that, they want you to believe in them, to develop them, to help them to see what they’re capable of as well. And so when we look at what is being a leader, we’re not talking about managing KPIs but what’s the definition of leadership. When I get a leader who’s having trouble communicating, I never ask them, “So what did you do in the meeting?” I first ask them, “Define leadership to me.”
Alex: Coach the person, not the problem.
Marcia: Yeah. So, I mean, if leadership really is lifting the spirits and helping people to see their potential, then you’re not going to beat them over the head because they didn’t meet a KPI. So, it’s shifting of really seeing we have to, especially in these times of uncertainty and people not going back to work because they’re not going back to that terrible manager. That is a critical element that leaders have to shift who they are, not just what they do.
Alex: Absolutely. When you talk about people’s reaction to feedback that is like putting a gun to their head reminds me of this survey that was conducted about people’s fears and the number one fear was public speaking and the second fear was death so people preferred to die than to have to speak in public, it’s a little morbid but it’s funny.
Marcia: Let me just tell you, I have a T-shirt that says, “I make a living at your greatest fear.”
Alex: I love that. I love that. And coaching, I mean, a lot of coaching is about feedback and utilizing feedback. So much of coaching starts with assessment or has assessment at some point in it and assessment really aims to provide the coach and the client with actionable insights that they — sometimes, it’s feedback, in the case of the multi-rater assessment, sometimes it’s just some understanding about your personality and yourself, but feedback is such an integral process of coaching so I can think of some people saying, “Hey, you’re gonna be working with a coach,” and them being a little reluctant to open up and work with that coach.
Marcia: You know, Alex, I actually teach how to start a coaching conversation with feedback but the difference is that most feedback is, “Here’s what you did wrong,” which already nobody wants to be made wrong, “Here’s what you did wrong and here’s what you should do right,” and that’s what’s damaging. So, how we say that — okay, we do want to give them behavior that needs to be changed so here’s what you did but then we immediately go to “…and here’s the impact.” It’s more about impact, like you kept interrupting people in the meeting and, as a result, people shut down and they didn’t share their ideas and they were irritated with you. It’s the impact that’s more important than the behavior. They can argue with the behavior all day long and say, “Yeah, I know who said that,” and whatever, but here’s the impact. And then the third thing is you have to align it with something they want. “I know you wanna be seen as a leader, I know you want people to recognize your expertise, but that’s not happening now because of the behavior you’re doing.” So its impact and their desired outcome that makes the feedback important. So even if I’m giving them results of an assessment, I’ll say, “Okay, so here’s what happened,” and, “But here’s the impact on this desire that you have,” so I always need to find out in the beginning of the coaching relationship, I always ask, “So what are your ultimate goals?” Even before I would give them the results of the survey, I want to know what’s important to them so I can tie the results into something that they want. Otherwise, it’s just damaging.
Alex: Absolutely. I remember from my time at the Center for Creative Leadership, CCL, we had this model, the SBI model, Situation Behavior Impact, and when you teach that to people as part of a leadership development program, you see how difficult it is to structure feedback in a way that’s going to be conducive to people hearing it. When you break it down into, “That was the situation, that was the visible behavior, and that was the impact,” it really allows you to absorb and hear that feedback because it’s very factual, it’s like it’s based on behaviors and it is always almost comical how difficult it is for people to be able to structure feedback in that way. And I think from all my years at working with CCL, that was probably one of my favorite things to work with people on, which is really understanding how to structure feedback so that it’s more impactful. But that really makes you think how poorly wired we are naturally to be able to provide people with good feedback and also to receive feedback. That was always powerful for me. For everything I did with CCL, that was probably the thing that’s always the most fun to work with clients on and also the most revealing as to some of the natural tendencies we have and how we have to overcome those.
Marcia: Yeah, yeah, and I would just add, because you ended with impact, that no one has to end it with how the impact relates to their outcome, to their goal.
Alex: Absolutely, and that’s the art of tying that to the —
Marcia: Yeah, and then you say, “So would you be willing to have a conversation with me of what you could do to change the impact to achieve your goal and then you move into coaching?”
Alex: That’s exactly it. It’s so fun. It’s just feedback. Maybe as the coaching culture sort of become more pervasive in organizations, then we’re going to be, as a whole, better prepared to be able to receive feedback, to provide feedback. I mean, when I think — I mean, going back to what you were saying around possibility and uncertainty, feedback, I think, has a very powerful role in helping us navigate through uncertainty because the more feedback you get, the more you’re able to anchor on what possibility means and how do you enable it and then now you’re here meeting in this complex world where all these things happen that you have no control over but just working on yourself, thinking about how you learn from experience and actually learning from experience. One of my favorite quotes, George Bernard Shaw, “If history repeats itself and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience.” And he goes man because it’s like 100 years old, but isn’t that interesting? It’s like if history repeats itself, how is it that it’s always unexpected?
