We take ourselves seriously and feel like we carry the weight of the whole world on our shoulders. Sometimes. I do not say this with any kind of irony. I say this with compassion because, in executive coaching, those I coach have great responsibilities and very often need to reconnect to the fundamental idea that they are human and thus vulnerable to pressure, uncertainty, and ambiguity, that they haven't answered all the problems and they don't have a decision on all the situations and that, that's perfectly fine.
The road to vulnerability is a difficult one because we work for years to strengthen ourselves and face a variety of situations that justify the responsibility we have: through the role of leader in an organization, responsibility towards people, towards customers, or against the objectives. We, coach and client, have the dose and our own need for vulnerability so that through coaching, development, and learning can happen naturally, deeply, and sustainably.
Vulnerability creates the space for reflection, and without it, the conversation, no matter how good the quality, remains a conversation, sharing, instead of asking questions and relative doses of listening, but somehow the learning doesn't happen because we stay in the space of needing confirmation, without let's drop the armor altogether. "Is coaching a kind of therapy for managers?" one of my new clients asked me the other day. Just the idea of therapy seems scary and, while we fully support the need for emotional and mental hygiene that psychotherapy can bring to our lives, it should be clarified once again that the coaching process is a learning, creative, open partnership that is based on trust, mutual respect, the possibility of vulnerability and genuine compassion, in a confidential space. A space where the definition of vulnerability is no longer that of weakness but of openness to being able to hear and generate new possibilities.
The safe, coaching space can rarely be explained in detail, fully rationally, it rather feels and is subject to the pressure of expectations and assumptions with which we enter it. Many times, the person in front of you, the client, the leader comes expecting you to give him advice and you have to resist him. Many times, the coaching client assumes that they could miraculously find immediate and punctual solutions to their anxieties or problems. Many times, in the way they come to coaching (especially in executive coaching), there is the assumption and expectation of the client to have an expert in front of them, a coach who will tell them, and guide them. That is a mentor. How are these expectations born... in real life the speed with which we need to find solutions and clarify keeps us away from the space where, knowing nothing and having no specific expectation, a space where you do not prove, leaving the thoughts to simply happen, well, in everyday life, it doesn't exist.
I learned vulnerability the hard way. I come from a generation that was brought up with the discipline of the communist regime where your parents gave you your career and where being among the best at school gave you, at least, a chance to get a decent job close to home or in a city. Being competitive, even if you were a nice person and had lots of friends, was the rule of thumb. High performance, lack of choice to make mistakes or failures, and perfectionistic tendencies are part of the long line of legacies that we have firmly anchored in our way of being. The journey of personal development did not start because I set out to do so, it took shape intuitively, over time, as I began to learn in a whole new field related to people and not engineering, related to the improbable and you try harder than of numbers, structure, and clarity, related to leading people, communication, connection and understanding the psychology of performance. It took me a long time to understand how I need to remind myself from time to time that I am first and foremost human, that I am vulnerable, and that I need to give understanding and empathy first and foremost to myself and that, only then, am I a man who delivers performance.
Contact with personal vulnerability is a blunt one in places because it can shake your confidence that you will be able to continue by placing there the doubt of personal weakness.
It took me some time, and many coaching sessions, I worked with a supervisor, and I worked with a therapist to feel and understand the difference and get better.
The development of emotional capability in leaders, understanding emotional intelligence, became a mandatory subject, especially after the 90s when the effects of technology development and globalization became visible, the speed of work, responsibility, and pressure on business leaders doubled, tripled, created opportunities for redefining success but also created the possibility to very easily reach narrow spaces where burn-out is rather the rule. Connecting with your own emotions and accepting them is a process that takes time.
In the last three years or so, something new has happened through the pandemic and all that it has generated: the need to stop neglecting discussions of emotional health and mental health has become urgent. At all levels in the organization fatigue set in, all the internal processes involved in how to deal with uncertainty and complexity were accelerated and more and more leaders understood the value of having a partner and finding solutions through reflection to all these themes in a safe and trusting space, without competitiveness and value judgments, quelling perfectionist tendencies and staying face to face with oneself to find a new kind of balance, to be able to integrate life and work in a way I hadn't thought of in the past.
There are a few myths about vulnerability that are worth dispelling
The first and most widespread myth is that being vulnerable means being weak. Without direction or decision-making power, abandoning the expectations others have of you when you assume the leadership role. Being vulnerable can be seen as a real act of courage because it means being able to look at your set of values, beliefs, and beliefs, and ask yourself to what extent it needs revision and to what extent it serves you in the new context in which you have to deal with all those you lead and are with you.
A second myth is related to the fact that we can choose not to be vulnerable. The statement is completely false because vulnerability is not something we do in honor of something that comes from within in direct connection with our emotions which are inseparable from us. The fact that a leader may be discouraged in certain situations, experience confusion, or feel overwhelmed is part of reality. The success of leaders is measured by the success of their team, and what connects people is the feeling that they share the same situation, team spirit is an emotion, and mobilization of energies, initiative, and involvement is more about emotion than about reason. For all of this to happen people need to be able to connect emotionally with their leader and that happens when the leader is vulnerable.
A third myth I'm referring to, which I've lived with for quite some time, has to do with the fact that we "can carry them ourselves". This often means that we do not ask for help and end up in physically or mentally limiting situations where our decision-making power and reason are affected. Vulnerability and the ability to ask for help save the quality of our decisions that we are there for as leaders.
No, (executive) coaching is not therapy for leaders, but it creates a safe space so that even the least comfortable leader with the idea of accepting vulnerability can discover it and work with it, putting to work empathy, sensitivity towards others, the ability to connect, that is, he can become, in real-time, an empathetic leader, including, a leader who serves his purpose and purpose.
Article Published on PRwave.ro