Ed Batista

The Passion Paradox for Entrepreneurs

The passion that drives entrepreneurs to achieve greatness can also take a toll on their professional and personal lives. What can we do?

Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness are two of my favorite writers on the subject of human potential. Their 2017 book Peak Performance explored the implications of recent research from psychology, neuroscience and elite athletics for day-to-day effectiveness in the workplace and other domains of life.

Their latest book The Passion Paradox, published earlier this year, continues in this vein and extends the theme of their earlier work into some new directions. While its tone and approach are reminiscent of Peak Performance, Brad and Steve go beyond scientific findings and introduce a range of philosophical perspectives, from Epictetus and Seneca to Alain de Botton.

(Full disclosure: Brad and I are colleagues in the Bay Area coaching community, and I consider him a friend. I haven’t met Steve, but it would still feel a little too formal to refer to them here as Stulberg and Magness.)

The Passion Paradox is subtitled, "A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life," and Brad and Steve’s thesis is concisely stated in their final pages:

Mindlessly living with a passion can be extremely harmful and destructive. Mindfully living with a passion can be the key to a life well lived. Above all, this is the conclusion we came to after researching, reporting, and writing this book. [1]

What struck me as I read The Passion Paradox is the relevance of this idea to the leaders I work with in my coaching practice. Most of my clients are founder CEOs, and all of my clients are entrepreneurs in one way or another--they've taken a leap, they're pursuing a vision, they're building a culture. And they're deeply passionate about their work in ways that are often "the key to a life well lived," but also occasionally in ways that are "harmful and destructive."

While Brad and Steve’s book can be read profitably by anyone, below are nine key points that seem particularly significant for leaders like my clients, related patterns I've observed in my practice, and some suggested "lessons for entrepreneurs":

1. Passion and persistence have a neurological basis.

The sustained effort that’s necessary to pursue a passion in the face of adversity can be the result of a lower-than-normal sensitivity to the neurotransmitter dopamine:

Unlike other feel-good chemicals that are released after you’ve accomplished a goal, the far more potent dopamine is released prior, during the pursuit… [As a result] it’s not surprising that people who are insensitive to it (and thus need more of it to feel good) embody persistence, demonstrating unwavering determination and relentless drive. The more dopamine someone needs to feel good, the more willing she is to strive for and chase after ridiculously challenging rewards, even if doing so turns out to be detrimental to her in some way. [2]

To be clear, I don't have any data indicating that my clients or other entrepreneurs are less sensitive to dopamine, but it's a plausible hypothesis that could explain patterns that I frequently observe in my practice: Founders and other entrepreneurs work harder and longer than many other people, and they often accomplish more as a result, but they can also take less pleasure in the process and feel less fulfilled by success.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: I often have to remind clients that their employees need to celebrate company achievements--many of my clients are inclined to simply "check the box" when a milestone has been achieved and move on to the next task.

2. Struggles and failures can spur subsequent performance.

Brad and Steve draw upon a body of research suggesting that experiences of "adversity and discomfort" can fuel a determination to succeed later in life. [3] The life histories of many of my clients reflect this pattern, although the details vary widely, ranging from a sense of social exclusion in school to family turmoil to early career setbacks. I've also observed the inverse pattern--people who reach leadership positions never having experienced significant struggle or failure in life can find it difficult to regain their equilibrium when a setback occurs later in their career.

A version of this that I see in my practice involves a senior executive recruited by one of my clients to join their mid-stage company: the accomplished and polished executive isn't prepared for the inevitable stumbles that occur in a startup, and they experience these difficulties as a threat to their identity, which manifests itself as paralysis and retreat, or defensiveness and blame.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Embrace struggle and learn from failure--they're two of our best teachers. Look for these experiences when hiring, particularly in senior roles--they build reserves of resilience that leaders must draw upon to survive difficulties and help others do the same.

3. Passion is a form of addiction.

Brad and Steve cite a passage from Maia Szalavitz’s book on the neuroscience of addiction, Unbroken Brain:

When starving, when in love, and when parenting, being able to persist despite negative consequences—the essence of addictive behavior—is not a bug, but a feature, as programmers say. It can be the difference between life and death, between success and failure. However, when brain pathways intended to promote [positive attributes] are diverted into addiction, their blessings become curses. Love and addiction are alternations of the same brain circuits. [4]

And as Brad and Steve go on to note, "The line between what is good and bad, between what is productive and what is destructive, between when lots of dopamine fuels generative action and when it leads to disorder—is a fine and fragile one." [5] This is a hallmark of many of my clients--in a sense, they're addicted to work and often consider themselves happy workaholics. But the benefits to be derived from such single-minded dedication can at times be outweighed by the costs.

Something many of my clients experience is persistent and even obsessive thinking about the company--they're constantly turning it over in their minds, solving one problem so they can move on to the next. They're like a gamer who's unable to stop playing until they've "won"--which is itself a form of addictive behavior. Such passion can be a tremendous advantage in overcoming difficulties and persisting in the face of adversity, but like every superpower it has a dark side: I've had many clients who've experienced difficulty sleeping or being fully present in personal situations because thinking about work is a constant distraction.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Obsessive focus can be a superpower, and yet more isn't always better. Under some conditions it yields increasing returns, and under others it doesn't--be thoughtful about the difference.

4. Passion can be cultivated (although it may not feel good at first).

Psychologists have observed that people generally hold one of two different beliefs about how passion for work is obtained--we either find the right fit at the outset, or we develop it over time--and Brad and Steve cite a paper on this subject by a team from the University of Michigan and USC. They don't quote from it directly, but I found it sufficiently interesting to explore further, and the authors write:

The dominant mentality in America is the belief that passion is attained through finding a fit with the right line of work: We enjoy working in vocations compatible with our true selves. This is captured in the term "follow your passion," which advocates actively seeking the right fit...

[In contrast,] espousing what they consider a more realistic approach, some people suggest that passion for work can be cultivated over time in any line of work. They advocate developing one’s passion through mastery rather than expecting it from the outset. [6]

As Brad and Steve note, the vast majority of people who hold what's called a "fit mind-set" believe that "happiness comes from finding an activity or job about which they are immediately passionate, something that feels intuitively right from the get-go." [7] But the problem is that people with this mind-set tend not to follow pursuits that are initially challenging but offer greater potential for long-term growth, and they give up in the face of early disappointments.

In my experience entrepreneurs generally take the opposite perspective and hold a "developmental mind-set." My clients are clearly driven to pursue their professional goals, but they don't expect entrepreneurial leadership to feel good from the start, and when it does feel good, they're keenly aware that such feelings will probably change quickly as the business evolves and requires something new of them as a leader.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Resist the temptation to conclude that early challenges are a sign of a poor fit. Cultivate your comfort with discomfort in order to persist through challenges while pursuing growth opportunities.

5. Passions fulfill fundamental psychological needs.

Brad and Steve discuss the work of psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who developed the concept of "self-determination theory" in the 1970s. According to this model, we remain motivated by a pursuit over an extended period when it fulfills three primary needs:

• Competency, or "a sense of control over the outcome of your efforts and the ability to make progress over time."
• Autonomy, "sometimes referred to as authenticity, [which] is about acting in harmony with your innermost being." Brad and Steve clarify this concept further by citing the work of a team of psychologists from the University of Washington:

The great benefit of being able to convincingly rationalize one’s work as a manifestation of the true self is that it gives the individual direction and purpose. Work then provides the answers to an individual’s fundamental questions: "Who am I?" and "What should I do with my life?"

• Relatedness, or "the need to feel connected to and/or like you are part of something larger." [8]

I regularly observe all of these factors in my clients, particularly founder CEOs, although each strength comes with a downside. Entrepreneurial leaders enjoy a great deal of agency and rightly believe that their individual efforts will be vital to the company’s success (or lack thereof), but as a result they often struggle to relinquish ownership of key tasks and delegate them to subordinates. Entrepreneurs generally feel personally identified with their venture, which enables them to serve a unique role as an avatar of the business, but this can undermine their sense of self-worth should the business stumble or fail. And entrepreneurs typical relish the experience of being a central figure in a community of employees, customers, and other stakeholders, and yet even the most extroverted leader needs time away from the spotlight to replenish themselves.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Just as passion itself can have an addictive dark side, the aspects of leadership that are most fulfilling can also carry a cost. Be mindful of the need to let go and delegate, maintain a separate identity, and disconnect from the role.

6. External rewards are of limited value.

University of Quebec psychologist Robert Valleyrand has suggested that our pursuits become problematic when, as Brad and Steve note, "someone becomes more passionate about the rewards an activity might bring than about doing the activity itself. As a regular reader of Stoicism, I was gratified to see Brad and Steve link this current research to the teachings of Epictetus, who warns against becoming attached to any outcomes that we do not directly control. [9]

The Stoic perspective helps us manage feelings of disappointment when we fail to obtain a desired reward, but it's just as important to limit the value we attach to any external rewards that we do obtain, because of a process known as "hedonic adaptation." As I've noted before, UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky explains that this is a double-edged sword:

The bad news about hedonic adaptation is that it ultimately dampens your happiness and satisfaction after any positive event or uplift. But there is good news, too. I would argue that human beings are actually lucky to have the ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, as it's extremely useful when bad things happen. Some studies of hedonic adaptation show, for example, that we have a phenomenal ability to recover much of our happiness after a debilitating illness or accident. [10]

I observe both sides of this dynamic in my practice. No entrepreneur relishes having to lay off employees or shut down the company, and new leaders in particular can feel a profound sense of dread at the prospect. These events exact real costs, to be sure--careers flounder, dreams die, people suffer. And yet life goes on, and with the passage of time the healing power of hedonic adaptation allows the leader to recover and move on, hopefully having learned how to avoid a similar outcome in the future.