Marcia: Yeah, yeah. Well, and John Dewey says, “We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on our experiences.” So, you don’t learn in the moment but, in coaching, we go back and say, “So what did you learn from that moment that felt awful or that you didn’t get what you want? And what did you learn from that that you can use going forward?” So, yeah.
Alex: Yeah. Sometimes, when something bad happens, there’s a tendency for a lot of people to wallow. Some people don’t wallow, they just move forward. But one way or the other, we oftentimes don’t spend time really reflecting, and reflecting is really, you can run away from it or you can wallow on it but it’s hard to actually understand what happened in a way that is conducive for you to learn from it and actually have a reflective experience from that. And part of like when you think about meditative practices, they’re all about these practices around reflection, and it’s almost like, in very high states or levels of meditation, it’s almost like you’re taking these cosmic journey. The power of reflection is unbelievable. I mean, it really is — it is almost to the point where you’re having that cosmic journey. So I’m not saying we’re all going to reflect in ways that takes us to those levels, but the fact that there’s these reflective practices that have been known for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to allow the human mind to absorb just a deeper level of reality, just bring it back to something very practical. You had a coaching session, spend some time thinking about how you help your clients, how perhaps you could have helped your clients better. As a client, absorb the learning. We just oftentimes undo that. I love that quote from John Dewey that you just mentioned, it’s just so on point. We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on our experience. I love that. That should be a T-shirt.
Marcia: Yeah, absolutely. But this then also points to the power of coaching, because I don’t care how good you are at your own personal reflective practice. The more emotion you have tied to something, the less you’re able to examine it yourself and your brain blocks it. It does two things. One, it doesn’t want you to feel bad. So, two, we’re master rationalizes, where it’s like, “Well, I did that because…” and we come up with a rationalization to make it okay. So we need someone external, what the neuroscientists call an external disrupter, to disrupt the thinking patterns that we have and our natural tendency to rationalize our behaviors. And it has to be someone outside of ourselves because of the brain’s protective mechanisms, that it doesn’t allow us to go there. I mean, we can reflect on things that it’s like, “Oh, well, okay, what I wanna do is this that are okay to absorb,” but when it starts to get uncomfortable, we shut it out, and so I say coaches are external thought disruptors. That’s what we do. And that’s the power so we use reflective practices of summarizing, paraphrasing, honing it down to the key elements so people can then reflect on their thinking in a way they can’t do for themselves.
Alex: When you break it down like that, it’s so simple. And, usually, things that sounds simple are hard to do. Just like if you’re watching the Olympics or you’re watching any sport on TV, looks so easy, all of these very complex movements. When you’re really good at that, you make it look easy. And the way you’re breaking that down, almost makes the art of coaching seem easy, but as we both know, it’s not as easy. It’s really — that’s why I love the work that you do, because it’s not only about becoming a great coach, it’s also about helping others become great coaches. With this understanding that formulaic approaches don’t work, so how do you create — it’s the paradox, how do you create a formulaic approach to help people not develop their own outcomes, not these formulaic — not outcomes but these — not formulaic ways of operating their coaching practice so you structure these great courses and you work with coaches very closely to help them find who they are as a coach and have some guidelines as to what makes a coaching session effective, a coaching relationship overall effective, but without having — don’t confuse the map with the territory. They’re two different things.
Marcia: Absolutely. But what I teach, Alex, is there’s a balance between structure and flow. There’s absolutely a structure, I call it the bookends, that if you don’t know where we’re going, what is it the person really wants that they don’t have now? What is it they want to create? What is it they want to change? And they don’t know so you can’t just say, “So what do you want?” at the end of the session. They don’t know. We have to coach that to crystallize, which sometimes can be most of the session, that could lead to the breakthrough. So we have to know that so we can have a pathway to the end, which is then when they have the insight that we quickly then, “What are you gonna do with that?” Get the commitment to action. That’s the structure. What’s in between is a spontaneous interaction that flows, that that’s what we teach then in coaching is like what are you listening for? How do you offer that back and invite them to choose and what to do with that and maintain your curiosity, that’s the flow but it has to be within the bookends or you’re never going to get anywhere. You’re going to circle around, you’re not going to achieve anything. Or they’re a verbal processor, they’re just going to talk and then they’re going to go, “Oh, thank you, now I know what to do,” but you didn’t really coach them. And maybe they learned something, maybe not.
