How to be a lighthouse in a sea full of tugboats and drowning people
As a coach or a mentor, the biggest part of your job can be holding your clients or mentees accountable for their own dreams and expectations. It often falls on you to be a calm voice of reason and reality when someone is either lying to themselves or refusing to acknowledge the reality of their world. If you fall into the trap of being agreeable and convivial at the time when you need to be firm and truthful, you will fail at your job. It is one of the biggest disservices you can do to your calling, yourself, and the people who are coming to you for advice.
If you have come to me for advice and coaching, it is absolutely my job to hold you accountable to what you said you wanted. Your dreams are what I am in service of; when the reality of your actions and your life doesn’t match the path to the attainability of your dreams, that’s when I need to stand strong and tell you how to get back on your desired path.
Holding people accountable begins by knowing two things about your client very clearly: Point A – where they are currently and Point B – where they want to be. The gap between the two is what I have to help you navigate, and that’s where I have to ask the hard and uncomfortable questions. And the thing you learn very early on is that everyone has a block. Whether that block is a result of lack of knowledge, lack of experience, or simply the lies they’ve told themselves, everyone who is stuck in the process of growth has a block that they can use help with. This is where it gets tricky because this is where we talk about control.
Be a lighthouse, not a tugboat
When you are given the privilege of being the person in position of being able to coach someone, remember that you are not in absolute control. You can only shed light on the path that they can take to safety; you definitely cannot do it for them. If you hold the reins of control tight and decide that you’ll personally take your client to Point B, you are a tugboat and not a lighthouse. By personally escorting them to the first goal, you will think you have done your job. After all, you reached the harbor, right? So that’s the goal—fulfilled.
Now this is just the first time. You can do it. What about all the other times? What about when they need to navigate the waters again? Do they know how to rescue themselves? Do they know how to navigate? No. They do not, and that’s the growth that you will have denied them. As a coach, you need to learn to be separated from the results of the decisions of your clients. This is why I picture a lighthouse when I think of my coaching technique. I can light up the correct path, but the decisions that they make by themselves—whether to grow or not, whether to pedal or not, whether to want something or not—those actions and decisions will guide them to ultimately either reach harbor safely or to crash into it.
As a lighthouse, I can’t personally go chase everyone that will stray from the path, but I will never waver from shining uninterrupted light. That’s my role, and I’ll be unrelenting in it.
Before we even get to understand what Point A and Point B are for a client, sometimes we run into difficulty, and that is because people think they already have an answer to what they need. So, that’s why we come to the next part.
Keep the mindset of the “doctor frame”
You wouldn’t go to a doctor and tell them that because you have XYZ symptoms, you have diagnosed yourself. Hence, they should prescribe the drug of your choice. That’s not how consulting a professional works. No one is saying that a coach is a doctor, but when you have come to us, you have come for our expertise in our field. And we would approach the concerns you have with the mindset of the expert; we’ll ask questions, and we’ll ask you to define things. Based on my experience, that can be hard for some people; it would mean confronting their own ideas and misconceptions.
So, they say things such as: “Oh well, I have everything ready. I have almost everything in place, and I just need marketing.” This is very strange to hear from extremely smart, accomplished people because the process of acquiring marketing isn’t difficult. What’s happening is that they are assigning the roadblock to an easy item on the checklist, so that they don’t have to accept that there wasn’t a concrete plan or that the plan they do have isn’t working. There’s a reason they are struggling, and their self-diagnosis and self-medication would have already worked, if it were going to.
So, the best thing you can do as a coach or a mentor is to ask the hard questions: ask them the whys and why nots. It is the best thing you’ll ever do for them.
written by: Jorge Moral
About the Author
Jorge Moral is a professional Coach that helps coaches that are stuck in fear, anxiety and are overwhelmed get clarity and be empowered to start their journey as a coach. His specialty is empowering and holding accountable his clients to shape their coaching careers and live a purposeful and fulfilled life.
