I’ve been happily engaged with learning over the last month, leading a series of two-day coaching skills workshops at both Dulwich College, Singapore and UWCSEA. As usual, these workshops bring new thinking and reflection. Is there anything better than being a teacher? I wonder sometimes how this most ancient of arts became so deeply devalued in Western society. Perhaps all the blame lies with George Bernard Shaw’s ridiculous but sticky phrase that society loves to recite, “If you can do, if you can’t teach.” Or perhaps it lies with those soulless profiteers and power brokers who routinely place the bottom line above the top line in measuring life’s great equation.
Happily, in Asia in general and in the international teaching sector in particular, there is a more enlightened and respectful view of what teaching is. The false gods of progress and profit have not yet reduced teaching to an algorithm but we all know that business will continue to try to do this, identify a deficit (bad teachers), label it progress and then milk the new cash cow for all its worth on an industrial scale. More about this in a future blog because the great lie of progress troubles me greatly, but for today I want to stay in a lighter space.
When I run workshops and enjoy the insights that our sharings illuminate for participants, there are always new thoughts that come to me. On the evening of one recent workshop, I went for a run on the shores of the Singapore Strait to clear my head and I became engaged by the shoals of other runners that I passed. To be clear, I was not overtaking many of these athletes, most were coming from the opposite direction, some actually overtook me, but what I began to notice, that evening, was the extraordinary number of different ways in which people run. I would go so far as to say that no two people I saw that night were running in the same way.
My favourite was the fit looking grey-haired man who ran with one hand by his side and the other waving frantic circles in the air, like a stuttering propeller on a doomed aircraft. Then there was the lady who ran with both of her arms pressed so close to her chest that her bunched fists were jammed against her throat. There was the loper, who ran like a wolf; the glue-runner whose feet were going forwards but appeared to be moving only with extraordinary effort. A speedy young man went past running on his tiptoes, stealthily passing a slower and older man seemingly trying to impersonate the hind movements of a horse.
People bounded, bounced, stuttered, stamped, slouched, staggered and actually just walked with exaggerated elbow movements. Apart from the sheer entertainment of this carnival of movement, my thinking drifted to the advice I had been given just the week before by my very skilled and very patient osteopath, who had told me that the problem with my ischial tuberosity might well be resulting from a poor running style.
For starters, I was completely unaware that I possessed an ischial tuberosity (and who on earth gave it that ridiculous name?). If you know where yours is, put your finger on it now (clue: you won’t be able to if you’re sitting down). When told that I might have been running incorrectly for the past six decades, my initial response was to transform into transactional child: that’s not my fault, no one ever taught me how to run. It’s really true, no one ever did. I can remember learning to ride a bicycle with my Father panting alongside holding onto the saddle (and that overwhelming joy of my first unsupported ride), I can remember being taught how to write (and the shame of being a particularly scruffy writer which I later attributed to my speed of thought); but I cannot remember anyone ever teaching me how to run. The result? Park carnival chaos. If there is a right way to do it, very few of my running companions that night had been shared in on the secret either.
So much of our learning is instinctive and experiential but it might have been really useful for a few more ‘Life 101’ lessons when I was younger. My pilates instructor tells me that I stand ‘wrong’. I’ve also been told that I breathe ‘wrong’. This week I read an article which told me that I sleep ‘wrong’. Did you know that you are not supposed to hyperextend your ligaments for long periods during sleep? How on earth would you know that? How do you conceive a strategy to stop it while you are sleeping? Would these insights have been more useful in school than making screen prints of Richard Nixon with faces cut from a potato?
When we run coaching workshops, we look at two really critical skills that people perform ‘naturally’ without any training at all. The skills of listening and asking questions are as basic as it gets for successful human communication but it was certainly never explained to me as a child or as an adult what ‘good’ listening actually involves. Neither was it explained to me how the nature and structure of the questions that I ask can have a profound effect on the success of my attempts to communicate. Who knew what the word ‘why’ can do on the wrong lips, or launched with careless intention? Who taught us that sending a warning flag to show that negative feedback is on the way can prepare the receiver to receive it with an open mind and heart? Who explained strategies to get into conversations that are going past you? Who explained the power of silence in both speaking and listening?
Coaching is not a panacea for all of life’s communication needs. If a person runs into your office with wild eyes and sooty smuts on their face, demanding to know where the fire extinguisher is, it doesn’t empower them to ask them where they think it might be, or if they have a friend they could discuss it with. Coaching is a tool in the toolbox and its main value is twofold. At the micro level, it empowers people to focus and problem solve; at macro level, if linked to an organisation’s value statements, it can produce a rich emotionally intelligent culture where people go the extra mile because they want to, because they feel respected and because they feel that their voice counts.
If people in your organisation don’t treat each other properly, when called to account, are they still able to default to the child’s voice and say, “No one ever told me how we should treat each other here…?” A coaching culture makes that expectation very clear to everyone.
