My Deep Coaching Roots

Throughout my life, people have come to me for advice. When I was in elementary school, I’d sometimes hold advice-giving sessions at lunchtime, dispensing my nine-year-old wisdom across the sticky cafeteria table.

Just before I entered high school, I was selected to be a “peer helper.” Each grade had six peer helpers: three boys and three girls. Late each spring, the 8th grade class would go to the high school for a tour and to meet some of the teachers and administrators who they’d see each school day starting in the coming fall. As part of that visit, guidance counselors would pass out surveys to the class.

The survey included questions about who the class’s best athlete was, who had the best sense of humor, and other measures of popularity. Woven into these questions were others about who was the most trustworthy and who would you go to if you had a serious problem. The guidance counselors would tally up the questions about trustworthiness and the like. The three boys and three girls who got the most votes in those categories would become the incoming freshmen class’s peer helpers.

I was selected, and went on to serve as a peer helper for my four years of high school. The program included annual training on how to listen, keep confidences, and be empathetic, and how to know when to set confidentiality aside and alert an adult that a classmate was in crisis.

Back then I wasn’t sure what made my peers come to me, but as I got older I figured it out. As a closeted gay young person in fairly rural Pennsylvania in the 1980s and 1990s, I trained myself to become acutely aware of how others were doing, what they were thinking, and what they were going through. This hyper-vigilance served me, because it helped me detect any incoming questions (or worse…) about my sexuality, ideally before they were asked. One way to do that was to ask questions of my peers before they could ask any of me.

I became a very empathetic person as I hid in plain sight.

(Although this behavior served me by keeping me safe at the time, it was also exhausting and unfair and harmful. I now know that I shouldn't have had to hide who I was or be a counselor to others to be physically and psychologically safe.)

People kept seeking me out as I made my way through college and grad school, and that continued when I started my professional career. Whether these were peers on other teams or at different organizations; younger people who wanted career advice or mentorship; or older, more senior individuals, their needs and requests of me were the same: listen, react, advise, suggest.

I grew to see this role as one that was valuable and valued, so I would prioritize requests for my time. I was often informally compensated with a free coffee or lunch, but the “work” itself was fulfilling enough.

That sense of fulfillment is one of the factors that led me to enroll in a coach training class a year ago and really dig in–even if at times I felt like the instructors were telling me things I already knew. In retrospect, I almost always didn’t, and the training proved very beneficial.

Through my consulting practice, coaching is one of the services that I offer. This includes traditional one-on-one and team coaching, but I also strive to bring a coaching mindset to the strategy and organizational development work that I do. In those engagements, I’m working with incredibly talented people who more likely than not know how to navigate many of the things they hire me to help them decide. And I had a hunch–based on what I learned and observed in my training–that if they came to decisions themselves, they would be more likely to implement and own them. So I started to approach many of my meetings with a coaching mindset: I ask as much as I tell.

Of course this isn’t always the case–sometimes I’m hired to bang out a project and that’s what I do; other times I’m working in partnership with organizational leaders to execute on a new program or initiative. But especially when I’m helping a leader solve a problem or make a decision, nine times out of 10 the outcome is better if I coach them toward an answer rather than simply tell them what I’d do in their shoes.

I can’t remember if I showed up this way back in school (it wasn't yesterday!). But now I get to see this approach in action–and succeeding–almost every day, on questions big and small.

If you’d like to learn more about my consulting work, my training, or what it’s like to be or have a coach, please get in touch. I'm always happy to schedule some time to speak.

Be well!