Decision coaching
Can anyone truly coach this very personal process? You can do so with groups – or at least kind of. But for individuals?
When I started out on this latest outreach effort, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do, but getting into its implementation raised all kinds of questions. Each person decides differently. Especially heart-and-mind decisions which get processed largely in our subconscious-intuitive mind regions. While a bit of rational thought is typically involved, the real decision-making goes on within. How do you go about coaching something that is both intensely personal and deeply buried?
Decision-making, along with any coaching assistance, generally focus on rational thinking processes. Why? Because, I think, that it is very difficult to work with decision-making based largely in our subconscious heart-and-mind regions – wherever these may be located in reality. Based on a lifetime of extremely diverse experience, I have learned the hard way that our real decision-making is so often handled deeply within us. It utilizes mind processes that cannot be reached directly from our conscious-rational machinations. These processes “just happen”.
How so … “just happen”?
Here is an example. As he did so often, a client one morning was describing a number of issues – some about business and some about people – to see what I thought about them. This was usually a thinking process for him more than a way to get my input. I mostly just listened. But when he came to talk about a particular person – a contractor, I could see him getting increasingly riled up as he talked. The issue as I recall was pretty mundane, and certainly not anything that one might get worked up about.
After a few minutes of his snarling and arm-waving, he cooled down enough to ask me what I thought. I told him that the “issue” here was not the real issue. The real issue was something else entirely. After a bit of hemming-and-hawing, he hesitantly admitted that he was struggling with an angry customer who had a legitimate complaint. This took a bit of probing on my part, but once the real source of his anger came out, we were able to go to work on some constructive ways to deal with this customer. The anger here “just happened”, and it served to identify what he really wanted to discuss with me.
Heart-and-mind issues are so important
To continue with the “how’ of decision-coaching, it is vital to note that many such issues present two challenges. The first is identifying and dealing with a client’s immediate real concern. The second is figuring out a way for the client to learn how to identify and deal with such concerns on their own, without a coach being involved.
How exactly can one affect mind processes that cannot be reached by rational means? Personally, I can think of many decisions that I made intuitively – some directly contradicting my rational thoughts. I often have a “gut-feeling” about what I should do. These gut-feelings very often turn out to be largely correct. This website is the result of a very strong personal gut-feeling. I was my own coach in this situation.
My Udemy course on decision-making that is presently in its final stages of completion offers one approach. In this course, I utilize stories – carefully designed to engage a reader’s heart-and-mind processes. These are stories intended to make readers process them in their heart-and-mind machinery rather than mainly through their rational thinking heads.
In the next few posts, I’ll have a look at a number of decision-making issues and describe how I might go about dealing with them in practice.
“The only real valuable thing is intuition.” — Albert Einstein