But the sword cuts both ways, of course. Entrepreneurs are as susceptible to the allure of external rewards as anyone else, and many of my clients have pursued and realized these dreams, from the heightened prominence that comes with public accomplishment to the tangible trappings of professional success. But the fulfillment that results is inevitably short-lived, and these rewards lose their ability to stimulate or soothe us as we come to take them for granted.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Keep failure and success in perspective--neither is permanent. Be mindful of the impulse to compare ourselves to others using external measures, which leads to the trap of competition.

7. Fear can be useful in the short-term, but sustained anxiety is costly.

A visceral response to fear clearly offers an important evolutionary advantage. When our early-human ancestors encountered a situation they perceived as dangerous, a powerful threat response primed them to act quickly and decisively, allowing them to survive and pass down their propensity for fright and anxiety. Their less perceptive contemporaries may have enjoyed a more stress-free life, but it was a shorter one as a result.

Yet the same neurological warning system that keeps us safe from harm when we face a literal threat to our physical safety carries a cost when we face merely symbolic threats, which is almost always the case when we encounter a potential failure in our professional lives today. Citing work by NYU's Jocelyn Bélanger and Penn State's David Conroy, Brad and Steve note that fear of failure can offer a short-term boost while imposing a long-term cost:

When we are overcome by fear, we evaluate everything as a threat. Our body and mind prepare us to survive by any means possible. But what is an effective survival response in the short run almost always morphs into anxiety in the long run. [11]

And while we can recover quickly from a sudden jolt of fear once a literal danger has passed, the experience of sustained anxiety in face of symbolic dangers can damage our psychological and physical health.

I see this consistently in my practice. Entrepreneurs face situations on a daily basis that can pose a symbolic threat, from pitching investors to tough conversations with employees, and the relatively mild and brief threat response they experience as a result can help them navigate these situations more effectively. But entrepreneurs can also experience a deeper sense of existential threat over a period of time, not only when the company is failing, but also when the company's succeeding if they're worried about their ability to keep pace as an effective leader. In these cases the toll on the leader can be grave.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Pay close attention to stress levels and make a consistent investment in self-care in order to recover. As Brad and Steve note in Peak Performance, growth results from the right combination of stress and rest.

8. Mastery requires patient effort and focused attention.

Quebec psychologist Valleyrand contrasts a destructive, extrinsically-driven "obsessive passion" with a nourishing, intrinsically-inspired "harmonious passion." [12] One of Brad and Steve's core concepts in The Passion Paradox is that we can attain a state of harmonious passion through what they call a "mastery mind-set," which we might view as an extension of the idea that you can "[develop] one’s passion through mastery," as noted above.

Brad and Steve discuss six different elements of mastery at length: intrinsic motivation; an emphasis on process over goals; consistent, marginal improvements; embracing failure as a challenge; patience; and focus. The entire framework is well worth exploring, but here I focus on the last two and their relevance to entrepreneurs.

Brad has written elsewhere on the problem with hack culture--"Most of it is complete, utter bullshit"--and The Passion Paradox connects this theme with the work of aikido master George Leonard, who disdained "what he called the obsessive personality: someone who lacks the patience and stick-to-itiveness required for mastery." And as Brad and Steve go on to note, "all the previously discussed elements of the mastery mind-set...require patience. Patience is a first principle." [13]

I'm not suggesting that entrepreneurs must be patient in growing the business--they may well need to press forward in the face of competitive threats and limited resources. But I do believe they must be patient in their efforts to develop themselves as a leader (and to support others in doing the same.) There are no hacks to becoming a better leader, no short cuts--it's an arduous process that requires sustained effort over time.

In part this is because entrepreneurial leadership ultimately involves managing attention in any number of ways: deciding what to address and what to ignore, creating the optimal conditions for strategic thinking or a difficult conversation, and regulating anxiety. But as Brad and Steve note, we often fail to treat our attention with the respect it deserves, with pernicious consequences for our effectiveness:

The majority of the time, we walk around on autopilot, not deliberately choosing where or how sharply we direct our attention. To sustain passion, however, we must remove distractions that pray on our attention and break from the mundane and automatic thoughts that normally fill our minds. [14]

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Leadership must be approached like any other demanding discipline. Progress will be contingent on your ability to treat your attention like a resource. A capacity for mindfulness will support patience as well as focus--meditation helps.

9. Balance is overrated, but self-awareness is essential.

Brad has also written elsewhere about the downside of striving for "balance," a perspective that he and I share. As Brad and Steve note, "passion and balance are antithetical," [15] and as I've written before, "balance requires an unsteady equilibrium among the various demands on our time and energy," a precarious stance for a fully committed entrepreneurial leader in a highly dynamic role. Among other proponents of a passionate approach to work, they cite Dr. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic:

You've got to be a minimalist to be a maximalist; if you want to be really good, master and thoroughly enjoy one thing, you've got to say no to many others. [16]

Having rejected balance as a principle for developing a healthy relationship with our passion, Brad and Steve assert that the key is self-awareness:

Self-awareness is perhaps the only countervailing force strong enough to match the extreme inertia of passion. Possessing it ensures that you can thoughtfully evaluate your passions... It gives you the power to choose if and when to pull back from a passion--or, alternatively, if and when to push forward, perhaps with even more fire and drive. [17]

The problem is that many people are actually far less self-aware than they think. Brad and Steve cite research that compares peoples' self-assessments on psychological instruments with assessments made by their friends, as well as those made by total strangers who interacted with them for just a few minutes. The friends' ratings were far more accurate than the self-assessments, and even the strangers' ratings were more accurate for certain traits. [18]

This can pose a significant dilemma for the entrepreneurial leader, particularly in an early-stage company that's growing rapidly. Founder CEOs typically disdain hierarchy--that may be why they started their own company in the first place. As a result they often view themselves as an unthreatening, approachable figure--and that view is often shared by early employees, many of whom know the founder in a personal capacity or worked with them in a prior, more junior role. But fast-growing companies can't fill their ranks with the founder's friends and former colleagues, and eventually the business is populated primarily by people who know the leader only as their CEO--a role that carries ever greater power and authority as the company grows.

And so a gap emerges between the leader's self-image and how they're perceived by others, which can cause any number of problems. For example, a common challenge faced by leaders in my practice is that their passion can lead them to communicate with a great deal of intensity, because they feel a sense of urgency to make good decisions quickly. This wasn't a problem when it was a small group of employees who interacted regularly and who knew the leader as a human being, because they didn't feel intimidated by the leader's intensity and would readily push back. But it can become a big problem when the company grows beyond a certain size.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: The more successful you become, the less feedback you'll get--so ask for it. Cultivate close relationships with your direct reports and encourage them to be candid with you. Model this behavior by assessing your own performance in these conversations. And while I'm hardly objective on this point, get a coach.

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A personal note:

One reason why I found The Passion Paradox so useful is that it offers a perspective through which to view my own professional history. I had three careers before launching my coaching practice in 2006--a short stint as a journalist after college, and then two longer periods that preceded and followed business school. In the first I worked for organizations that served homeless and low-income families in San Francisco, and in the second I worked across the United States and beyond to help the nonprofit sector and NGOs use technology more effectively. Over the course of the latter two careers I was the first employee hired to launch three separate organizations--I'm proud that the first two are still flourishing today, and I like to think of the third as a highly educational failure.

I enjoyed my work as a journalist, but it wasn't a passion. But as I observed and wrote about life in the Bay Area I became deeply passionate about issues related to poverty and income inequality, and that passion propelled me into my career in social services. After being immersed in that world for several years, I became passionate about the potential for technology to transform how nonprofits and NGOs could deliver services and raise funding, and that passion first took me to Stanford to earn an MBA, and then led to the opportunity to serve as the first Executive Director for the Nonprofit Technology Network, known as N-TEN.

For 15 years as I pursued these various passions, my professional life was a roller coaster, rising to the heights as I helped launch new organizations and felt tremendous pride and fulfillment in my work, and then plunging to the depths as I worked long hours under conditions that eventually led to disenchantment and burnout.

But in 2005 I was volunteering to offer support to a struggling management team, and I realized that what I was actually doing was coaching, although no one was calling it that. I had been the beneficiary of some outstanding coaching when I was N-TEN's Executive Director after a member of my board encouraged me to invest in myself and get a coach, and the experience had transformed my perspective on leadership and my sense of my own capabilities. That first round of volunteering led me to seek out additional opportunities to work with leaders, and within a few months I realized that coaching was my passion.

I eventually concluded that I wasn't going to develop myself as a coach in my spare time, and I made the momentous decision to leave my current management role and launch a coaching practice. At the time it felt unimaginably risky, and yet it was clearly one of the best choices I've ever made. Over the last 14 years I've developed a "harmonious passion" for my work that aligns closely with the concepts Brad and Steve explore in their book. My "obsessive passion" enabled me to have an impact in my prior careers, but it always carried a cost and ultimately limited my long-term effectiveness. But I've pursued my career as a coach very differently--it hasn't always been a smooth process, and I made plenty of mistakes, but I adopted an approach that, with the benefit of hindsight, was very consistent with Brad and Steve's "mastery mind-set," and today it's hard to imagine doing anything else.