Alex: That’s interesting and that makes me think there’s a word in coaching that, for many, it’s a dirty word. For others, it’s not. It’s part of the process. That word, as you probably can imagine, is “advice.” It’s just like it’s a very polarizing topic in coaching. I would want to get your take on should coaches just ask questions and not necessarily just open-ended questions but should coaches have really an exclusive approach of always asking questions or is advice warranted as a coach as well?
Marcia: Okay, so, first, I’m going to say, remember, it’s never always asking questions, that I use reflection even more than questions, but it really depends on — I go back to Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership model, what is it the person really needs? Do they actually have no experience and need some knowledge and skills? Or do they have even a little bit or even, like with new leaders, have you ever worked for a leader? What did you like? I mean, what experience can you build on that you would coach? But these days, I’m getting people that are being promoted like two levels and have zilch experience. At the beginning, we will contract that, okay, I’m going to coach you through to see what you need, how you really see the situation, and then we might get to a point where it’s useful, because you really don’t know, that I will offer some suggestions or some resources, but it’s only at the end because I should never assume that I know exactly what you need at the beginning of the session because your experience is not the same as mine, even though it looks the same. So coach first. And, a lot of times, Alex, what’s interesting is these clients that I have, where, at the first month or two, I may give them some suggestions at the end of the session, and then they start coming like, “Okay, I just want coaching. You don’t need to give me anything, I’m having this problem with this person and I need just to — I’m angry, clear that away and see what I should do.” So they experienced the power of the coaching, they start asking for it. So I don’t say you’re never going to give advice but coach first. Coach first. Otherwise, you may be giving them advice in something that’s not the same situation that you had been facing. So don’t take the path of convenience. Stay with the code, yeah, and together determine what’s needed.
Alex: Yeah, and really great coaches can coach people across different contexts. In some cases, for some people, for some clients, it’s good for the coach to actually have some experience in that industry, perhaps they were an executive working in a similar company and just coaching. Meeting the client where they are means that, sometimes, they should be paired up with someone that has both industry knowledge and experience and is well versed with the art of coaching. And, in some cases, a coach that knows nothing about your industry can be the great capitalizer to help you grow.
Marcia: The best coach, because then you won’t be making assumptions. I do better in industries that I don’t know anything about. I think that’s a myth, Alex. I think that, “Oh, you should have had experience,” it’s like what I just said, don’t ever assume that you know exactly what they’re going through because you don’t, you didn’t live their life. And that if you come in with your own experiences that you’re going to end up wanting to tell them what to do. I coach across industries. I had experience in tech companies, both hardware and semiconductor and healthcare, but I coach in the finance industry, I’ll coach in online programs, e-commerce, and it doesn’t matter because they’re coming to me with a leadership, not a technical problem so I don’t need to know and I’ve coached CEOs down to frontline leaders, so if you’re coaching, now, if the person feels safer with you because you have experience, then that’s a different story and they’ll say to me, “Oh, they’re happy I have a doctorate in psychology,” it’s like, well, who cares? But it makes them feel safer with me other than the coaching certification or that — one time, my first stranger client that I didn’t know was an attorney and he said, “Have you ever coached attorneys?” and I’m like, “No, but I was married to one.” He goes, “Good enough.” That was my experience and he just needed to hear something that made him feel safer.
Alex: I love that. I love that. So I want to learn more about the things that you find interesting in terms of books and resources. Coaches consume a lot of information, as you know, so it’s always nice, as we’re having more intimate conversations here in this podcast, to learn more about some of the books that you like to read, perhaps there are some podcasts, some shows, some movies that mean something to Marcia that you connect professionally to, so we’d love to hear a little bit more about.
Marcia: I love that you said movies because I’m just a movie fanatic. I love movies. I’m so glad theaters are open again.
Alex: I know.
Marcia: Yeah, yeah. People say, “Well, what fiction?” I don’t read fiction, I haven’t in years, but I go to movies, and there’s just so many things because they explore the human experience in so many ways, especially the independent movies, not the Marvel superhero movies. I mean, those are okay for — my undergrad was in broadcasting and he said before you go to bed, you should watch stupid TV, which gives your brain a chance to like calm down and work while you’re sleeping so stupid TVs, stupid movies have a place.
Alex: I watch Seinfeld every night before going to bed. I don’t think Seinfeld’s stupid but it’s just so easygoing in the world, everything’s okay, everything’s easy. I love it.
