Ed Batista

Chain, Chain, Chain (Self-Coaching and Self-Assessment)

A key self-coaching skill is self-assessment: How am I doing? Am I making progress toward my goals or not? Why or why not? And the more data we have about what's actually happening in our lives, the more accurately we can answer these questions.

I've written many times about Don't Break the Chain, a tool that I've recommended to numerous clients and students and that I've used myself since March 2008--an experience that began because of a personal crisis. I'd returned to Stanford as a Leadership Coach at the Graduate School of Business in January 2007, and over the subsequent 14 months I exercised exactly...never. It was the usual thing: throw myself into a demanding job, defer my personal needs, tell myself "I'll exercise tomorrow," all while assuming that I could get active again any time I wanted to.

And then in the Spring of 2008 I finally did get active again--and in less than a month I hurt myself, wrenching my knee so badly that it took seven weeks of rest to recover. I dimly recalled turning 40 the previous year and wondered if that might have something to do with it. Ultimately I realized that I needed to get active and stay active--I was too old to do "the usual thing" and needed to make a sustainable change in my approach to exercise.

So for over four years I've relied on Don't Break the Chain to track whether or not I exercised on a given day--here's the data:

Year    % Days Exercised

2008    66.2% (10.5 months)

2009    56.2%

2010    61.7%

2011    81.4%

2012    83.0% (through June 13)

I find these figures really useful while reflecting on the questions above:

How am I doing? Pretty damn good!

Am I making progress toward my goal? Given that my goal was simply to get active and stay active, the answer is clearly yes.

Why? This is where it gets interesting. Obviously, a number of factors are involved--first, we know that we value what gets measured, so the mere act of tracking this data influenced the behaviors that generated it in the first place. Also, exercising creates a virtuous cycle (for me, at least)--if I was active yesterday, I'm more likely to be active today, etc. (This is certainly affected by the visceral feeling I get when I check off a daily box on my exercise calendar and "keep the chain alive"--it's an opportunity for a small victory every day.)

At a more granular level, I can look at the data month-by-month or even week-by-week to understand what was going on in my life at the time and assess the impact on this particular goal. For example, last Fall I let work knock me out of my routine, stopped exercising and promptly got sick. All of this suggests to me that it's important for me to be active every single day, if at all possible.  So even though exercise has been a priority for the past few years, ever since last Fall I've regarded it as a daily requirement, and I've been motivated to rearrange my life accordingly. I'm currently on a 58-day streak, the longest I've ever experienced, and I'm pretty sure I'll increase my 2012 percentage over the second half of the year.

Am I suggesting that everyone rush out and start using Don't Break the Chain? No, of course not. I think it's a highly flexible tool that can be applied to a wide range of goals because it's so simple (more on that topic soon), but I'm certainly not recommending a cookie-cutter solution.

But I am suggesting that a modest effort to generate and track data related to our goals can go a long way in supporting our ability to assess our progress and understand the factors that are pushing us forward and the factors that are getting in our way.

For an overview of my self-coaching framework, see A Self-Coaching Guide for Leaders at All Levels.

For all my posts on this topic, see my Self-Coaching category.

Photo by Stephen Heron.

No Lifeguard On Duty (More On Self-Coaching)

I prefer to hold coaching sessions with my clients and students every other week. My standing joke is that I have the easy job--I get to just sit around and talk--while they have to go back to their lives and do all the heavy lifting. Meeting every other week allows enough time in between sessions for them to actually do whatever needs to be done, reflect on their experiences and bring that data back to the next session. Occasionally I do meet weekly with clients, if their lives are moving particularly quickly, but the goals is always to ensure that there will be sufficient time for things to happen between sessions.

So right from the start in a coaching engagement I strive to put the emphasis on the work that my client or student will be doing on their own, without any support for me. And I'm returning to this theme of self-coaching (and will do so regularly going forward) for three reasons:

1) Better Coaching for Current Clients

As I noted a few weeks ago, my clients and students typically spend just 1% of their working hours talking with me, "so 99% of the time they're managing interactions, making choices and responding to situations on their own. While those actions may be influenced by our coaching conversations, at most I'm a distant echo in the back of their minds, and in the moment my clients and students are coaching themselves through these experiences."