Thanks to Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness for another great contribution to the literature, and for an opportunity to see myself from a new perspective.

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Footnotes

[1] The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life, page 162 (Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness, 2019)

[2] The Passion Paradox, pages 21-24

[3] The Passion Paradox, pages 27-30

[4] Passage from Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction (Maia Szalavitz, 2017) quoted in The Passion Paradox, page 31

[5] The Passion Paradox, page 32

[6] Finding a Fit or Developing It: Implicit Theories About Achieving Passion for Work, page 1412 (Patricia Chen, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, and Norbert Schwarz, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2015, Vol. 41(10))

[7] The Passion Paradox, page 37

[8] The Passion Paradox, pages 44-45

[9] The Passion Paradox, pages 60-61

[10] The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, pages 48-51 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2007)

[11] The Passion Paradox, page 70

[12] The Passion Paradox, page 74

[13] The Passion Paradox, pages 96-97

[14] The Passion Paradox, page 101

[15] The Passion Paradox, page 109

[16] The Passion Paradox, page 109

[17] The Passion Paradox, pages 125-126

[18] The Passion Paradox, pages 127-128

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For Further Reading

Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness, 2017)

My review of Peak Performance

Ignoring Bandits and Building Resilience

Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance

"Work Hard or Work Smart?" Is the Wrong Question

Comfort with Discomfort

Leader as Avatar

Watch That Next Step (CEO Problems)

How I Read Stoicism

The Trap of Competition

Investments, Not Indulgences

The Problem with Hack Culture (Brad Stulberg, Medium, 2017)

The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore

How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)

Setting the Table (Difficult Conversations)

Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)

Maybe We All Need a Little Less Balance (Brad Stulberg, The New York Times, 2017)

Pirates in the Navy

The Blue Problem (Communication and Power)

How to Find (and Choose) a Coach

Leadership and Transference

This is how we can understand the essence of transference: as a taming of terror. Realistically the universe contains overwhelming power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can't really do much about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we can endow certain persons with it.

~Ernest Becker [1]

Why do people follow leaders? What explains the power that followers invest in a leader and their role? And why, at the same time, do we have such ambivalent feelings toward leaders and their authority?

Anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker believed that these questions can be answered in part by understanding the concept of transference, which he explores extensively in The Denial of Death, a vast and far-reaching work in which he seeks to explain human behavior, with a particular emphasis on social relationships and power dynamics. While the term was originally coined by Freud (Übertragung) to describe feelings of attachment and fascination by patients for their therapists, Becker makes clear that it extends well beyond the therapeutic realm and applies to all of our relationships with authority figures and others--and his views are highly consistent with my experience as a coach working with senior leaders. 

Becker begins by noting that leaders' undeniable charisma is insufficient to explain their power over others:

All through history masses have followed leaders because of the magic aura they projected, because they seemed larger than life. On the surface this explanation seems enough because it is reasonable and true to fact: men worship and fear power and so give their loyalty to those who dispense it.

But this touches only the surface and is besides too practical. Men don't become slaves out of mere calculating self-interest; the slavishness is in the soul, as Gorky complained. The thing that has to be explained in human relations is precisely the fascination of the person who holds or symbolizes power...

Becker then reminds us that Freud saw the roots of transference in primal memories of childhood. As young children we emerge from infancy and experience the world as a chaotic and terrifying place. Parents and caregivers appear to us as awe-inspiring figures with the power to tame chaos and create order and safety, and while our relationship with authority may evolve considerably on our journey to adulthood, we often "transfer" our attachment to other powerful figures who promise to relieve our anxieties, and we retain a deep-seated yearning to submit to their leadership:

Freud saw that a patient in analysis developed a peculiarly intense attachment to the person of the analyst... In the transference we see the grown person as a child at heart, a child who distorts the world to relieve his helplessness and fears, who sees things as he wishes them to be for his own safety...

No one can argue away the manifestations of transference in everyday human affairs. It is not visible on the surface: adults walk around looking quite independent; they play the role of parent themselves and seem quite grown up--and so they are. They couldn't function if they still carried with them the childhood feelings of awe for their parents, the tendency to obey them automatically and uncritically. But, says [Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor] Ferenczi, although these things normally disappear, "the need to be subject to someone remains; only the part of the father is transferred to teachers, superiors, impressive personalities; the submissive loyalty to rulers that is so widespread is also a transference of this sort."

These individual impulses exert a profound effect on our behavior in groups, a topic that Freud discussed in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [2], which had a substantial impact on Becker's thinking:

Early theorists of group psychology had tried to explain why men were so sheeplike when they functioned in groups. They developed ideas like "mental contagion" and "herd instinct," which became very popular. But as Freud was quick to see, these ideas never really did explain what men did with their judgment and common sense when they got caught up in groups. Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.

We see extreme examples of this behavior in mass movements such as political rallies, and Becker, who helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 when he was 20 years old, devoted much of his work to understanding and combating the violence that such movements engender. But the same underlying impulses can affect our behavior and our social relations in ordinary organizational life, with none of the hyperbolic emotion or potential for violence that we associate with large crowds. While employees don't consciously view their leader as a substitute parent, on some level they do look to the leader to tame chaos and create order and safety, and this process can readily foster a sense of dependence and submission.

Becker doesn't accept Freud's views uncritically--one of the main themes of The Denial of Death is that while Freud remains worthy of study, he also made some fundamental errors that must be acknowledged in order to make use of his insights:

One of the weaknesses of Freud's theory was that he was too fond of his own phylogenetic myth of the "primal horde," Freud's attempt to reconstruct the earliest beginnings of society, when proto-men--like baboons--lived under the tyrannical male. For Freud this craving of people for the strong personality, their awe and fear of him, remained the model for the basic functioning of all groups. It was [Austrian-American psychoanalyst Fritz] Redl, in his important essay, who showed that Freud's attempt to explain everything by the "strong personality" was not true to fact. Redl, who studied many different kinds of groups, found that domination by a strong personality occurred in some of them, but not all. But he did find that in all groups there was what he called a "central person" who held the group together due to certain of his qualities.

The work by Redl which Becker refers to dates from 1942, but much contemporary research is finally rebutting the persistent idea that early human societies were despotic tyrannies. [3] This is significant because relatively few contemporary business leaders are charismatic tyrants who rule through "awe and fear," and yet it would be a mistake to imagine that the process of transference as Becker describes it is no longer relevant in the relatively egalitarian organizational cultures of today. This is particularly true for the startup CEOs who comprise the majority of my coaching practice. By no means are they "tyrannical" figures, nor are they necessarily the "strong personality" who dominates the organization, but they are often the "central person" who holds the group together.

Becker cites another aspect of leadership that is particularly relevant to my work with founders:

Freud saw that the leader wipes out fear and permits everyone to feel omnipotent. Redl refined this somewhat by showing how important the leader often was by the simple fact that it was he who performed the "initiatory act" when no one else had the daring to do it. Redl calls this beautifully the "magic of the initiatory act."

This is an apt description of the role of founder, whose first and most important "initiatory act" was launching the venture itself, and who feels empowered (and even obligated) to continue stepping into this process at every subsequent stage of the company's development. In this context it's significant that investors often cite a desire to retain founders in leadership roles as long as possible because of their "magic"--while the word conveys a nebulous, indefinable quality, Becker and Redl suggest that it may simply be the courage to take action when others lack daring, thereby becoming the group's "central person."

But the advantages of power and influence conferred upon a leader through the transference process come at a cost:

The important thing for us [in Redl's work] is that the groups "use" the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges. [British psychoanalyst] W.R. Bion, in an important recent paper, extended this line of thought even further from Freud, arguing that the leader is as much a creature of the group as they of him and that he loses his "individual distinctiveness" by being a leader, as they do by being followers. He has no more freedom to be himself than any other member of the group, precisely because he has to be a reflex of their assumptions in order to qualify for leadership in the first place.

The burdens of the leadership role and the loss of individual identity experienced by leaders are major themes in my practice. [4] Leaders enjoy certain freedoms, to be sure, and they also must relinquish certain freedoms in order to occupy the role effectively. Followers may admire and even adulate the leader, but they will resist empathizing with them, as that would render the leader human and diminish their power. [5] Leaders must strive to evoke empathy while also recognizing that it will come only with effort, and they must find ways to preserve their identity as an individual outside the role.

Highlighting the cost of leadership also allows us to more fully acknowledge the reciprocal nature of the relationship between leaders and followers. In contemporary organizational life followers are not held captive by the leader--the relationship is one of mutual choice, and followers ultimately decide who will lead them by remaining in their jobs (or not). But both parties need the other:

​The qualities of the leader, then, and the problems of people fit together in a natural symbiosis. I have lingered on a few refinements of group psychology to show that the powers of the leader stem from what he can do for people, beyond the magic that he himself possesses. People project their problems onto him, which gives him his role and stature. Leaders need followers as much as they are needed by them: the leader projects onto his followers his own inability to stand alone, his own fear of isolation. We must say that if there were no natural leaders possessing the magic of charisma, men would have to invent them, just as leaders must create followers if there are none available. If we accent this natural symbiotic side of the problem of transference, we come into the broadest understanding of it, which forms the main part of the discussion I now want to dwell on...