Marcia: Absolutely. Yeah, I’m always watching, streaming something that’s funny as well. But, you know what, mostly, because I’m constantly developing programs and writing, I’m reading research, which may be boring to other people but it’s fascinating to me, on what’s the latest on learning, how we learn, how we grow and develop. And it’s just I know how long it takes to write a book and then how long it takes for a publisher to put it out there so whatever you’re reading in a book is old research and I learned that just from my academic background that I have to have the most recent research, and people are constantly sending me articles and I’m just looking at what’s new, like the International Leadership Association, they’re constantly gathering research on learning and leadership and so I’m always looking at what’s coming out from them. Because that, to me, I enjoy that, that’s fascinating, and a magazine next to my bedside is Psychology Today, which I get for free because I write for them.
Alex: That’s awesome.
Marcia: Yeah, so I have to do a blog a month for Psychology Today. So I’m —
Alex: That’s a good trade.
Marcia: It’s a good trade, Well, and they pay me too for the blogs. It’s like I get paid $5 for every thousand hits, but a lot of my blogs have gone viral, and it’s evergreen so every month, I’m getting a nice little fee for my blog posts.
Alex: And you get the magazine for free. I mean, look at that. You’re getting a great deal. You’re going to inspire so many coaches to apply to write for Psychology Today.
Marcia: Yeah, well, there’s always some things in there that’s like, “Oh, well, that’s interesting,” especially when they debunk what we believed for years. So like I’m always saying change your thoughts, you change your behavior is bullshit. Yes, we act based on our thoughts but if you don’t change how you feel about something, it’s emotions precede thought and so you have to really look at how you feel about the situation and change your emotions before your thought. So there’s a lot of things people still believe that have been debunked a long time ago, like the whole separation of right and left brain, it’s like, nah, they talk to each other all the time.
Alex: Those are the ways in which we tried to explain the world so we create this map and it explains things in a way that is satisfactory and it sheds through some of that complexity and it’s easier to think about the right brain and the left brain as opposed to try to understand the complexity of those interactions that really add another layer of understanding but perhaps it’s a little bit more gray, pun intended. Gray matter —
Marcia: Yeah, yeah, no, I got it.
Alex: I know you got it but just putting it out there.
Marcia: Right, right. It is, and I guess, though, because I’m fascinated by it, I like that, but you’re right, the brain wants to make sense. That’s the brain’s primary function is to make sense, to give meaning, and that’s the problem is that we hold on to old meaning, it makes us feel like we think we know things. And we don’t —
Alex: It used to be a good thing when you’re protecting yourself from a specific area in the savanna where there’s a specific type of snake where you don’t remember that, then you’re really toast. A lot of how we’re wired was meant for a world that was different to ours and a lot of development and the compression of time, the acceleration of change, I mean, people used to live tens of thousands of years in a very similar environment with very similar groups and very similar ecosystems. Now, you’re talking about reading a book that took 18 months to publish and a lot of that research is not the latest and greatest, so that’s the kind of world that we’re living in and trying to find comfort and slowing down, I think, it’s one of those things that people want to resort to but sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s good to understand that you’re doing that, and bringing it back to emotions, which you have brought up a couple of times in our conversation today, it’s just emotions are such drivers of behavior and of thought, and a lot of what we do sometimes when we’re working with clients is we focus on thought, we focus on behavior, but emotion is such an interesting, complex, nuanced topic and there’s so much research and understanding around emotional intelligence. I mean, we’re going somewhere when we’re starting to develop this type of like, “Oh, there’s all these types of intelligences.” I like Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences, it’s always informed the way I look at people. But, yeah, so many interesting — I feel like we could have a four-hour podcast and cover so many different things.
Marcia: So, interesting fact, I mean, if you look back at Aristotle and Plato and all those thought thinkers, emotions were important. They talked about the power of emotions and trying to — anyone can be angry, Aristotle said, but then the why is a whole different thing. And emotions were always the dominant piece up until that guy Descartes came around, “I think, therefore I am.” There were two camps of philosophy and there was a guy named Spinoza who was fighting them.
Alex: I love Spinoza. One of my favorite philosophers.