The more explicit and deliberate a client or student can be about the self-coaching practices they're employing and experimenting with, the more clearly they'll understand which practices comprise effective self-coaching for them as individuals, and the more they'll get out of their work with a personal coach like me.

2) Sustainable Support for Former Clients

A personal coaching engagement is typically a short-term, intensive experience. My goal as a coach is to help someone make meaningful, lasting change in their life, and the intensive nature of the experience (which supports the change process) also insures that it's relatively short in duration (as it should be.)

For example, I see clients for three-month engagements, and while a number of them re-commit for a second or third engagement, I rarely work with clients for more than a year. A 2009 Harvard Business Review report found that 91% of coaching engagements last less than 18 months, 73% last less than one year, and 28% last less than six months. And by definition my work with my students at Stanford is always short-term (10 weeks to 6 months) and intensive (it's Stanford.)

The more experience with self-coaching that a client can develop while they're working directly with a personal coach, the more likely they'll be able to continue these practices on a sustainable basis after the coaching engagement is over.

3) Greater Access for All Others

Despite the increased acceptance and understanding of coaching in recent years, and the accompanying growth in the profession (over 40,000 active coaches and a nearly $2 billion global market, according to the International Coach Federation [PDF]), direct access to high-quality personal coaching is still a rare commodity, typically available only to an exclusive population. (The 2009 HBR report cited hourly coaching fees ranging from $200 to $3,500, with a median of $500, and annual tuition for the coming year at Stanford's business school, where I'm a Leadership Coach, is over $57,000.)

In most industries and organizations today coaching is viewed as an investment in helping high-performers be even more effective and fulfilled, and yet some people who could afford personal coaching may work in setting where it's still viewed as a sign of underperformance or career trouble. They may fear that working with a coach will carry a stigma.

Whether the cause is cost or culture, it's clear that many people who could benefit from coaching lack access to a coach, and that's not going to change anytime soon. While self-coaching in the absence of an ongoing or prior engagement with a personal coach is unlikely to have the same impact, I believe that the right resources can still play a meaningful role in helping people be more effective or fulfilled as professionals.

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All of which begs the question: Just what do I mean by self-coaching (and what are the right resources)? I started exploring this issue in 2009, and I realized that I'd already been writing about self-coaching for several years without even using the term; the results at the time were my initial Self-Coaching Guides, a collection of posts organized around the topics of change, communication, happiness, leadership, learning and motivation. I've published 116 additional posts since then, and my perspective on coaching has evolved in many ways during that process. So while I still view those 2009 Guides as a useful starting point, my current goal is to develop a completely new set of resources, building on the writing I've done here in recent years, sharing as I go, and ultimately compiling it all into a more coherent body of work.

I want to note that I started this project in 2010 but had to set it aside when I realized that I needed to take a break, recharge, and recover from a number of challenges before being able to write again on a regular basis. I was overwhelmed by the loss of Richard Wright, my father-in-law, and Roanak Desai, one of my students at Stanford, that Spring, and by Amy's experience with a second shoulder surgery and chronic pain that Summer. I needed to focus exclusively on my clients and students, on Amy and on myself, and I wrote almost nothing for a year from June 2010 through June 2011. I finally returned to writing in earnest a year ago, and since then I've been building the momentum I think I'll need to see this project through (thanks to a lot of work with my own coach and even more self-coaching along the way).

For an overview of my self-coaching framework, see A Self-Coaching Guide for Leaders at All Levels.

For all my posts on this topic, see my Self-Coaching category.

Photo by swanksalot. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

The way you are now is the way you are loved

A little gem of a poem, hidden away in Cary Tennis' advice column:

The way you are now is the way you are loved. Those who love you do not love this other person you wish you were. They do not even know who that person is. The way you are now is the way you are loved.

There is only one person who can be loved as you and it is your job to keep being that person.

You are here to do the one job no one else can do and that job is to fulfill the destiny written on your skin in a place you cannot read without turning inside out. Take several deep breaths. Stop what you are doing.

What is the source of your sadness?

