Discovering Your Truth and Setting Yourself Free Isn’t Easy

Part of the magic of coaching is that I can never tell where a relationship will end up.

An engagement that sets out to be about one thing, often ends up being about another. And few people expect coaching to touch them as deeply as it often does.

Take Patricia*.

A successful promotion

A talented woman who has fast-tracked her way through her chosen profession, she hired me to get supported in making a success of her first board level position. She was feeling unconfident.  And, quite aside from wanting to get her head round the rational side of  a more senior job, needed to build her personal resilience to be able to navigate its more emotional and political aspects.

It was a challenging move for sure and we spent a lot of time in the beginning game-planning. She worked through her business strategy and mobilised her team around it. She explored some of the tensions between her and some of her people  – and indeed some of her peers – and developed tactics that allowed her to move beyond them. She delivered some key things that were long overdue and central to the business’s long-term direction.

Within six months she was acing the role.

Confronting doubts

And it was only then, with her doubts about capability and performance put to bed, that she could confront other realities. Central to which was the emerging feeling that her initial lack of confidence was not just about how good she could be for the business, but about how good the business was for her.

Something happened that crossed her deep sense of integrity. She could have walked away at that point feeling angry and wounded, but instead she chose to use it as a lever to understand herself better. Where that took her was into doing a deep inventory of her strengths, talents, values and beliefs.

She discovered some fascinating things.

Discovering truth

First, there was a huge misalignment between her values and her company’s. She’s a people person; a real community player. They on the other hand were bottom-line oriented. And pretty ruthless with it. No amount of exercising her very powerful positive deviance was changing any of that.

So she constantly felt bad about what she was contributing. The culture was not, after all, a fit for her. She was full of ideas for how things could be different or better, but her autocratic managing director seemed only to want to clip her wings, leaving her feeling very constrained.

Then she realised that she did not identify with the company’s core business. And without that strong sense of brand identity, she began to see that she was having to really dig into herself to be and stay motivated. Which was pretty exhausting. It wasn’t safe to be herself in leadership.

You might ask, as I did, why she’d been attracted to such a firm in the first place.

This unraveled a key vulnerability for her: a big need for approval. It had been beyond flattering to have been headhunted into the job. And indeed it was those needs that had for a while been hooking her into believing that she had to make the job work for her. That if it didn’t work, it would be her failure.

But that insight unlocked something for her, allowing her to see that it was neither her nor the company that had “failed”; that indeed “failure” was not a useful way to frame things at all. Instead, she and the company were just not a good match.

That realisation was the one that in the end unleashed her. It gave her permission to think about leaving the business, not just to escape it, but to move to something more positive for her. As I write she’s now armed with a clear list of personal filters, and is using her discernment in looking for something that will be a great fit for her.

Who knew?

Who knew we’d get here? I certainly didn’t when we began our work together, and I guess neither did she. But, like I said, that’s the magic of coaching.

*This person’s name and details have been changed to protect their identity.

photo credit: ND Strupler