Business Coaching For Personal Issues?
What do you do when your problems at home – be it spouse, crappy nappies or hormonal teenagers – impact to the point where you lose focus and function at work? Believe it or not, Coaching may help.
In the bullshit-free safe zone that is an essential element of coaching our business clients about their business, we’re likely to bump up against any and all of the personal issues above, and more: Suicidal staff; depressed clients; business partnership disharmony; the huge negative impact of long-term dishonesty by staff; ill health; every shade of life-partner issue that you can imagine, and a few you couldn’t; menopause (male and female); stress; and aging, to name some of the more common.
So what’s all this got to do with busines coaching?
It depends on your coach. If they are aware but unqualified, they’ll recognise the symptoms of stress or other negative reactions in their client and responsibly recommend – or straight refer them out to – professional help. Or, if they have experience, qualifications and confidence in their ability in the specific situation, they’ll make a contribution in this area as well.
The following is some emailed advice cobbled together for one of the more common issues when it was raised by a client recently, prior to talking it over for some solutions.
Teenagers
Client: “What do you recommend I do with two teenage daughters who are driving me up the wall?”
Coach: “You mean apart from a whip and a chair, or moving to a far off place until they grow out of it? The short answer is “Hang in there” – time tends to cure them but you (and they) have to stay alive long enough for that to be a solution.”
“When all else fails: If you truly love them and care about them, they need to know it. They may reject that (or say they do) right now (it’s cool to be cruel), but if you come from a consistently positive base, with some really clear – and obviously fair, and preferably negotiated – rules, then at least you have a stable platform to work from.
Here’s a bit of a checklist you can run through to score your efforts to date:
Everyone wants to feel safe and secure
Love
Everyone to whom you matter wants to see and feel your care and respect for their emerging individuality. They will be unaware of their own lack of responsiveness, apparent caring, etc, because they are inside the puberty process and don’t have the experience and maturity to recognise what is going on in relation to them. You have life experiences to draw upon that they have not yet acquired, so you can expect to have more insight into situations. That doesn’t make it hurt less when they’re being little shits.
Recognition
A teenager is experiencing an emerging sense of themselves as independent of their parents – but they are not! They don’t have money, legal autonomy, a driver’s licence, or much power of any sort, so their experience is likely to be that they are trapped! That feeling has the potential to generate all sorts of negative behaviour. If you do what you can (including telling them directly) to have them understand that you do value them as an emerging adult, and do sympathise with their need to cut some bonds, and be different (from you, not from others their age, mind you), you may gain some respect. Remember, you get respect by first giving it – really. It might be smart to start including them in some of the decisions that are made for the whole family, giving them a vote in family affairs, and recognising that they are no longer “just kids”.
Understanding
Most good teenagers (in their more balanced moments at least) are keen for real connection and real conversation andreal understanding – it’s part of the new territory that they are exploring. Working on creating and maintaining an honest and open environment where you take them into your confidence as young adults and share some of your own feelings – the ones you hid from them as kids – may help them to understand you and vice versa. If you do love them, you’ll put effort into looking at things and understanding things from their point of view; as the very beginning of understanding whatever it is that they are doing at the moment. It’s useful to use the Coach’s Approach to issues:
- There is no right or wrong; there is only what works and what doesn’t.
- Avoid judgements, and work on good outcomes.
- Don’t take positions, but don’t be afraid to uphold the values that matter either, and explain why you are doing it.
- Learning where the boundaries are is just as important as learning how to exercise freedom responsibly. You can guide them – or a Judge can, but he won’t do as thoughtful a job as you will.
Support
We all respond positively to sincere praise. If you want to put some praise in and not have it rejected use this formula: Pay a sincere and factual compliment, and follow it immediately with a relevant question. Try this one, it’s a buzz, and it sure oils the tracks. Create opportunities for them to contribute – expect it of them, request it of them and, if you have to, requireit of them as their duty to the tribe of which they are currently a member. Once they are contributing, sincerely praise anything positive to begin with, then progressively raise the bar. This is their training for the world at large, and you want to send them out there eventually with a good standard of performance that will be valued in the wider community, and which they can trade for what they want.
Discipline
Parental discipline is the most likely foundation for personal discipline. If you don’t teach your children boundaries, they feel you don’t care. Of course, they’ll yell when you enforce them, but that’s part of the dance that parents and children do anyway. It’s all training for the bigger world where, if they step over a boundary, they are likely to be hit in the teeth with a baton, or sued, or be burdened with an obligation that shapes the rest of their life in a way that they would not want. First Rule: Mum and Dad must agree on and enforce the boundaries TOGETHER.
Good luck. Most of my clients survive this one.