I'm struck by how moved I am by this passage, and how uncomfortable it makes me to think about hitting "Publish" on this post, allowing anyone to see just how much it moves me. I know I'm a deeply sentimental person, at times almost overwhelmed by feelings of tenderness, affection and love. And yet despite all the work I've done over the years recognizing that aspect of myself and becoming more comfortable sharing more of it with more people in more settings, it's still a struggle.

It's a struggle in part because at times it feels safer to hide that aspect of my self, and in part because I'm not only a tender, affectionate, loving person--I'm also a snarky, competitive hard-ass. Less so as the years pass and I become more comfortable with my softer side, but still, both dimensions are important to me, and I don't see them as mutually exclusive. And yet I find it difficult to integrate them, and I know that I can gravitate toward one side or another in certain roles or relationships.

As I mentioned while expressing my thanks to the GSB's Class of 2012, I'm proud of my ability to simultaneously support and challenge others, and while I'll never master that crucial skill, I believe I've made meaningful progress because I identified it as a personal goal, told people I was working on it, and asked for feedback on how to improve. This past year I've also been working on expressing more of my tenderness and my snarkiness, but perhaps it's time to up the ante.

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Thanks, Amy.

Photo by Candida Performa.

Thank You, Stanford GSB Class of 2012 (A Year In Review)

I've been back at Stanford since January 2007, so the current graduates are the fifth class of MBAs I've had the privilege of working with as a Leadership Coach. I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to get to know 35 people in particular--11 Leadership Fellows and 24 members of two T-groups in the school's Interpersonal Dynamics course, aka Touchy Feely. To all of you, I can't thank you enough for the experiences we had together this year.

Any fifth anniversary is a milestone, of course, and yet on a personal level the past year has been particularly meaningful for me. The passage of another year has eased the pain of losing Richard Wright, my father-in-law, and Roanak Desai, a former student, both of whom died in 2010. I'll always miss them, but I've made peace with their passing.

I'm also truly proud of the work that's been done over the past year by the Leadership Fellows I worked with and by my colleagues on Stanford's coaching staff and faculty to revamp the school's Leadership Labs and the Fellows program itself. The effort wasn't as daunting as the process of launching these courses back in 2007, but it was close. I was pushed to be a better coach and a better colleague, and although I stumbled constantly, someone was always there to help me up. And while I'm very grateful for everything I got out of the process personally, what's just as meaningful to me is the sense that we all made a long-term contribution to the school's ability to help students become better leaders.

Finally, facilitating T-groups in Touchy Feely is always uniquely rewarding, and I learn something new every time. This year I was gratified to see how effective I can be at simultaneously supporting and challenging others, and I was challenged myself to be more vulnerable and to worry less about "making mistakes." I came a long way in my understanding of diversity and my ability to work with people across many dimensions of difference, and I realized how much work I have yet to do in this area.  And I was very lucky to be paired with two amazing partners, Erica Peng and Michael Terrell, who pushed me and allowed me to push back.

Despite--or because of--all of this ferment, the past school year was a tremendously productive time for me on this site, where I strive to share what I know (and continue to learn) about coaching not only with my students and clients, but also with anyone who might not have access to a personal coach or a graduate program in management. Below are links to 33 posts written from September 2011 through June 2012, all of which grew at least in part out of my work with those 35 members of the GSB's Class of 2012: Again, thank you all.

T-Groups, Feelings and Management Theory (September 2011)
It's important to better understand, express and manage our emotions. This doesn't mean just expressing "warm fuzzies"; it means taking some risks.

 

Phil Stutz on Taking Risks (September 2011)
What holds us back at the edge of the cliff?  What might happen if we took that leap?

 

Experiential Learning Revisited (September 2011)
Experiential learning remains central to my work as a coach and implicit in everything I do with students and clients.

 

Taming My Perfectionism (October 2011)
I had metaphorically envisioned my perfectionism as a snarling dog, threatening me, keeping me cowering in the corner, practically paralyzed.  And that's not sustainable--it's stressful and boring.

 

Five Leadership Lessons (October 2011)
Some reflections on what I've learned over the last five years about leading groups, with an emphasis on leader as coach and guide rather than as directive authority figure.

 

Don't Build a Castle; Put Up 1,000 Tents (October 2011)
Don't over-invest your resources (time, money, attention) in a single, grandiose enterprise. Instead, experiment across a portfolio of possibilities, and double down quickly on the ones that show promise.