Here Becker reaches the heart of his argument:

This is how we can understand the essence of transference: as a taming of terror. Realistically the universe contains overwhelming power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can't really do much about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we can endow certain persons with it. The child takes natural awe and terror and focuses them on individual beings, which allows him to find the power and the horror all in one place instead of diffused throughout a chaotic universe... The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to control, order and combat them.

Again, I'm not suggesting that employees view their leader as a substitute parent, but the all-consuming, immersive experience of transference that we undergo as children affects us in profound and lasting ways, and one of the results is our subconscious desire for a leadership figure who can "control, order and combat" the chaotic, terrifying world around us. Followers choose their leaders and endow them with such power for this very reason.

But our dependency and submission to the leader's power also provokes a counter-response:

This totality of the transference object also helps explain its ambivalence. In some complex ways the child has to fight against the power of the parents in their awesome miraculousness. They are just as overwhelming as the background of nature from which they emerge. The child learns to naturalize them by techniques of accommodation and manipulation. At the same time, however, he has to focus on them the whole problem of terror and power, making them the center of it in order to cut down and naturalize the world around them. Now we see why the transference object poses so many problems. The child does partly control his larger fate by it, but it becomes his new fate. He binds himself to one person to automatically control terror, to mediate wonder, and to defeat death by that person's strength. But then he experiences "transference terror"; the terror of losing the object, of displeasing it, of not being able to live without it. The terror of his own finitude and impotence still haunts him, but now in the precise form of the transference object. How implacably ironic is human life. The transference object becomes the focus of the problem of one's freedom because one is compulsively dependent on it...

This explains the complex and emotionally fraught nature of so many leader-follower relationships. Both parties need each other, so much so that they create each other. As noted above, in the process the leader gains power, but at the cost of their individual identity in the eyes of their followers. Leaders make this bargain willingly, and yet it is a painful and lonely experience, and they cannot help but blame their followers for their lack of empathy. Followers endow the leader with authority in order to quell the anxiety evoked by a chaotic world, and yet in so doing they create a powerful figure who in turn becomes a source of further anxiety. Followers are then torn between their fear of leaderless chaos and their ambivalence regarding the leader's power. By definition, those who remain are opting to live with the latter, and yet this choice does not resolve the ambivalence. Just the opposite--it binds the followers to a figure who is simultaneously a source of comfort and fear, which causes immense dissonance. Thus "the fascination of the person who holds or symbolizes power," which I see in my practice every day--we cannot help but be fascinated by such figures and obsessed by the problem of our paradoxical relationship with them.

It would be specious to offer a "solution" to such profound challenges, but here are some of the ways I work with clients to address them:

• Leader-follower relationships are inevitably sources of powerful emotions, and we resolve such feelings by talking about them and writing about them.
• Leaders must be mindful of the tension between their desire to be an authentic individual and their obligation to perform in the role.
• Followers must be mindful of their reluctance to "empathize up" and their denial of the leader's humanity.

Finally, while I've framed this discussion around leader-follower relationships in organizations, it's worth noting that these dynamics exist in every domain of life, as Becker makes clear:

No wonder Freud could say that transference was a "universal phenomenon of the human mind" that "dominates the whole of each person's relation to his human environment."

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Footnotes

[1] These lines and all other cited passages are from The Denial of Death, Chapter Seven: The Spell Cast by Persons--The Nexus of Unfreedom (Ernest Becker, 1973)

[2] Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Sigmund Freud, 1921)

[3] For example: Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts (Dacher Keltner interviewed by David DiSalvo, Scientific American, 2009)

[4] Leadership as Performing Art

[5] The Difficulty of Empathizing Up

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Thanks to Anamaria Nino-Murcia for the inspiration.

Photo by François Philipp. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

You Can't Steer a Parked Car

I didn't coin the title of this post, and I wish I could remember where I heard it first, because it does come up frequently in my coaching practice.

When we suspect we're not headed in the right direction, we often slow down and lose momentum, and sometimes we stall out entirely.

But it's very difficult--and perhaps impossible--to change direction when we're not moving at all.

The key is to move forward judiciously and thoughtfully, and to use the resulting momentum to adjust our trajectory in the process.

What does this look like in practice?

• Talk about it.
• Write about it.
• Talk about it some more.
• Get comfortable with vulnerability--it's unavoidable.
• Recognize that change consists of countless small steps.
• And remember that you're a work-in-progress, learning how to learn.

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Thanks to Ryan Caldbeck.

Photo by IwateBuddy. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Coaching and Emotion Management

The difficult work of emotion management--which entails both awareness of and regulation of our feelings--lies at the heart of much of what I do as a coach and experiential educator. The issues my clients and students wrestle with obviously have many cognitive dimensions: There's a challenge that must be understood fully. There are potential solutions that must be assessed. There are actions to be taken (or to be avoided), and the likely result of these choices must be predicted. In a word, there's a great deal of thinking to do, and I spend plenty of time coaching people on this level.

But these issues are never purely (or even primarily) cognitive. If they were, my clients and students--all successful leaders or Stanford MBAs--are more than smart enough to determine next steps on their own. They would have reached a conclusion, made a decision and moved on. But one reason they find value in talking about these issues with a coach is the emotional dimension. The issues that come up in coaching sessions generally evoke a range of feelings that are rich signals full of data about how to proceed, but these signals are tremendously complex and hard to decipher. In a word, there's a great deal of feeling to do, and I spend just as much time coaching people on this level.

Coaching can highlight the power of our emotional drives and the inadequacy of our purely cognitive responses. We're often so ill-equipped to deal with our feelings that we try to push them away. We distract ourselves, we numb ourselves, we do anything but allow ourselves to truly feel. But the problem is that emotions are essential inputs in our reasoning and decision-making processes, and without their guidance we can get stuck--particularly when we're dealing with complex issues that can't be distilled into comprehensible decision trees.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should simply obey our feelings or that emotions are an unerring guide to right action--far from it. Our emotions are a "quick and dirty processing system," in neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux's phrase, and there's plenty of noise in those signals. So the task we face is emotion management. We need to both heighten our awareness of our feelings and allow ourselves to fully experience them in the moment, while also building our capacity to regulate them, so that we can choose more thoughtfully how (and how not) to express and respond to those feelings in a given moment.

This is where a coach can be uniquely helpful. In a coaching session I'll regularly bring the focus back to the emotional level, not just by asking, "How do you feel?"--which is both inadequate for my purpose and tiresome for the person being coached--but by taking other, more proactive steps: Sensing, reflecting back, and responding to the other person's emotions; evoking emotions that may play a helpful role in the conversation; and even expressing my own emotional response in the moment.

Such work can be an end in itself--the ability to fully experience our emotions adds tremendous value and richness to life--but it's also a means to an end. Improved emotion management results in stronger relationships, greater influence and better leadership. It's difficult work, requiring a substantial commitment of time and energy, but my clients and students don't make that investment because it sounds good; they make the investment because of the return it yields in fulfillment and effectiveness.

Photo by Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Talking About Feelings

My work as a coach often involves encouraging clients and students to talk about their feelings--a process known to psychologists as affect labeling--in order to manage difficult emotions more effectively. Experience tells us that this is a useful practice, but why? How does talking about feelings make them easier to manage?

Recent neuroscience research, including a substantial body of work by Matthew Lieberman of UCLA [1], has helped us to better understand the processes in the brain that contribute to this effect. [2] Some of the earliest research on this topic was conducted by Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger, and several other colleagues [3]:

Putting feelings into words has long been thought to be one of the best ways to manage negative emotional experiences. Talk therapies have been formally practiced for more than a century and, although varying in structure and content, are commonly based on the assumption that talking about one's feelings and problems is an effective method for minimizing the impact of negative emotional events on current experience. More recently, psychologists have discovered that merely putting pen to paper to express one’s emotional ailments has benefits for mental and physical health. Although conventional wisdom and scientific evidence indicate that putting one’s feelings into words can attenuate negative emotional experiences, the mechanisms by which these benefits arise remain largely unknown.

Recent neuroimaging research has begun to offer insight into a possible neurocognitive mechanism by which putting feelings into words may alleviate negative emotional responses. A number of studies of affect labeling have demonstrated that linguistic processing of the emotional aspects of an emotional image produces less amygdala activity than perceptual processing of the emotional aspects of the same image. [The amygdala is a region of the brain associated with emotion processing that plays a role in helping us interpret and respond to perceived threats, among other tasks.] Additionally, these studies have demonstrated greater activity during linguistic processing than during non-linguistic processing of emotion in [the] right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), a region associated with the symbolic processing of emotional information and with top-down inhibitory processes. Finally, the magnitude of RVLPFC activity during affect labeling has been inversely correlated with the magnitude of amygdala activity during affect labeling in these studies. Together, these results suggest that putting feelings into words may activate RVLPFC, which in turn may dampen the response of the amygdala, thus helping to alleviate emotional distress... [page 421]

The results of this study provide the first clear demonstration that affect labeling disrupts the affective responses in the limbic system that would otherwise occur in the presence of negative emotional images...

These data thus suggest that one route by which putting feelings into words may regulate negative affect is by increasing activity in RVLPFC, which in turn dampens activity in the amygdala by way of intermediate connections through [the medial prefrontal cortex]... [page 426]

In summary, this study provides the first unambiguous evidence that affect labeling, compared with other ways of encoding, produces diminished responses to negative emotional images in the amygdala and other limbic regions...

