There’s an unspoken secret that many coaches and teachers have.
If your job is to help other people perfect a skill–to coach them–you sometimes secretly wish no one else had ever coached your client before they came to you.
(That’s a broad statement: maybe it’s more accurate to say that you wish all their previous instructors had followed the tenets and practices that are foundational to your own approach.)
I’ll give you an example.
Last year, I coached a smart executive at the top of his field. He is personable and funny, and really connects with people one-on-one. But when he walks out onstage to speak, he seems like a different person. A previous coach gave him instructions that disconnected him from his natural charm and made him stilted and robotic. Nothing he does onstage seems natural, unforced, or confidence-inspiring. In fact, the more he uses the over-the-top gestures and movements he inherited from his last coach, the more divorced from his own message he seems.
He wants to overcome these habits. We talked and practiced for more than 90 minutes, and at the end he was maybe 8% better. His bad habits were an obstacle he couldn’t quite understand how to surmount. The muscle memory of “public speaking = this kind of gesture!” was incredibly strong. He had connected public speaking with those kinds of movements over several years, and it would take a lot more time than we had to forge a new connection.
I definitely wish this client had come to me without having had the previous coaching: not because it makes my job harder, but because the client has to first undo the old habit, then replace it with something more effective.
When we know we’re grappling with habits that don’t serve us, what can we do? In the case of my client, I asked him to start developing an awareness of his natural body language and style, how he behaves when he’s not GIVING A PRESENTATION. This gives him a chance to develop new muscle memory, and a battery of aligned behaviors we can call on the next time he needs to present. As always, we need to focus regularly on the behavior that isn’t working in order to replace it with a new one.
We’ve all got bad habits. Which ones are you going to seek to change?