 

The Air Mask Principle (October 2011)
Knowing that I can't help others effectively unless I'm taking care of myself helps me put my needs first when necessary without feeling that I'm letting others down.

 

Learning from Mistakes (October 2011)
What is a mistake? When we make a mistake, what do we think that says about us? And how does that framing affect what we learn from the experience?

 

Significance Junkies (October 2011)
It hurts like hell to admit our insignificance, and we find consolation in endlessly inventive delusions of relevance.

 

Corn Mazes and Mental Models (December 2011)
They didn't think they were in a cornfield; they thought they were in a maze, and while their failure to recognize the difference says something about their crisis management skills, it also says something about the power of mental models.

 

Hammering Screws (Bad Coaching (December 2011)
If good coaching feels like a trip in a tandem kayak...then bad coaching feels like hammering screws--a solo effort on the part of the coach that can make a lot of noise but accomplishes very little.

 

Coaching Is A Journey (December 2011)
I find myself returning to the metaphor of coaching as a journey at sea...

 

Setbacks, Mindset and the Fundamental Attribution Error (January 2012)
Thinking about some recent setbacks has led me to reflect on two topics that often come up in my coaching practice: mindset and the fundamental attribution error.

 

The Meaning of Mindset (January 2012)
Just what do we mean by 'mindset'? Here are 4 inter-related definitions to help us make effective use of the central concept.

 

Comfort Struggle (January 2012)
Observe Exellence! Honor Attempt! Comfort Struggle!

 

Why I (Keep Trying To) Meditate (January 2012)
I find meditation difficult, I regularly avoid doing it, and yet I persist in the practice. Why?

 

Resistance and Self-Sabotage (January 2012)
"The enemy is identified as those forms of self-sabotage that I call 'Resistance' with a capital R (in The War of Art). The technique for combating these foes can be described as 'turning pro.'"

 

Human Velcro (Hooks and Loops) (January 2012)
What hooks am I putting out there?  How effectively am I bidding to connect with this particular person?  Just as important, what loops am I putting out there?  How effectively am I perceiving and responding to their bids?

 

Blocking and Tackling (Fundamentals of Change) (January 2012)
No matter how lofty or ambitious the goal, the path to its achievement will be paved with countless small, humble steps.

 

Make the Right Decision...Or Make the Decision Right? (January 2012)
"It's important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about "making the right decision" and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right."

 

Investment vs. Attachment (January 2012)
We invest in people, and being invested in someone means we care about them and want them to succeed. But if we invest in people, we're attached to outcomes. 

 

One Stone At A Time (Building Boundaries) (February 2012)
The key is recognizing that boundaries aren't static features of a landscape, but dynamic aspects of our relationships, our personal lives and our organizations.

 

Measuring the Infinite (February 2012)
An infinite distance lies between nothing--the unsaid comment, the unwritten letter, the undone act--and something, no matter how much room for improvement remains.

 

Suspension of Belief (February 2012)
Without reaching any final conclusions regarding the validity of a given belief, we can temporarily suspend it, and "act as if" it we didn't hold it, or as if it had no hold on us.

 

Skin in the Game (February 2012)
While having skin in the game allows us to do our best work, it also exposes us to risk. When we succeed it's all the more gratifying, and when we struggle, it's all the more disheartening

 

Taking the Plunge (Safety, Risk, Learning and Growth (February 2012)
The safer and more trusting we feel, the more risks we can take, the more we learn and grow. And safety and trust are even more useful when we push (and extend) their limits.

 

Tiny Gestures (and Emotional Bids) (February 2012)
Safety and trust are established over a series of interactions through countless tiny gestures that take the form of an emotional bid.

 

In Defense of Normal (A Coaching Manifesto) (February 2012)
For coaching and other interventions to achieve their goals they must be perceived as normal, but too often coaching and related services are perceived as special.

 

Dan Oestreich Interviews Me (March 2012)
My role as a coach is both necessary and modest. Necessary in the sense of helping clients know how to get started. And modest in the sense that the goal is for clients to be able to coach themselves after I leave.

 

The Work and The Job (May 2012)
We can change jobs readily; we change our work only with great effort. In the end our jobs are lines on a resume, while our work is our legacy, our epitaph.