These findings begin to shed light on how putting negative feelings into words can help regulate negative experience, a process that may ultimately contribute to better mental and physical health. [page 427]

While the specific neural mechanisms involved remain unclear, it's noteworthy that this research highlights the connection between the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain most closely associated with logical reasoning, and regions of the brain involved in processing emotion. Although this may seem counterintuitive, given our popular conception of reason and emotion as opposing influences on our behavior, it's entirely consistent with decades of research by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio [4] and Richard Davidson [5], whose work emphasizes the complex and intertwined relationship between these modes of mental processing.

Lieberman also explored these neural mechanisms in work that he conducted independently [6]:

[T]here is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the process of sharing one's worry, of putting bad feelings into words, can diminish one's emotional distress at least under certain circumstances. This chapter examines the neurocognitive mechanisms of disruption effects, the process by which putting feelings into words can disrupt the feelings being verbalized... [page 188]

RVLPFC activity is associated with reduced activity in limbic regions, such as the amygdala and [dorsal anterior cingulate cortex], and [symbolic processing of affect] is associated both with increased RVLPFC activity and decreased limbic activity. [page 199]

Given that [symbolic processing of affect] appears to regulate limbic responses...this would provide a mechanism by which putting feelings into words would have benefits for regulating emotional distress and for mental health more generally. [page 200]

Numerous philosophers and psychologists have noted over the years that thinking about affect has the capacity to alter and even dampen the affect that is being thought about. This has been used to good effect in various forms of therapy, from formal psychotherapies to informal social support networks in which people talk about their feelings with friends. The reason that putting feelings into words helps has remained elusive and somewhat mystical. The work presented here describes a neurocognitive process focused on RVLPFC that provides the beginnings of an answer. Putting feelings into words activates a region of the brain that is capable of inhibiting various aspects of immediate experience, including affective distress. [page 203]

Lieberman later summarized this research in his insightful book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect [7]:

It turns out that putting our feelings into words or simply being able to label them can regulate our emotions and promote our mental and physical well-being...

Preschoolers who can describe their feelings have fewer emotional outbursts, get better grades, and are more popular with their peers. High school students who write about their math anxiety right before taking a math test actually do better on the test. In my lab we ask adults to perform a simple task, called affect labeling, during which people choose a word to best describe the emotional aspect of a picture. For instance, a picture of an angry face might be shown, and the participant would have to choose whether the word angry or scared describes the target's emotion. We have found that labeling the affective aspect of a disturbing image reduces the distress a person feels while looking at the image...

When people label an emotional picture or their own emotional response to a picture, it activates the RVLPFC and reduces activity in the amygdala... It is still unclear what exactly the RVLPFC does to stimulate self-control. The debate typically focuses on whether this and similar regions are directly inhibiting responses in other brain regions, like the amygdala, or are helping to strengthen the nonimpulsive alternative so it can compete effectively with the impulsive response. [pages 219-221]

So while we can't explain the underlying mechanisms with absolute certainty, a highly plausible theory has emerged over the past decade that allows us to explain why talking about distressing feelings mitigates the counterproductive impact of those emotions. How can we make more effective use of these ideas?

Practice

Many of us lack experience talking about our feelings, particularly in a professional setting, and just thinking about it can trigger a sense of anxiety and unease. This response is understandable--being called "emotional" is typically a criticism in business, and yet it can be unclear what would cause that label to be applied to us. But in our efforts to avoid this outcome, we may over-correct and never disclose our feelings at work--which prevents us from leveraging the neural processes discussed above, making our negative emotions even more difficult to manage.

Psychologist Daniel Wegner quoted educator John Dewey on the importance of routinizing desired behaviors: "Habits must intervene between wish and execution in the case of bodily acts, [but] we still cherish the illusion that they can be dispensed with in the case of mental and moral acts." [8, emphasis added] The key here is recognizing that talking about emotions is a bodily act, not just a mental one. By definition emotions aren't purely cognitive processes--we often become aware of our emotions when we suddenly feel our heart pounding or a pit in our stomach. And just like any other embodied experience that involves multiple physiological systems, like driving a car or public speaking, we must make it a habit in order to grow accustomed to the challenge. But the good news is that practice inevitably increases our comfort with discomfort and reduces our self-consciousness as we grow more competent.

Expand Our Vocabularies

A consequence of our inexperience with discussing emotions--and a contributing factor that holds us back--is a limited emotional language. Even when we're ready to talk more fully about our feelings, if we lack the precise word to convey our emotion to another person in such a way that it has the intended impact, we're likely to struggle. A simple solution is to expand our emotional vocabulary.

This one-page document lists eight primary emotional states--angry, averse, caring, embarrassed, excited, fearful, happy, inadequate, and sad--and 52 synonyms. Psychologists differ on the nature and number of primary emotions--Paul Ekman defined the six basic emotions as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, while the late Sylvan Tompkins believed there are eight: anguish, disgust, fear, joy, interest, rage, shame, and surprise. [9] I've adapted this list from one originally developed by David Bradford, Mary Ann Huckabay and Carole Robin at Stanford, and I find that it works well for my clients and students.

Create a Supportive Culture

As Lieberman's work indicates, and as ample empirical evidence makes clear, merely reflecting on our feelings also allows us to regulate them over time. But the process of internal reflection appears to work less efficiently than openly discussing our feelings, and in many circumstances it's simply not possible to pause the interaction in order for us to take time to reflect. If we want to manage difficult feelings as effectively as possible, we need to talk about them with others--including those people who may be the cause of our emotions.

And yet even if we're willing to have this conversation with a rich vocabulary at the ready, our ability to do so will be significantly influenced by the surrounding culture. Note that every relationship and group has its own culture--a set of norms, often tacit and unspoken, that determine what behaviors or statements are acceptable and what will result in embarrassment or threat.

If we want to make full use of the neural processes described above, we have to create a safe, trusting and intimate culture in which talking about feelings is accepted as normal. I fully recognize that this may involve taking some risks in order to move the culture in the desired direction, and I'm not suggesting that we do so heedlessly. But what gives me hope is that the bold act of talking about our feelings is what tends to create a safer, more trusting, and more emotionally intimate culture in the first place.

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Footnotes

[1] Matthew Lieberman's faculty page at UCLA

[2] Twitter Study Confirms the Power of "Affect Labeling" (Christian Jarrett, BPS Research Digest, 2019)

[3] "Putting Feelings Into Words" (Matthew Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger, Molly Crockett, Sabrina Tom, Jennifer Pfeifer, and Baldwin Way, Psychological Science, 2007)

[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[5] The Emotional Life of Your Brain (Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley, 2012)

[6] "Why Symbolic Processing of Affect Can Disrupt Negative Affect: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Investigations," Chapter 13 in Social Neuroscience: Toward Understanding the Underpinnings of the Social Mind (Alexander Todorov, Susan Fiske, and Deborah Prentice, editors, 2010)

[7] Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (Matthew Lieberman, 2013) I highly recommend Social as a lucid and thought-provoking guide to recent neuroscience research on a wide range of issues beyond the topic of this post. When I taught Interpersonal Dynamics (aka Touchy Feely) at Stanford, I included chapters from Social on my syllabus for the first and last classes in the course.

[8] White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, page 14 (Daniel Wegner, 1989)

[9] For more on primary emotions, see The Emotional Brain, Chapter 5 (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)

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For Further Reading

Comfort with Discomfort

Conscious Competence in Practice

Vocabulary of Emotions

Self-Coaching Is SOCIAL

Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up)

Safety, Trust, Intimacy

Taking the Leap (Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty

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This is a revised and expanded version of a post first published in February 2008.

Thank you to Stephanie West Allen for helping me grasp the implications of current neuroscience research for my work as a coach, and, more specifically, for initially referring me to the work of Matthew Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger, and their colleagues at UCLA.

Photo by Gideon. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Self-Coaching Is SOCIAL

This is a point I stress when I teach The Art of Self-Coaching at Stanford, but I want to make it even more explicit here, both to better prepare my students for their experience in the course and to clarify my terminology for others who've expressed interest in the concept:

Self-coaching is not a solitary process but a highly social one.

Self-coaching is a self-directed process, in that we're taking active responsibility for guiding our own growth and development, but other people play extremely important roles in this process at every step.

There is certainly value to gained from solitary activities such as journaling, reflection, and an ongoing dialogue with ourselves on matters large (e.g. What should I do with my life?) and small (e.g. What am I feeling at this moment?). And it's essential to cultivate the ability to engage in these practices more effectively and to build routines that support them into our lives.

Students in my course do an extensive amount of solitary work outside of class. Each week they read the materials on the syllabus, reflect on the meanings and implications of these materials, and complete a written assignment. It's my hope that this experience will help them determine how best to continue these activities in their career after business school, when they'll be responsible for creating their own "syllabus" and for determining how to reflect upon and write about those materials without anyone's input or oversight. (This is why the content of these weekly assignments is determined by each student as an individual, beyond the constraint of looking ahead to the upcoming class.)

But these solitary activities are just one aspect of a self-coaching process that also involves meaningful relationships with others. A dilemma that many of us encounter when seeking support is that even well-meaning allies can respond in ways that we find unhelpful. Frequently this takes one of three forms: My problem's worse... or Look on the bright side... or Here's some advice... [1] This isn't to say that shared experiences, encouragement and advice are never useful, but they can convey counterproductive meta-messages, even when unintended: You don't have it so bad, so stop complaining... or If you were smarter, maybe you would have figured this out on your own... The solution is to employ coaching tools and techniques that enable us to have more effective helping conversations.

