To me a coaching conversation is a dialogue with your best Self. For an artist I think this is an absolutely crucial opportunity. It can be very tricky sharing unformed ideas with friends, colleagues, other artists, partners and so on. Even when that person is 100% committed to supporting you they are still another human with a whole bunch of alternative perspectives, values and experience.
They might whole-heartedly want to help you but the fact is that they simply are not you and therefor they can only guess and interpret what you are saying and what are you thinking. Even with the best of intentions the potential for misunderstanding is huge and sometimes the reality is that, consciously or unconsciously, not everyone is able to support 100%. People can only believe in you, to the extent they believe in themselves. With this in mind as artists we can be incredibly vulnerable as we tentatively put forward a new idea, or a new strategy. In my opinion there is one person and one person only who knows best how to nurture your ideas into fruition and that person is you.
This is what I love about coaching it is a completely clean process. As a coach I am completely neutral, I do not give advice, I do not lead or advise, I simply actively listen without analysis or judgement.
Although, yes, coaching is a collaborative process, a coaching partnership will take you far further than you could ever imagine by yourself but the focus is completely on you, as a coach my thoughts, feelings, expertise don’t come into it all. My job as coach is to ask the right questions at the right time; these questions act as a mirror to you, the coachee- ‘the one who knows.’ The right question will land beyond your everyday thinking into a space of all possibility, and here hidden and unexpected solutions can be found.
The answers are always within ourselves. I believe there is nothing that cannot be significantly progressed through a coaching conversation. Often we can’t reach the gold of our own insight because we are stuck in habitual thinking patterns. Coaching transcends these limitations by dialoguing with the ‘you’ that has access to all the resources they need, and the ‘you’ that has all the confidence that is required to achieve the goal. It perhaps sounds a bit unlikely; I certainly did not understand what was available through coaching until I had experienced the outcomes of coaching for myself. The simple truth is that the best coach in the world for you is YOU!
