There are differences in opinions about the approaches in coaching when it comes to setting goals for the overall journey. Let me specify, I refer to individual coaching journeys.
This blog seeks to unpack two perspectives and share some of my views that draw from coaching experience – both coaching others and being coached.
Some suggestions speak to spending time in the early parts of the journey to carefully define goals for the future. Which future is this? The future after the coaching journey is completed, the near future, the distant future?
Hopefully the client decides, joined by a coach that inquires with increasing focus. The hope is that the client might define something measurable and specific that can be worked towards with a degree of certainty and success. At the end of the journey, the work together can be inspected.
The benefit to the client is meant to be related to making distinctions between what is not wanted and what is wanted instead, what is realistic and specific. With some focus, this may very well be attained and sometimes even attained within the number of sessions or sometimes even beforehand.
One approach asks of coaches to trust the client’s knowingness about what they want and how they want to get there. Another might add to this that sometimes, as people, we don’t know what we want.
The future is subject to our projections, hopes, fears, assumptions, beliefs, arriving leaving and belonging, and circumstances inside and outside of our control – and a whole lot more.
I sometimes question the use of investing so much up front into a future that might be unexamined.
Personally I have never found value in defining certainty too far in advance. As undertaking coaching journeys myself, regularly, I have learned about myself that embarking in the journey itself changes the outcome and goals. I get better results when I refrain from digging into a significant investment of goal definition at the start. This means that what we want is also defined by what we discover about ourselves, what we learn – our insights and experimental discovery; our experiences along the way.
There is one approach that I find greater resonance with. Rather than defining the What of traditional goals, discovering and continuously referring back to the Who of the goals accelerates my journey. It might be confirmation bias, but my clients seem to echo the same sentiment.
This speaks to coaching for foci. Exploring the essence of who the client wants to be or become – connecting the essence of that identity to an expression of purpose and value in the What and How of their lives. It is present tense, positive tense, future-back and both outward and inward focused.
The second philosophy I hold about working with goals for a whole journey is taken from Solutions Focused Coaching (Brief coaching by Chris Iveson, Evan George and Harvey Ratner, 2012), in which they refer to: “Brian Cade [who] recently reminded us of one of his ‘important rules’ (Cade, 2009: 116) that ‘It is important never to be more enthusiastic about the need for any particular change than is the client,’ since when this happens the client is only left with the arguments for no change!”
This is in respect to the belief that when clients explore the present and future in relation to a past that holds evidence of what they want having always already contained all the ingredients for the future; while simultaneously defining the future in how the client IS in relation to these two awarenesses.
“Mapping out a ‘small print’ description of a future where this outcome has been achieved is not the precursor to specific plans, targets and tasks. In most cases the client’s answers will be a sufficient intervention to inspire movement towards a better future. This is one of the harder lessons for many coaches to learn. Trusting the client to listen and respond to their own words frees the coach from the temptation to overinvest in the client’s future.”
I experience this as true in my own practice and my experience of being coached. Often times defining the goal as we work brings us further than defining the goal up front. There is something Lean and Agile about this – start with the minimum and regularly inspect and adapt.
With the ‘minimum’ I refer to the idea that I value personally – trusting myself as a coachee and trusting my client as coachee to deeply know who we want to be and what the essence is of what we want to express through this way of being. This is more than enough to work with while aligning and realigning along the journey to define a goal.
So, what am I saying?
Am I advocating for one approach and criticising the other? This is not my intent. In fact, I offer free tools to all coaches who embark on an individual journey to support sense making about goals for their journey because I know that sometimes we want a change, now, but we don’t know where to start.
Some clients use this and solve their own problems- ask for a refund on their individual coaching journey package (which I gladly give in celebration of their achievement) and they make their way! Others never use the tool and never define overall goals, but come with an outcome for each session. Yet others don’t know what they want in the session and we define it together. Yet others use the tool and come with a backlog of things to work through and some of them even experience overwhelm at the number of goals – and this may not support discovering the essence of their future either.
There is no single way, no utopia, none better than the other. There seems to, at least so far, in my experience; to be a commonly held desire for us to explore Who we want to be, and what we want to have expressed in the world through our ways of doing. Defining goals up front may make this possible for some and for others if may get in the way.
Which approach to take seems to also come from the knowledge of who we want to be in the start of the journey and how we want to express ourselves in the process of self discovery at every step of the journey. There are as many ways that this can happen as there are possibilities for the future.
Resources:
Brief Coaching, Chris Iveson, Evan George, Harvey Ratner, Routledge 2012
Systemic Coaching and Constellations, John Whittington, Kogan Page 2020
