“Woah, this person has accomplished objectively more… who am I to be their coach?”
If you’ve ever found yourself unnerved in this scenario, or any other that similarly evokes the impostor syndrome, take heart. There are ways by which an ostensibly “less” powerful/skilled/experienced/whatever person can effectively coach someone who is ostensibly “more”.
How? The key is to remember that you, as coach, are an external observer, and thus able to be NOT too close to the situation at hand. Instead, you are in the luxury position to offer more distant, and therefore commonly novel, perspective on our situation, and do so with relative ease.
Being distant means you can tease apart the decision to do something from the need to actually do it. If X is clearly the right thing to do next, but X is a pain-in-the-a** to do, we should all be forgiven if we convince ourselves “You know what, I’m pretty sure X isn’t actually the right approach… Y’s looking pretty good (and easy)…” The non-trivial service a good coach will provide us here is to make the case for doing X, tying it back to the big picture of what we’re up to, and maybe even generously indulging (briefly) our complaints about having to do X (when confronted, a little solidarity to the tune of “Yeah, I totally get it… but do it anyway. Because remember: who you are in the matter is _____, and what you’re playing for is to have _____.” goes a long way).
Keep us on track, and demand we live up to our (already-declared) higher standards, and we’ll do things that perhaps you could not, yet have you to thank that they got done.
To do this effectively, you have to closely track with what we clients are dealing with, while staying present to the big picture of what our goals, aims, and broader commitments are. And you have to convince us that this is so: nothing unravels this quite as quickly as you being a blank slate at the top of each call. No, instead you want to show up already fully briefed and aware of that big picture and recent developments, what I like to call a genius, fully in our world. Then it doesn’t matter that we’re scaling a higher summit than you’ve ever managed: you’re there with the supportive gear and intel, so to speak, including a little encouraging talk, that will help us reach a higher height than we could have without you.
What else makes this sort of “coaching up” possible? This next one is as powerful as it is pedestrian: simply keeping score. Score of what? What we said we would do, versus our actual efforts. Be someone who writes down our aims, our tasks, our targets, and our by-whens; and then expect us to follow through and review how things actually went down. We generally don’t like looking like a chump to people we gave our word to, so this too gives you the power to coach someone on a path that perhaps you yourself could not walk.
Finally, be a space of welcome camaraderie. Look, it’s lonely at the top. Being intimidating to coach means being intimidating in other ways, too. If you can provide genuine support while being an inviting space for a high performer to be known and understood, that’s a real gift that can make working with a coach a genuine treat.
So if you have any doubts whether or not you can meaningfully contribute to someone who is already well-accomplished, recognize that coaching is NOT the same as mentorship: this is NOT a relationship in which the real value takes the form of “to know the road ahead, ask those who are coming back”. If you haven’t been there yourself when it comes to where your prospective client is going, you can clearly communicate what you do have to offer, things that have nothing to do with whether or not you yourself have already scaled a particular summit.
