There, I said it. And by implication, I’m calling out coaching relationships that aren’t action-oriented as unhealthy.
I used to think this idea was, well, not necessarily self-evident, but something that clearly must be so if you sat down and thought about it for a beat. By extension, I thought it must be the case that most coaching relationships out there in the wild ARE action-oriented.
Spanning 22 years of paying attention, I have been unsettlingly surprised to find how often they are NOT.
Let’s first get clear what I mean by action-oriented as a coaching label.
Action-oriented means oriented around the coachee taking action in their lives to bring about desired outcomes. It means coaching will have, as a regular (if not constant) fixture, a cyclical cadence of planning, doing and review. As spoken by coach, something like:
- “Okay, these are great insights. Now what are you going to DO in your life to move things forward?”
- “Good, that’s a solid plan: go do that and we’ll talk about how it went next session.”
- “Alright, welcome back. Tell me about what you got done and how it went. We’ll take stock of lessons learned and what is now the state of things, and we’ll go from there.”
Action-oriented means it would be weird to NOT have some sort of plan at the end of a session.
Action-oriented means these sessions are not for idly throwing around ideas.
Action-oriented recognizes that feel-good insights that aren’t acted on will fade and will thereby have meant nothing.
Action-oriented knows that results come from being out on the court of one’s life, and not from the commentary of spectators watching from the stands.
Therefore action-oriented has only limited patience for idle talk. Hearing the words “Yeah, I know I should do X” three times is about two times too many. In a coaching relationship, recurring words like those means a relationship is spiraling, going nowhere, even if for your client it is a pleasurable place to vent and be heard.
If we agree that coaching should be about producing desired results and with velocity1And if we don’t agree that coaching should be about producing desired results with velocity, sorry, but on behalf of every client you’ll ever have: “That’s a hard fail, back to square one you go.”, all of these things are healthy. Because they are necessary to fulfil the very point of coaching. Remember, the point of coaching isn’t to have feel good insights, and leave a call feeling all stoked and excited.
Lacking action-oriented? That’s coaching that’s stalling out. Coaching that’s probably inviting regular or even endless rumination. That’s offering a sounding board which, yes, has value, but lacks power. It’s sickly. Living, sure. Often sustainable for years. But you wouldn’t call it vital. To call it vital, or thriving, would be to cheapen either term. So you shouldn’t call it healthy.
Healthy coaching is action-oriented.
Notes:
- 1And if we don’t agree that coaching should be about producing desired results with velocity, sorry, but on behalf of every client you’ll ever have: “That’s a hard fail, back to square one you go.”