 

I Am The 1% (Why Self-Coaching Matters) (May 2012)
Effective self-coaching is the key to meaningful growth and development, whether you're working with an executive coach like me or simply reading websites like this in your spare time.

 

Brass Rings and Railroad Tracks (On Self-Validation) (June 2012)
The challenge before us is to rely less upon extrinsic rewards for validation and instead put greater faith in our own intrinsic worth and validate ourselves.

 

Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up) (June 2012)
This defense of speaking up shouldn't be read as a simplistic manifesto to just "speak our minds." If we want to influence others and affect the outcome of the discussion, we must speak up skillfully.

 

Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up)

1. If it feels risky to say, it's important.

If it wasn't important, it wouldn't feel risky. And that sense of risk is a critical piece of data, a sign that the conversation is a meaningful one with larger implications.

2. If it feels risky to say, there are good reasons why it feels risky.

It feels risky because we sense that what we say will have an impact, although we can't be certain just what that impact will be. The content, the timing, our tone of voice, or even the fact that we're speaking at all--on this topic, at this moment, to this person--any one of these factors could be the source of the risk. 

3. If it feels risky to say, saying it will upset a defense routine.

Chris Argyris defines defense routines as "actions or policies that prevent individuals or segments of the organization from experiencing embarrassment or threat... [W]henever human beings are faced with any issue that contains significant embarrassment or threat, they act in ways that bypass, as best they can, the embarrassment or threat. In order for the bypass to work, it must be covered up." [1] By speaking up and saying something risky, we will inevitably run up against and highlight a defense routine, thereby compounding the embarrassment or threat. Note that our own defense routines will also be implicated, not merely those of other people.

4. If it feels risky to say, saying it will carry a short-term cost.

Just as we can't know the precise impact of speaking up in advance, we can't know the precise short-term cost that we will have to pay for doing so. We do know that being perceived as a source of embarrassment or threat always carries a cost; we also know that calling attention to any efforts to avoid embarrassment or threat also carries a cost. We can estimate these costs after speaking up by measuring the length of the silence that follows our comments, although this is a rough calculation at best.

5. If it feels risky to say, NOT saying it will carry a long-term cost.

Nor can we know the precise long-term cost that we will have to pay for NOT speaking up. We do know that censoring ourselves is stressful and generates negative feelings. We also know that we will inevitably blame those negative feelings on those who "made us" censor ourselves. Finally, we know that censoring leads to distant and superficial relationships, that we crave intimacy and meaning, and if we can't find those qualities here we'll go elsewhere to find them. We tend to have a high tolerance for these long-term costs until we cross some undefined threshold, beyond which our capacity to bear them is rapidly exhausted.

6. Minimizing the short-term costs will increase the long-term costs.

7. Minimizing the long-term costs will increase the short-term costs.

The short-term and long-term costs are inextricably intertwined. However, we typically act as if this is not the case and prefer to assume that A) all costs can be avoided, B) any unavoidable costs can be indefinitely deferred, and C) any unavoidable, non-deferrable costs will be paid by someone else. This is magical thinking.

8. Our success depends on balancing these costs by speaking up skillfully.

This defense of speaking up shouldn't be read as a simplistic manifesto to just "speak our minds." (See point #4.) We do need to speak up. (See point #5.) And yet if we want to achieve our goals, influence others, and affect the outcome of the discussion, we must speak up skillfully.

9. Speaking up skillfully is itself a skill that must be practiced in low-risk settings.

And it's a skill comprised of many complex sub-skills, such as the ability to...

• Sense and listen to our intuitive feeling of risk.
• Keep pushing ahead in the face of that risk without shutting down.
• Manage and make use of the emotions evoked by the discussion.
• Insert ourselves gracefully but assertively into the flow of the discussion.
• Speak with sufficient passion to be influential.
• Regulate that passion so as not to trigger distress in others.
• Monitor and respond to others' verbal, non-verbal and visual cues in the moment.
• Know when it's time to let go and move on.