Thus the classroom experience in my course is highly social and interactive, not solitary, and each week my students work with classmates in pairs and small groups. In addition to preparing them for the solitary work noted above, it's my hope that this experience helps them better understand how to develop and sustain relationships in which they can build trust, discuss meaningful issues of importance to them, and offer and receive coaching support. Note that these conversations are intentionally brief, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes, and my goal here is to replicate real-world conditions, when my students will often face significant time constraints in their working relationships. While more extensive unconstrained conversations always have a role to play, being able to address a significant topic quickly and economically is a valuable skill.

Given all this, I don't make a sharp distinction between self-coaching and coaching conversations with others, because the former necessarily involves the latter. My course does not provide in-depth coaching training, but a basic understanding of coaching tools and skills allows students to get more out of the conversations they'll have with classmates. This is why I offer some brief instruction on how to coach others at the very beginning of the course and include some of the resources below on our syllabus.

Resources on Coaching and Being Coached

• How Great Coaches Ask, Listen, and Empathize (Ed Batista, Harvard Business Review, 2012)
• Helping: How to Give, Offer, and Receive Help (Edgar Schein, 2009)
  • Chapter 3, pages 30-47: “The Inequalities and Ambiguities of the Helping Relationship”
• Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling (Edgar Schein, 2013)
  • Chapter 3, pages 39-50: "Differentiating Humble Inquiry from Other Kinds of Inquiry"
• Scott Ginsberg on Asking (Better) Questions (Ed Batista, 2008)
• Hammering Screws (Bad Coaching) (Ed Batista, 2011)
• The HBR Guide to Coaching Employees (2nd edition, 2015)
• A Challenge to Leaders: Help Others Self-Coach (Ed Batista, 2013)
• Coaching, Advice, and Feedback (Ed Batista, 2011)
• Coaching Your Employees (HBR Webinar Video and Summary) (Ed Batista, 2014)
• Coaching and Feedback Tools for Leaders

Resources on Reflection and Journaling

• The Value of Journal Writing (Ed Batista, 2008)
• How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work) (Ed Batista, 2017)
• Conversations with Ourselves (Self-Coaching and Self-Engagement) (Ed Batista, 2012)
• Reflecting on Work Improves Job Performance (Carmen Nobel, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, 2014)
• Why You Should Make Time for Self-Reflection (Even If You Hate Doing It) (Jennifer Porter, Harvard Business Review, 2017)
• Does Journaling Boost Your Well-Being? (Pelin Kesebir, Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin, 2017)

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Footnotes

[1] How to Express Empathy--Avoid the Traps! (Michael Sahota, 2013)

Photo by Heinrich Böll-Stiftung. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Deference Kills Coaching

The most effective coaching relationships are equal partnerships between the coach and the coachee. Both parties are invested in the process and its success, they're free to challenge each other or disagree, and they each feel a sense of mutual respect.

This doesn't mean that the coach and the coachee are peers; this is often not the case. My professional identity differs substantially from that of most of my clients, who are primarily technology company CEOs, and it differs even further from that of my students at Stanford, who are MBAs in the early stages of their career.

But our relationships with non-peers tend to be hierarchical, with one party perceived to be higher status than the other. Our contemporary egalitarian sensibilities may resist this impulse, but at some deep level we find comfort in pecking orders, and we create hierarchies all around us.

And hierarchies run on deference. When we perceive someone as higher status than ourselves, even in some vague, ill-defined sense, we tend to defer in all sorts of ways. And when we perceive someone as lower status than ourselves, we tend to expect deference from them (even if we don't want to admit it.) As a consequence, we often characterize professional relationships that adhere to expected deference norms as "good," and those that don't as "bad."

Note that I'm not talking about grossly excessive manifestations of hierarchy and deference that have (thankfully) been under attack since the Enlightenment. I'm talking instead about very subtle aspects of social interaction that derive from and confer differences in status. Most relevant in this context is the sense of a leader and a follower in a given conversation: The leader generally sets the agenda, changes the topic, speaks first when there's silence, interrupts more frequently, and provides answers to questions.

All of these subtle status-driven behaviors play a crucial role in allowing hierarchies to function smoothly. This doesn't mean that such norms should always be observed; when we prioritize smoothness in our social relationships, much can be lost in the process. We've all sat through efficient, well-run meetings in which nothing meaningful was accomplished because no one was willing to say what they were truly thinking. We've all had polite, vacuous conversations in which no real human connection was achieved because both parties tacitly agreed to faithfully observe a set of unspoken rules.

At the same time a certain degree of predictability is essential in our professional interactions, and the norms of deference help make this possible. A common theme in my coaching practice is the difficulty created by unpredictable behavior by people who fail to grasp the importance of understanding and abiding by expected social norms. (Most often this takes the form of a CEO dealing with a talented executive who's disrupting the team, and sometimes it takes the form of a leader who's received feedback that their own behavior is causing disruption.) So I'm well aware both of the counter-productive impact such norms can have when they're followed mindlessly and of the important role they play in organizational life.

These dynamics become even more complex in the context of coaching, where any number of factors can raise the status of one party relative to the other. The coach generally has more familiarity with the process and has worked in such a setting with a large number of people, which may lead the coachee to feel like an inexperienced junior party (exacerbated by the fact that they're usually younger than the coach.) Alternatively, the coachee is usually paying for the coach's time and is in some sense the arbiter of the coach's effectiveness, which may lead the coach to feel an impulse to please the coachee (or at least to avoid causing any offense.)

As a consequence there's no single pattern that characterizes the status distinctions between coach and coachee; in any given coaching relationship there are usually some factors that elevate the coach's status and others that elevate that of the coachee. This doesn't mean that the status distinctions simply cancel each other out, but, rather, that they're fluid and dynamic.

Why is this so important? Because status distinctions create hierarchical relationships, and hierarchical relationships trigger deference (and the expectation of deference), and deference kills coaching.

When a coach defers: They fail to challenge the coachee's assumptions and mental models, and they collude in the coachee's illusions and misperceptions. They tolerate lateness or cancellations which weaken the relationship. They don't ask the truly difficult questions, the ones that may cause confusion or embarrassment or even shame. They do not interrupt.

When a coachee defers: They accept advice and guidance that they know to be irrelevant. They take the coach's communication style as a given, rather than something that can be modified to better suit their needs. They fail to provide critical feedback to the coach. They limit the relationship to the issues that led them to seek coaching in the first place. They do not interrupt.

Deconstructing deference norms--and doing so in a way that allows two non-peers to build a safe, candid relationship characterized by trust and emotional intimacy--is one of the fundamental tasks of coaching. There's no simple, immediate solution, but some of the steps that I take are listed below. Note that I'm not suggesting this is the "best" way to coach--it's simply what works for me--and most of these factors also serve other purposes beyond influencing the status distinctions and deference norms in my coaching relationships:

• I meet clients and students in a predictable location that I've selected and which is optimized for a coaching conversation.
• I'm generally available at very specific times; I'm available outside those times only under very rare circumstances.
• In my initial conversation with a client, I discuss the importance of creating an equal partnership and our mutual obligation to speak up if we ever feel that we're not honoring this commitment.
• In this conversation I also emphasize that I'll err on the side of asking questions, but I will not withhold information that I believe could be useful to them; when I do offer advice and guidance, I'll be explicit about naming it, to make it easier to assess its relevance and accuracy.
• And in this conversation I also note that my conversation style is very flexible, and we'll work together to find the ways of interacting that work best for them.
• In my initial conversation with a student, I make clear that our coaching will have no impact on my assessment of their performance in the class.
• After this initial framing, I begin with an open-ended question: "Where do you want to start?"
• I pay close attention to the interaction patterns between us, both in any given meeting and over time; while the dynamics will differ from meeting to meeting (and from one relationship to another), there should be a healthy fluidity to the process with relatively few fixed patterns (which are often a sign of a deference norm).
• Every few conversations, I'll make sure that we step back at the conclusion to assess how things are going. I generally ask, "In what ways was this conversation useful, and what would you like to continue?" We jointly explore what went well and why, and then I generally ask, "Was there anything that was unhelpful about this conversation or that you'd like to do differently next time?" And we jointly explore what didn't go well and why, and how to improve.

(This is a short list off the top of my head, and I may add to it in the future. I think a lot about the dynamics of coaching relationships, if that's not already obvious.)

Finally, given the increasing popularity of coaching as a tool for leaders, it's essential to note the implications of the concepts discussed here for a coaching conversation between two people in a reporting relationship. I believe that skilled managers can coach their employees, but to do so effectively they must be careful to identify and discourage signs of deference. This can be extremely difficult, in part because the deference norms that characterize most manager/employee relationships can serve a useful purpose in the larger context of their work together. (Not always, of course, as I discuss above.) Failing to correct for the status distinctions that are intrinsic to the manager/employee relationship turns a potentially fruitful conversation into mere theater, with the manager asking leading questions and the employee trying to come up with the "right" answers, and that's just bad coaching.

Photo by Dmitris Kamaras. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Thank You, Veterans

As we remember veterans and acknowledge their service today, I'm thinking of four specific individuals and what I learned from them.

