Burger Bites: Committed To Truth, Even Hard Truth

The Burger Bites Series Is Designed To Bring You A Taste Of Coaching.

One thing each of us needs in order to see where we are and how we can improve is clear, precise feedback. Coaches try to act as mirrors for their clients, reflecting exactly what they see so clients can also see it and understand themselves better. Sometimes, a coach has to act like a wrap-around mirror under glaring light.

In the field of psychology, when the theoretical people try to explain self-esteem and self-perception, they refer to three different “selves.” There’s the perceived self, which is the way you see yourself. There’s the ideal self, which is the way you think you ought to be, plus how you really wish you were. It’s the combination of good ideals, your higher goals, and potentially harmful standards, like the expectations you place on yourself that are often absorbed from other people. Then there’s the real self, which is the objective view of how you look and act, what your personality is like, and what abilities you have.

Psychology professors like to show simple diagrams to represent complex people. For the three selves, they make three dots in a triangle pattern. Then they draw circles around the dots. For a person with distorted self-perception and unrealistic expectations or standards, the circles don’t overlap or barely overlap. The ideal self is impossible to achieve, the perceived self is an unfairly harsh picture, and neither have much to do with how other people actually experience the real self. The goal is to get the three to be closer, nearly overlapping, so the perceived self is close to the ideal self, and the real self other people see is pretty close to the other two.

Increasing self-awareness helps a person see where the harsh standards of the ideal self come from. Then he can shift his ideal self to something less critical and much more inspirational. Increasing self-awareness also helps a person see himself more realistically and helps him extend more compassion and grace in his self-evaluation.

One of the most powerful ways to challenge an unkind ideal self and negatively distorted perceived self is to have compassionate people give clear, precise feedback to a person about how that person comes across. This works kind of like a mirror, revealing aspects of the real self to the person that he doesn’t see because his perceived self and ideal self are in the way.

Counselors do this for their clients. It’s one of the key elements of a “therapeutic alliance,” their joint commitment to the client’s healing and recovery. Members of a counseling group do this for each other, telling each other how they come across, good or bad. Members of general support groups and professional development groups give each other feedback, as well, intending to help each other define obstacles and find strengths they can use to overcome them.

Coaches are mirrors, as well, and often with more lighting than even a therapist-mirror. Therapists have to be careful not to inflame emotional wounds in their clients. Coaching clients, while maybe sensitive about some things, have recovered from emotional wounds enough that they don’t need the slow, carefully paced approach of therapy to look at themselves and change their behavior.

Coaches are committed to the client’s agenda, both the small “a” agenda and the client’s big “A” Agenda. That means they are helping clients move forward on specified goals with clear steps and accountability, and they are also committed to their clients’ long-term personal development.

Both types of agendas require a coach to give honest feedback to the client on a regular basis. Helping a client break goals down into objective steps is a mirror that reflects how important the stated goals actually are, by showing the client’s motivation and resistance. Accountability is a mirror that reflects what the client is actually doing to accomplish the stated goals.

By holding a memory of the client’s patterns, the coach becomes a mirror that reflects ingrained habits or enduring traits to the client. This is when the coach says something like, “You say you want to work things out with people, but you just described confronting someone and then looking for a way to avoid the person.” Every segment is a statement of fact, but strung together they show a clear picture of fully lit details.

Sometimes a coach has to say things that might be considered “brutally honest,” or in the new jargon of business management, “boldly honest.” These are the kinds of things that are likely to cause some discomfort and maybe even risk hurting the client’s feelings. But they are true things that the client must see in order to make the significant changes, or even the leaps forward, that he is committed to making.

With compassion and caring, committed to the client’s higher goals and personal growth, the coach becomes a mirror of things the client may strongly resist seeing. But they are things the client knows, on some level, are true. The effect for the client can be like standing in the middle of a wrap-around mirror, where you can see every bit of your outer self from all sides. There is nowhere to hide, and excuses are pointless.

Knowing it can be tough to hear, a coach will usually ask the client’s permission before stating something so difficult to hear. “Can I tell you a hard truth?” the coach will ask. The coach will have explained hard truths early in the creation of the relationship so the client knows something unsettling is coming. But he knows the coach is speaking on behalf of who he wants to become, so he tentatively says, “Okay.”

“You said a few minutes ago that Jenna was telling you the same old crap again. I think what you’re telling me now is your same old crap.”

-or-

“You don’t sound like you want to make things work in that relationship. You say you do, then you make all these excellent arguments about why it won’t work and why you should leave.”

-or-

“You keep expecting your supervisor to change the way he treats you, but he never does. You’re making excuses to stay, and you’re not respecting yourself when you do that.”

Because hard truths are strong, they are powerful, so they can shift thinking quickly. But wise coaches don’t go looking for hard truths to spring on their clients, because that would be both unnecessarily confrontational and overly focused on the coach’s agenda instead of the client’s. The coach gives voice to a hard truth only when it is tapping him on the shoulder or staring him in the face. When it’s obvious to the coach, it’s time to make it obvious to the client.

Speaking truth with compassion, focused on the client’s personal growth and the person he wants to become, is an essential component of the coaching relationship. Truth is the light that helps a client see where he wants to go and where he is now; where the path forward is, and where the obstacles are.

And sometimes, because the client is so accustomed to ignoring the obstacles or the obvious next step, the coach has to shine the light very brightly on the thing the client is avoiding seeing. It can be uncomfortable and even distressing for the client for a while, but that glaring light is exactly what the client needs when he says, “I can’t figure out why I don’t just get this done.”