Given this complexity, the only way to develop these skills is to jump in and practice them. This is a fundamental purpose of all experiential learning programs, including the courses that I've been involved in at Stanford, such as the Leadership Labs [2] or Interpersonal Dynamics (aka Touchy Feely). [3] They provide a setting in which the (variable) level of risk adjusts with the group's (variable) level of skill and interest in having a risky discussion. This is also a good reason to work with a coach--one of the most useful functions I fulfill for my clients is simply listening and responding as they talk through things that feel risky to say, and in many cases we actively role-play a situation to allow them to prepare for the real thing. In the absence of resources like a graduate program in management or a personal coach, it's critical to seek out settings and develop relationships in which we can practice the art (and it is an art) of speaking up. The key is feeling safe enough to step outside our comfort zone, because we only learn when we're willing to risk making a mistake.

10. It begins by recognizing when we're censoring ourselves because something feels risky to say.

This is always the starting point: An awareness that we have something to say, and yet we're not saying it. In some settings or in some relationships we self-censor so habitually that we don't even notice it anymore, and our task is to rouse ourselves from this slumber, recognize ourselves and our responses, and return to the top of this list.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning, page 25 (Chris Argyris, 1990)

[2] Teaching Leadership with Stanford's Leadership Fellows

[3] Interpersonal Dynamics

Inspired by Chris Argyris' brilliant Overcoming Organizational Defenses:

All organizational defense routines are based on a logic that is powerful and that has profound impact on individuals and organizations. The logic is to:

1. Craft messages that contain inconsistencies.

2. Act as if the messages are not inconsistent...

3. Make the ambiguity and inconsistency in the message undiscussable...

4. Make the undiscussability of the undiscussable also undiscussable. [p 27]

Photo by Jônatas Cunha.

Brass Rings and Railroad Tracks (On Self-Validation)

What do we do when extrinsic motivators lose their power? Where do we go when there's no obvious path ahead of us?

A theme in my work with clients and students is a need for achievement that relies on extrinsic rewards and inevitably shapes our professional paths and personal destinies. We're driven to succeed, to reach for and grasp the brass ring [1] in one form or another: good grades and academic awards, important positions with prestigious organizations, titles and promotions and other status badges.

And our success often leads us down a path in which each step seems to logically follow the previous one: Those good grades open the door to a budding career in which strong performance leads to graduate study, which opens the next door. This isn't to say that we simply glide along on rails from one stage to the next--we're hard workers and usually our own toughest critics. But at each transition we consider our options and find our choices heavily influenced by extrinsic factors--so we choose the most selective school, the most glamorous industry, the most high-profile firm, the best-paying job, etc.

This process can work well--until suddenly it doesn't. The value of extrinsic rewards always has a shelf life--they never satisfy indefinitely. As psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky has written, "Although we may achieve temporary boosts in well-being by moving to new parts of the country, securing raises, or changing our appearances, such boosts are unlikely to be long-lasting. The primary reason...is that people readily and rapidly adapt to positive circumstantial changes." [2]

Sometimes we refuse to believe that the brass rings have lost their luster--we just need higher-quality rings! We'll get another degree at an even better school, and a more demanding job at an even more competitive firm with an even bigger compensation package! And sometimes this works, for a while. But never forever. At some point we realize that we may have amassed a truly impressive collection of brass rings, but A) we're making ourselves miserable in the process, or B) brass rings don't provide meaning or purpose or love, or C) we really are mortal, and at some point in the rapidly approaching future all the brass rings in the world will be meaningless. [3]

And whenever this moment occurs in our lives, at that point the well-trodden path we've been following suddenly disappears. The clearly-defined tracks that have eased our progress toward a better future no longer reach to the horizon but bog down in a tangled thicket we can't even see through. We're on our own, and we're going to have to blaze a trail from here on out.

As stressful as that experience can be, I also believe it's an incredible opportunity. At that moment, whether we're 21 or 25 or 44 or 99, the challenge before us is to rely less upon extrinsic rewards for validation and instead put greater faith in our own intrinsic worth and validate ourselves.

 

For Amy, whose courage in finding her own path gave me the courage to find mine.

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Footnotes

[1] "A brass ring is a small grabbable ring that a dispenser presents to a carousel rider during the course of a ride." (Wikipedia)

[2] The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, page 63 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2008)

• Also see Understanding "The Pie Chart" in The How of Happiness

[3] Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

Updated March 2021.

Photo by Nathan Siemers.