How to Ruin Your Own Day
You know what's worse than someone rejecting you?
Realizing they never actually did.
You did it for them.
You didn't send the proposal because you knew they'd say no.
You didn't follow up because you didn't want to seem desperate.
You didn't tell anyone what you really wanted because, well, that's a little embarrassing.
And eventually, you've got an entire collection of evidence that nobody wants what you're offering.
Except nobody actually told you that. You told yourself.
Now imagine your coaching client tells you this story.
Where does your curiosity go? Toward their fear of rejection? Their confidence? Their reluctance to put themselves out there? Maybe.
But hang on a minute. How much of that story have either of you actually established?
The client may have mistaken a prediction for a fact. And the coach may be about to mistake that prediction for the problem. Suddenly, you're exploring a client's fear of rejection when nobody has rejected them. You're examining their confidence when they haven't necessarily said they lack any.
And you might be having an incredibly insightful coaching conversation. About something neither of you knows to be true.
One of my sons, when he was little, seemed to believe it was his civic duty to announce whenever another kid began spinning wildly out of control. He'd point and declare, loud enough for everyone, including the kid, to hear: “Look! He's ruining his own day!”
It never stopped the meltdown. But it certainly attracted a larger audience. And how often do we do something similar in coaching? Not the pointing and shouting part. Hopefully. But how easily we can become an audience to a story, then an enthusiastic participant in making sense of it.
We hear the client's explanation. We become curious about it. We ask thoughtful questions. We explore what it means. All while the original conclusion sits there, remarkably undisturbed.
Maybe the client is afraid of rejection. Maybe they aren't.
Maybe the prospect isn't interested. Maybe they are.
Maybe something else entirely is happening.
The point isn't to replace the client's explanation with ours. It's to leave room for the client to examine how they arrived at it. Because sometimes the most consequential part of a client's story isn't what happened. It's what they decided happened.
And before we help someone make sense of the day they're ruining, perhaps there's something worth exploring about how they came to understand the day in the first place.
Whose story are we actually working with?
Learning Journeys — The International Center of Coaching At Learning Journeys, we develop coaches who go beyond behavior, strategies, and solutions to explore how the stories people live by influence what they believe, the choices they see, and the futures they imagine.
Our Power of Possibility experience introduces this exploration. Our Narrative Coach Practitioner program develops the coaching capacity to partner with clients as they uncover and examine these influences for themselves.
Where the map ends, the Learning Journey begins.
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