Ten years ago my professional duties included commenting on students' written assignments in a class at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Two of the students assigned to me were veterans, both of whom had seen combat. At the time I had little understanding of what it was like to be a veteran in contemporary society, and reading these students' reflections helped me realize that this was a topic that I needed to explore further. Much of my work involves reaching across dimensions of difference--gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation--in order to be a more effective coach and teacher. And yet I'd failed to appreciate that being a veteran can be an equally meaningful aspect of personal identity, particularly in an era of extensive armed conflict.

As a result of this newfound perspective, over the next few years I made a special effort to work with veterans and to learn more about their experiences. A theme that emerged from these conversations was the gulf that can exist between veterans as a community and the larger culture's awareness of that community and what it means to be a member. Today, while I try to avoid stereotypes, I pay close attention when I learn that someone's a veteran, knowing that their military service may have had a significant impact on their life. In addition, I have a heightened sensitivity to other often-invisible forms of difference, such as religious faith or social class.

A few years after the experiences described above I was working with another veteran in a different capacity. His communication style was relatively reserved, and I offered some critical feedback in response, suggesting that greater expressiveness would allow him to be a more effective communicator. He was receptive to this feedback, but after several exchanges along these lines he pushed back. He explained that his communication style was a function of his life experiences, including his military service, and in some circumstances it had been essential to minimize his emotional expressiveness in order to fulfill his duties effectively. He also noted that while he had been trying to respond to my feedback, I had not acknowledged these efforts--it was as though any expressiveness on his part was going unseen unless it was conveyed in a particular way.

This was a powerful lesson for me. While my feedback was offered with the best of intentions, it was also a type of intolerance that reflected a blind spot on my part--I wanted him to conform to my more overtly expressive communication style. While it was valuable for him to learn that his default style wasn't having the desired impact, it was just as valuable for me to realize that I needed to pay closer attention to subtle forms of emotional expression and to better understand the role of formative experiences--not only military service, but also family background, national culture, and professional training—in shaping people's communication styles. While I try to challenge any assumptions I might make on the basis of these factors, I continue to benefit from a greater awareness of the role they can play in communication.

Finally, in 2008, while I was beginning the process of reaching out to veterans, I had the privilege of working with Jake Miller, a West Point alumnus on active duty in the U.S. Army who had come to Stanford to earn an MBA in the midst of his military career. Jake joined the school's Leadership Fellows program that year and subsequently enrolled in the Leadership Coaching class (which has since been integrated into the Fellows curriculum). Jake and I worked together closely in the Fellows program, and I had the opportunity to observe him many times in the coaching class, and he exemplified a characteristic that I've come to believe is a hallmark of great leaders: a commitment to ongoing learning and development.

Jake arrived at Stanford with a wealth of real-world leadership experience and could easily have chosen not to participate in the Fellows program, which was only in its second year and still very much a work-in-progress. He also had a leadership style that was clearly well-suited to his professional environment and might not have felt the need to further expand his range. And yet he took full advantage of the school's leadership-related classes, routinely striving to make the most of every opportunity. I once asked him why he was immersing himself so fully in these classes, and he replied that after completing our MBA program he would be returning to West Point to teach leadership, so he felt an obligation to absorb everything that Stanford could possibly offer. Today Jake leads an aviation battalion, and I know that the hundreds of soldiers under his command benefit from his determination to continue to grow as a leader. I remain inspired by his example and seek to apply it in my own development as a coach and teacher.

I've worked with many veterans over the years, and hopefully the memories of my experiences with these four will allow me to say to all of them: Thank you.

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Thank You, Veterans (2012)

Photo of the San Francisco National Cemetery by John Picken.

The Problem with Anonymous Feedback

The issue of anonymous feedback comes up consistently in my work as a coach to senior leaders. Many of my clients gather feedback from employees assessing their level of engagement or seeking input on problems, often through an anonymous survey. And I'm regularly asked to conduct 360 reviews for a CEO or a member of their executive team, typically via anonymous interviews with direct reports, peers, superiors, investors or board members

I no longer offer 360 reviews in my practice—over the past decade I’ve concluded that I add the most value as a coach by working directly with individual leaders and focusing our time on preparing to have the difficult conversations for which anonymous feedback is often a precursor (or, more problematically, a substitute.) In the course of this work I sometimes discuss with my clients anonymous feedback they’ve received via 360 reports and employee surveys, and while these tools can be useful, I’ve come to feel ambivalent about the role anonymous feedback plays in our efforts to improve leaders’ effectiveness.

Anonymity clearly has value under certain circumstances, but it also carries a cost, and it's important for leaders to understand both sides of the equation before committing to any anonymous feedback process. What is the value of anonymity? When people can voice perspectives anonymously, they presumably feel more comfortable sharing concerns or negative feedback that might otherwise expose them to risk in some way, and the data gathered is more candid and thus more useful. But note the underlying assumptions here: People are currently not being candid and can’t be trusted to speak up. Feedback generated through an anonymous process is more accurate than feedback expressed publicly. Hearing concerns or negative feedback will cause distress or anger. And anyone who shares such information is at risk because leaders will seek retribution.

In any given organization these assumptions may well be true. I’m not naïve about the power dynamics of organizational life, and I know that much goes unsaid, that speaking up can trigger a hostile response, and that people with power often abuse it. [1] But when we assume that these conditions make anonymity necessary, we often fail to factor in the cost of doing so. What are the costs of anonymity? In my work as a coach I see three sets of counterproductive factors.

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1. Critiques become criticism.

The work of psychologist John Gottman is based on observations of couples in long-term relationships, but many of his conclusions have important implications for organizational life. [2] One of Gottman’s key concepts is to distinguish between critiques and criticism:

[Criticism] is different than offering a critique or voicing a complaint. The latter two are about specific issues, whereas the former is an ad hominem attack: it is an attack on [the other person] at the core. In effect, you are dismantling his or her whole being when you criticize. [3]

For example, here’s a critique I commonly encounter in my practice: “Chris is getting into repeated conflicts with other members of the exec team over seemingly minor issues.” And here’s a similar sentiment in the form of criticism: “Chris is an abrasive person who lacks people skills and a domineering personality who has to win every argument.” The former focuses on specific behaviors; the latter is a broad generalization. The ability to voice critiques and complaints is essential to working through challenges in healthy relationships, but criticism is a sign of trouble in Gottman's framework because it often leaves the recipient feeling “assaulted, rejected and hurt,” and it can lead to more serious interpersonal difficulties. [4]

Much anonymous feedback from employees toward a leader can be characterized as criticism rather than critiques. It doesn’t focus on specific behaviors, let alone specific instances of those behaviors, but applies a broad brush and tends to address the whole person. In part this is simply the result of the passage of time, our notoriously poor memories, and our confirmation bias. We misremember past events more often than we’re willing to admit, so any retelling inevitably blurs the details to fit our pre-existing narrative.

But the anonymous nature of the process also serves to wipe away essential information that might prevent a critique from becoming criticism. Feedback providers are discouraged (explicitly or implicitly) from identifying themselves or from sharing specific details about the situation. What emerges is often highly generalized criticism of the leader, rather than a more nuanced set of critiques of their behavior in specific circumstances. Unsurprisingly, this is more likely to provoke defensiveness on the part of feedback recipients rather than a desire to learn and change.

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2. A tendency to blame and a failure to take responsibility.

The fundamental attribution error is a cognitive bias identified by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross which leads us to believe that causality rests primarily with individuals rather than the with the surrounding situation. [5] A consequence of this dynamic is that leaders get more credit than they deserve when things go well—and they get more blame than they deserve when things go badly. I’m reminded of this passage from Brene Brown’s 2010 TED talk:

There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort. [6]

This is an apt description of many anonymous 360 reports and employee surveys—very little discourse, and a great deal of blame directed at leaders, most of which imagines that the leader’s personal attributes are primarily responsible for the situation being described, particularly anything associated with employees’ pain or discomfort. The leader’s behavior is often assessed in isolation, without much (or any) consideration of a group dynamic or organizational culture that might have given rise to said behavior. And the providers of the feedback frequently fail to take responsibility for their own contributions to the situations being described—everything is ascribed to the leader’s influence.

The result is an unrealistic portrayal of the leader as an outsized, all-powerful authority figure and the infantilization of the other members of the organization. While this outcome is obviously undesirable, it can be dangerously seductive to both leaders and employees. We all find it gratifying to be viewed as influential and high-status, and leaders in particular generally have a strong need for power. [7] And as much as we want to be responsible adults, when we’re under stress or feeling disempowered it can be comforting to imagine that a commanding, parental figure will take care of our problems and make everything better. Thus, leaders and employees alike collude in the process of shifting responsibility from the latter to the former, when in truth leaders typically have more influence than all other individuals, but less influence than the employees as a group.

This dynamic can occur in any feedback process, but it’s compounded by anonymity, in part because of the bystander effect. The presence of others discourages us from taking action to intervene in a difficult or dangerous situation, because we feel less responsible for the outcome. [8] Many anonymous processes convey to feedback providers (again, both explicitly and implicitly) that they are merely one voice among many, and, further, that they’ve already made a meaningful contribution merely by participating in the interview or the survey. The structure of the process suggests that once the interview is concluded or the survey is submitted, their work is done, and now it’s up to the leader to take action in response. There’s little if any recognition that the problems which gave rise to the negative feedback in the first place are likely to be solved only through collective efforts which take into account the larger group dynamic and organizational culture, even when those problems stem from an individual leader’s behavior.

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3. Necessary skills go undeveloped.