Marcia: Yeah, right, and he was always, “No, no, no, emotions are important,” and he lost. They actually kicked him out of Amsterdam, and from that point, we started saying that the brain was all important, the rest of the body didn’t matter, emotions didn’t matter. It led to the Industrial Revolution where we were just measuring how to do things better but not taking into consideration how people felt. And so, for over 200, almost 300 years now, we’ve not made emotions important so we’re neck-ups, we don’t know what’s going on with our bodies and where emotions occur. So it’s not anyone’s fault, this is what had happened, the whole shift. And so we’re just bringing it back, really, when psychology shifted. It was Alfred Adler, who, breaking with Freud, said, “I don’t believe people are broken. I think that their resourceful and they’re whole.” Creative, resourceful, and whole. It was Adler who first said that, not a coaching school. And we have to build on that, on their creative capabilities. And so it wasn’t until the 1950s that we started bringing back, “Hmm, maybe there’s more to it than logic,” and then it wasn’t until Daniel Goleman came out with his book in the late 1990s, Emotional Intelligence. It’s not been around for very long and so we still have so much to learn and share with people and to understand that the old beliefs they have, okay, that’s what we used to believe, but throw that out, we’ve got new stuff now.
Alex: I mean, I agree with you 100 percent. Over the last 300 years, we have hyper-rationalized the world. I mean, if you look at what makes humans very successful is these very advanced cognitive abilities. I mean, what we have in our prefrontal cortex is something that we haven’t seen in the known universe outside of humans. And there’s some mammals that are pretty advanced —
Marcia: Whales and dolphins.
Alex: Absolutely, but the hyper-rationalization of the world —
Marcia: The pig.
Alex: Yeah. Think about that when you’re eating bacon. So the hyper-rationalization of the world has enabled tremendous progress but at the cost of almost our souls, because when you’re thinking about us thinking from the neck up, we’re creating this world, it’s very fine tuned around looking for efficiencies and it’s also at the same time very dehumanizing and that’s where you get these first-world problems, where you have people living in these societies that have all these resources that would be just a dream for any human that ever lived and people sometimes have to be on antidepressants because there’s a loss of meaning because we have disconnected with a lot of the core drivers. And, when I think about this topic, it’s just, for me, scientific reductionism is our express — it’s the same thing that we’re describing at a human level in terms of our bodies and systems of knowledge. Science is such a powerful tool but it is a tool, and science cannot answer what is something that not physical real. It’s just a question that it’s just not poised to answer so there’s this whole spiritual realm that we’ve dried up the world a little bit with science, it’s just explained so much but it explains so little of the things that provide meaning and guidance and I think that really explains a lot of where we are in the world today. So really bringing all those together and reformulating the way we look at values and leveraging science as a tool but understanding the human-spiritual dimension in relation to that, it’s complicated. A lot of people still find the spiritual connection through organized religion. Some people are looking at the world through the scientific perspective and sometimes that leads to just, “I don’t believe in anything,” it’s just we also almost become cynics in terms of, “Well, we’re just random atoms in space,” and then there’s the advanced, the more higher levels of spiritual development that integrate all those bands of development and recognize the truths but also build upon those and I think that’s where we are in the spiral of development. People across the spectrum and working together to try to find a semblance of meaning, I think it’s what’s much needed in the world. And when you think about politics, when you think about the geopolitical landscape today, it’s almost going back to the Beatles, it’s simple, it’s love. It’s about connecting with other people and going beyond the rational, the transpersonal. I mean, for me, when I read about — you didn’t ask me because it’s my podcast and I’m asking you questions, but when I think about what excites me in terms of reading, I like personal transpersonal psychology that always connect those higher bands. So, see, I love what you mentioned about the last 300 years because these are the things that I think about a lot. And, for me, coaching definitely has a pathway for helping us grow in those areas. Yeah, I love talking to you, Marcia. I feel like I could do this all day.
Marcia: Yeah, me too, this was fun.
Alex: Really cool. So, as we close out this episodes of Coaches on Zoom drinking green tea today, anything you would like to just go over based on the conversation we had today? Anything you’d like to say to coaches as they work on helping other people develop?
Marcia: Well, like what you said about the importance of coaching today and helping people to reconnect with themselves and their purpose in the world, that we’ve — coaches, it’s a noble profession, that it’s not just a way of — if you get into this as, “Oh, I can make money at it,” you don’t stick with it because it takes a while. But if you recognize you’re a part of this community that’s wanting to make a huge difference in the world, then it’s an empowering process that we’ve taken on and so I’m always grateful to coaches for being there and wanting to always improve themselves as a coach and recognizing we are making a difference together. So I thank you for being a coach, for being together in this journey. That’s just amazing of what we can do.
Alex: Thank you, Marcia. I love your work, I love your dedication, your research foundation, really your willingness to work with people work hard to help them develop, and to help coaches learn at scale, which I think is very exciting and you’re fighting the good fight so thank you for that. I really appreciate your work.
Marcia: Yeah, thank you. You too, Alex.
Alex: Wonderful. Well, thank you for joining us today. I’m sure we’ll talk again soon.
Marcia: Okay, great. Thanks.