So I started this week’s coaching session asking my coachee about his 15 minutes in nature. For him, it was a bit unnatural (ironically enough) because he is so used to spending time in nature in less contrived ways. He hikes and camps and isn’t used to being in his backyard and calling it “nature.” He found the noises and bustle of civilization a bit distracting, but he was still able to find some value in his quiet time.
Through his meditation, my coachee aimed to be open to himself and to solidify an understanding of who he is. That is, however, something that he does pretty regularly and naturally, so the tough part is and will be actualizing that vision. How can he get to be this best version of himself? One key we talked about was making sure to take time to think about this best version as often as possible. The more it is in mind, the more likely we are to act on those hopes and impulses.
The “self” that he was thinking about is a person who needs to help. Since he was a little kid, my coachee always felt a yearning to do so. He asked an interesting question though, which I thought of during my own meditation: If enough people feel that same helping impulse, there must be a reason. There must be something about helping others and making others happy that is universal and necessary. I suggested that maybe it has to do with needed to connect. We also agreed though that it is largely selfish. Helping feels good, so we like to do it. He finds, however, that as he gets older he finds it harder to make others happy. I suggested that problems are simpler and PEOPLE are simpler when they’re young, so it makes sense that it’s easy to help and sooth at that point. My coachee thought that it might have to do with standards of happiness – both his own standards and the standards of others.
Finally, we talked about whether or not we always need to be happy. Is there value to feeling badly? I think that unhappiness is needed to connect us to each other. Maybe life stagnates if we’re always happy. If we need to help others in order to be happy, we need others to be unhappy sometimes, and they in turn need us to be unhappy sometimes too. Marc used a metaphor of a pendulum – we can swing back and forth or sit plainly in the middle. If we put too much pressure on ourselves to ALWAYS be happy, we are guaranteed to fail, and in doing so we’ll feel worse. The pendulum can’t stay at a peak. So while working to make yourself and others happy is noble and innately human, the key is reflecting on our feelings and how we make others feel instead of putting too much pressure and emphasis on happiness as a constant.
In the second part of our chat, we discussed his efforts at presensing in a meeting at work. He said that he kind of came upon presencing by accident, but it was very successful!
The issue at hand had to deal with money that was in my coachee’s name and was stolen from work. He was hoping that everyone in the department would chip in so he wouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of the entire stolen sum. What was really great about the way he talked about this is that he kept saying his “old self” would have dealt with it the wrong way – he wouldn’t have said anything and would have let himself become bitter and resentful of his co-workers who didn’t have to help pay. This week, however, the NEW self brought it up with staff members. One of them, a friend of his (Tim), was mad and had a “how dare you ask?” kind of response. My coachee’s response was that he would help if roles were reversed.
Once my coachee had time to explain himself and what he was suggesting (not demanding), people started to come around. Tim explained that he thought earlier that my coachee was going to demand money and that the theft was my coachee’s responsibility. These are just some of the reasons that money is always an awkward subject, and all the more reason that my coachee should be praised by taking on such a difficult topic for his first attempt at presencing.
What I’ve noticed over my conversations about this workplace is that they are moving in the right direction and my coachee’s strategies seem to be helping in that shift. This particular event, despite its uncomfortable nature, brought the whole group together. They all lost $200 that was supposed to go to something they all cared about, so the experience was shared. Even within that though, people had different perceptions of how coachee’s request came across, of what was expected, of what transpired, etc. So to clarify, my coachee made and effort to be open and honest and to suspend his judgements about how the situation should be handled. He admitted that if he (“old self”) didn’t ask for the money he would have been bitter about it, and he didn’t want to be in that position. In admitting this, he explained his position without saying “You should give me money because…” And the group responded to the honesty and vulnerability. At first there was silence as people thought about how this affected them and how they contributed, etc. But then, an aspiring therapist stepped up and facilitated a discussion which ended with an agreement that everyone would help pay back the program and that some new procedures would go into place to prevent the same problem from happening in the future. In that sense, the final part of the discussion was driven by the future that has yet to unfold…kind of?
I am really proud of how honest my coachee was willing to be about his own faults, his own interests, his self-perceptions, and his expectations of himself and others. As a result of all those things, the group became closer, listened to one another, and set themselves up for future success.
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