Finally, delivering feedback through anonymous processes can forestall other conversations and interactions, slowing or even preventing the development of necessary skills by employees and leaders alike. One of the most important skills in organizational life is navigating a difficult conversation with just the right amount of assertiveness and minimal defensiveness. [9] Providing negative feedback to an authority figure is almost always challenging, and yet our ability to conduct these conversations improves when we overcome our resistance and actually step into them. Similarly, hearing negative feedback without defensiveness is profoundly difficult, and yet our ability to manage this response grows when we find themselves facing such feedback in an actual discussion, rather than in private reflection.

This is because holding tough conversations isn’t a cognitive task that we can grasp intellectually—it’s an immersive emotional and physiological experience, and we need to practice repeatedly in order to habituate ourselves with the feelings and physical states that it evokes. We must become comfortable with discomfort. [10] This is one reason why the MBA curriculum at Stanford, where I teach, emphasizes in-person feedback in classes such as Leadership Labs, a required course for all first-year students, and Interpersonal Dynamics, our most popular elective. [11]

It’s also important to note that the capacity to safely discuss risky topics isn’t simply a function of individual ability--it’s the result of individual skills being employed in the context of a unique group dynamic. Every human system, from one-on-one relationships to entire organizations, has a culture that makes it easier or more difficult to hold these conversations. Specifically, the norms regarding emotion awareness, regulation and expression have a significant impact on our ability to conduct these conversations effectively.

Under optimal conditions, anonymous feedback can serve as a starting point for these discussions, but all too often the 360 report or employee survey serves to short-circuit this process. This is readily understandable—difficult conversations are hard, and when given the choice we almost always take the easier route. But when we continually divert these conversations into anonymous feedback processes, we fail to understand what norms best support the safe discussion of risky topics in a particular relationship or group, and we learn nothing about how to create a more functional culture. As a consequence, not only do we fail to develop our individual skills, but we also fail to cultivate a culture in our relationships and organizations that would allow us to employ these skills more effectively.

Finally, recall that one of the initial assumptions supporting the need for anonymous feedback is the idea that people aren’t speaking candidly because they are afraid. In my experience fear and anxiety are facts of organizational life—we can try to diminish their impact through more enlightened management practices, but imagining that we can eliminate them entirely is magical thinking. A repeated theme in my practice is how leaders inevitably trigger fear and anxiety in subordinates despite the best of intentions and a heartfelt desire to do the opposite. [12]

When we rely upon anonymous processes to provide feedback, we do make it safer for people to speak up—but we also deny them the opportunity to address and confront their fears and anxieties, and to test for themselves the accuracy of those concerns. As I note above, sometimes those concerns are well-founded, but when we prioritize safety above all else, one of the inevitable costs is a lack of learning and growth. [13]

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So what can we do?

I’m not suggesting that there’s no place for anonymous 360 reports or employee surveys. In the absence of sufficient safety and trust, these mechanisms can serve as effective means to gather the data that’s necessary to initiate candid conversations. But we can’t simply assume that anonymous processes are always more effective or cost-free. The data generated by an anonymous process must be carefully scrutinized and assessed for bias, rather than simply accepted at face value. While anonymous mechanisms may surface data that would otherwise go undisclosed, the data itself is affected by the means through which it’s gathered—it’s not necessarily any more “true” for having been shared anonymously.

A particular challenge with 360 reports is that in an effort to provide this service to a larger number of executives at a lower cost, organizations often allow feedback providers to simply type their comments into an application, and that unfiltered data is then shared directly with the recipient. It’s much more effective to have a skilled interviewer talk at length with feedback providers, compile and edit the comments resulting from these discussions, and then work with the subject over a period of time to interpret and act upon the feedback. Obviously, such a labor-intensive process is also much more expensive, and yet it’s important to ask whether the savings from an automated process are truly worth it, particularly with senior executives. At more junior levels, when organizations are uncertain whether the expense of an in-depth process is justified, decision-makers may well conclude that flawed feedback is better than no feedback at all. But it’s essential to acknowledge the potential shortcomings of that feedback, and at the very least organizations should insure that any anonymous 360 feedback is accompanied by sufficient coaching support.

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Postscript: Be sure to see the comments by my colleagues Dan Oestreich and Stephanie Soler, who offer some thoughtful suggestions about how to administer a 360 process while accounting for the concerns I raise above.

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Footnotes

[1] How to Feed a Monster (Leading in Elite Organizations)

[2] Making Relationships Work (Diane Coutu, Harvard Business Review, 2007)

[3] The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling (Ellie Lisitsa, The Gottman Institute, 2013)

[4] Ibid.

[5] The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (Lee Ross, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, L. Berkowitz, editor, pages 173-220, 1977)

[6] The Power of Vulnerability [transcript] (Brené Brown, TEDx Houston, 2010)

[7] McClelland and Burnham on Power and Management

[8] Understanding the Bystander Effect (Kendra Cherry, Very Well Mind, 2018)

[9] Learning to Yield (Navigating Tough Conversations)

[10] Comfort with Discomfort

[11] Interpersonal Dynamics at Stanford

[12] How Leaders Create Safety (and Danger)

[13] Taking the Plunge (Safety, Risk, Learning and Growth)

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Photo by Vincent Diamante. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Three Paradoxes (Another Coaching Manifesto)

I began coaching in 2005 and within a year I had I left my last leadership position to commit myself to a full-time coaching practice. I feel privileged to do this work—for me it’s a calling, not a job--and one of its rewards is the fact that there will always be more to learn. Twelve years (and thousands of hours) since I first started down this path, I’ve identified three paradoxes that are central to the experience of coaching and which I’m constantly trying to understand at a deeper level:

1. Supportive Challenge

A client once told me, "It feels like you're always in my corner, but you never hesitate to challenge me." It was some of the most gratifying feedback I ever got because it precisely describes my intended approach to the process.

My clients need to feel supported by me in a number of ways. They need to feel a sense of trust in my good intentions, my judgment, and my confidentiality. They need to feel sufficiently safe to be vulnerable--a process that begins the very first time we talk, because it can be a vulnerable experience for a leader who’s enjoyed great success in life to even express an interest in coaching. And they need to feel that I truly care about them as an individual.

My clients also need to know that my support will not prevent me from challenging them. They need to know that I’ll offer an alternative perspective and not simply ratify their feelings and agree with their point of view.  They need to know that I’ll be candid when I’m concerned or disagree with them or simply feel that something isn’t right. They need to know that I’ll speak up when I sense that they’re not being candid in return--that I’ll call them on their bullshit, just as my coach does for me. (She’s had a lot of practice.)

2. Intimate Distance

Meaningful coaching is always an emotionally intimate experience, no matter what’s being discussed. In part this is a function of the context: two people talking directly to each other with no distractions. We're not multi-tasking or sub-dividing our attention in any way. The person I'm coaching is completely focused on the issue at hand, and I'm completely focused on them. Such concentrated attention--a rare experience for most of us--inevitably creates a close personal connection.

Intimacy in a coaching relationship also results from a willingness to “make the private public”—to share with another person the thoughts and feelings that we usually keep to ourselves. Most of my clients are CEOs or in other senior leadership roles, and a dilemma they face is that they can’t always speak openly with their employees or investors, and yet their family and friends aren’t necessarily helpful discussion partners. A strong coaching relationship is one that creates an environment in which emotional intimacy is possible because both the client and I feel comfortable and willing to “make the private public” and express ourselves more fully.

And yet an essential factor that makes such intimacy possible is a clear set of boundaries defining the relationship, which create an inevitable and necessary sense of distance. Coaching conversations aren’t spontaneous events—my clients and I meet and talk for a predetermined length of time in a specific location. The relationships I have with my clients are warm and friendly ones, and yet it would be inaccurate to say that we’re friends—they need me to be their coach, not their friend, and we do the relationship a disservice if we confuse the two. And while I’m deeply invested in my clients and not in the least indifferent, I’m not attached to any particular outcome for them, a stance that requires a degree of distance that’s not possible in most personal and professional relationships.

3. Confident Humility

This is how I view myself and my role in a coaching relationship. I have a strong sense of confidence in my ability as a coach, which is rooted not only in my professional experience, but also in my ongoing commitment to challenge myself and to continue to my development as a person. I’ve reached the point in this process where I feel some “comfort with discomfort”—it’s not that I have confidence in every situation, but I can sense its absence at the limits of my comfort zone, and I’m generally able to find a way to make progress even under those circumstances. I’ve learned that courage isn't confidence.

At the same time, I feel a sense of humility as a coach. My clients are in the driver’s seat, and I’m merely helping them navigate. I don’t withhold my opinion when I believe it’s relevant, but ultimate I add more value by asking questions and reflecting my clients’ own views back to them, not by virtue of my own expertise. And while I would never describe myself as a humble person, I’m humbled on a regular basis by an awareness of my limitations (which fuels the drive to challenge myself) and by embracing mortality, which I view as one of the primary tasks of adulthood.

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There’s a delicate balance to maintain in each of these dimensions. It’s all too easy to err on one side or another: to over-emphasize support for a client and fail to challenge them, to embrace the emotional intimacy of a coaching relationship and neglect the necessary boundaries, to feel the flush of confidence and forget the humility that’s essential to the role (and, in each case, vice versa). And the difficulty of this work is one reason why I have my own coach (and why I believe every coach should).

This is a companion piece to In Defense of Normal (A Coaching Manifesto).

Photo by Brett Jordan. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.