We all have our weak suits. And some of them may be moving into the area of mission-critical or values-critical. And there are things we all need to learn to give us the edge we want or to unlock the potential we strive to fulfill. One of the two greatest values of a coach has always been the consultant's role: to give us new and useful points of view. Perspective is the slipperiest and most valuable commodity on this planet. No matter where you are, no matter how low you go, your viewing point about where you are and where you want to go and how you could get there will be a priceless commodity. We need to see "outside the box." We need to hear non-invested opinions about what we're doing and how we're doing it. This is, and always will be, the value of consultants.
But if we want it to happen now, and we want it to stick, we need to put ourselves in the hands of a coach who coaxes and coaches us through the new behaviors in real time in the real world. We often need professional help in real time to install new behaviors and to get and keep us at the enhanced levels we want to function. It's about consistently applied high-leverage responses and activities that happen on cruise control. It's about what we can be trusted to be doing, by others and (most importantly) by ourselves, when the pressure of the real world is at hand. To rapidly make those kinds of permanent changes and enhancements to our life-styles and work-styles, we need models, mentors, and most importantly, personal coaches, whom we spend real time with, getting us to do the real things we really need to be doing, from now on.
We need to groove new grooves in our patterns. The fastest way is to commit to a coach whose job and contract is to hold a focus and a format that helps us retread. It could be a new way to think, a new way to feel, and/or a new way to act and respond. But if it's a "new way" at all, it's unfamiliar territory to the unconscious part of us, and it needs to be made much more friendly to our basic nervous system. We want to become "unconsciously competent." We know that ultimately we need to be just doing it ourselves as a way of life and work. But we have to acknowledge that the path to that freedom is not free.
This conventional behavioral model identifies four stages of moving to permanently changed conduct:
(1) Unconscious incompetence
"I don't even know that I don't know what I don't know."
(2) Conscious incompetence
"I know now how to make it happen, and I know I can do it, but I have to keep reminding myself to do it, and I fall off the wagon regularly."
(3) Conscious competence
"I know now how to make it happen, and I know I can do it, (but I have to keep reminding myself to do it, and I fall off the wagon regularly.)"
(4) Unconscious competence
"I just do it. I only think about it when I don't do it, and I then just go do it."
Coaching is a high-leveraged way to get from stage (2) or stage (3) to stage (4).
Professionals must master critical personal behaviors that are required in the new world of knowledge work: how to collect, process and organize all the inputs, ideas, information and commitments that are potentially relevant to their life and work.
The challenge is to frame and address the more subtle behaviors, the ones that limit or expand our effectiveness in the world. We need to do this in the same way many of us have identified physical exercise as a strategic behavior to install in our lives, for which we have found the coach we needed and wanted to have, to make it happen at a new cruising level. To commit to a hands-on, real time coach is not a sign of weakness. It is rather the indication of a sophisticated awareness of the effectiveness of leveraging the best tools to restructure our automatic response systems in ways that create ever greater opportunities.
Adapted from The David Allen Company 2002. All rights reserved.
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GREG L. KILGORE, Achievement Coach
360° Achievement Coaching:
Creating Awareness, Accountability,
Action, and Achievement
