Corporate Coaching

The Power of Choice
Posted 9/16/09

Trapped.  Cornered.  Up against a wall.  All of us have felt this way at one time or another.  You might want to move to a bigger home but can’t sell your house without losing money in this market.  Perhaps you want to explore other job or career options but don’t want to think about starting over somewhere.  This week, I wanted to upgrade to a new Blackberry but have to wait until I’m my contract expires next month or pay a penalty.  With all of these situations, we seem to be helpless, stuck, or at somebody else’s mercy to get what we want.  However, what if what we really want is exactly what we have?  We don’t lower our standards; we simply open our options.

A common result of coaching is shifting perspective.  People who have been looking at a situation can shift the angle by which they’re looking at it, perhaps examine a filter through which they’re looking at it, and suddenly the situation looks different.  It’s a pretty powerful process and one that helps us get out of “stuck” and into “choosing”.  When we’re truly stuck, we have only one choice and it’s presumably not an attractive one.  Most of the time, though, we do indeed have choices and decide which choice works best for us.

Take our examples above.  Look carefully and you’ll see that all of these “stuck” situations are actually choices.  If somebody wants to move to a bigger house, some choices are:
a) sell now, which might mean losing money,
b) delay your move and perhaps be inconvenienced by lack of space
c) put the house into the rental market and rent a bigger house until yours sells
d) move to a different area
e) go condo instead of house
f) do nothing at all

What other choices does this person have?  By simply brainstorming choices, you shift from being a victim of your circumstances to chairperson of the board of your own life.  By choosing, you are in control of what works best for you. 

I coached somebody recently who was really hating his job but felt very stuck due to family responsibilities.  He had a mortgage to pay and his family required his income to sustain their current way of life.  He had explored other jobs he thought he might like more but didn’t pursue them if the pay wasn’t equal or more.   In the meantime, he suffered through his job, burdened by a high level of stress, in order to give his family what he thought they wanted.  As we identified this in coaching, he began talking to his wife and realized he’d made assumptions about her choice.  It turns out she would rather live off a lower budget, consider downsizing their house and cut back on vacations in order to have more of him.  With his family’s support, my coachee was then free to choose a lower-paying, less stressful job in order to have his mental and physical health.  The benefit he could see from his peace of mind made the other choices of newer car and annual European vacation seem a lot less attractive.

Short Exercise

Think of where you might feel stuck in work or life.  The following exercise might help you see your options.  In just a few minutes, you can change your perspective and see where you have the freedom to choose.

1.    First, write down how you feel truly stuck.  Be as specific is possible.
2.    Ask yourself, “Am I truly stuck?”  What are three choices you have right now with your situation? Write them down.
3.    Are there any more choices?  What might somebody else choose (perhaps somebody who’s brave, willing to take risks for payoffs or somebody who’s creative)?   Write these down.
4.    Are any of these options good choices for you?  If so, circle or star them.
5.    Knowing you have all of these options, what is your choice now?

Being at choice releases us from the cages we create in our minds.  By simply looking at the situation as a series of options, and not as a good or bad situation, we can then pick the best option for us right now.  As circumstances change, the choice may change, and you have the freedom to choose again.  Even though you can’t always see them, you have countless choices for almost any situation.  To make them visible, all you have to do is be aware that you are at choice.  Being at choice means the power to change a situation is indeed power we hold within ourselves. 

- Jeanne Schad

Quieting the Chatter
Posted 9/11/08

It’s 6:15 am on 9/11 and I’m watching memorial services for the victims of 9/11.  Seven years of perspective and still this day will always be a contemplative one for me and I’m sure for many of you.  This morning as I watch the coverage, my experience of memorializing the occasion is interrupted continuously by the commentary of the reporters.  Just a few moments ago, a bagpiper was playing "Amazing Grace" at the Pentagon and I was caught in the deeply soulful experience of the music. Suddenly, it was interrupted by the news anchor commenting about how beautiful the music was and just as suddenly, the beauty was gone.  It made me wonder, do we ever do this to ourselves?   How much of our own experience and emotion gets interrupted by our mind's chatter?  We seem to have a need to immediately interpret, analyze, compartmentalize and put away.  We shy away from the experience and move too quickly into, “What does this mean?  What is this?  Where do I file this away?  How to I get rid of this bad feeling as soon as possible?”  What we miss is the necessary experience itself.  Sometimes we have to live through it, internalize the experience and simply let it be.  To deny the experience denies us a big part of living.  What possibilities open up if we quiet our own internal commentary and simply experience the moment?  For one, I can get the joy of living, even living through painful memories.  The alternative is to experience life a little more numb, which makes a little pain seem not all that bad. For another, I get the peace that silence of the mind brings.  When the mind shuts down, the spirit has room to speak and is almost always the voice I want to hear more than the mind.  The constant chatter of the mind, though, is constantly interrupting the spirit, trying to bring it on logical, left-brain terms.  The mind often squashes the spirit’s fabulous creativity with things like, “That’s crazy!  That’s not reasonable!”  Right now it’s telling me, “Don’t put that on your website!  That’s too personal.”  If you’re reading this right now, you know which voice won out.

Throughout today, if you feel sad, reflective, perhaps a little emotional, please allow yourself to be that way.  I’ll do the same.  And when you feel like pausing for silence, please gently nudge your mind to do the same.  Perhaps our collective minds couldn’t prevent the first 9/11 but our collective spirits, if we listen to them, might help us wise up and avoid another tragedy.  

I wish you a thought-provoking, contemplative, peaceful 9/11.

- Jeanne Schad

Making It Real
Posted 9/4/08

In each work environment, there are unique expectations. Just like snowflakes or socks in my drawer, no two are alike. What worked at company X could get you fired at company Y, even though both hired you, perhaps for the many of the same reasons. Companies sometimes ask you to mold to their environment to a certain extent to ensure your success there. Some of that is easy to give up. Sometimes you mold so much out of character, it’s hard to bounce back.

When I was growing up, a neighbor kid had a Stretch Armstrong. Stretch was a doll whose arms and legs could expand two to three times their normal length, then slowly draw back to their original shape. Over years of stretching Stretch, the gel inside him would harden. His arms and legs would no longer bounce back. Stretch stayed stretched into a morphed, disfigured character who wasn’t much fun to play with anymore.

Many people are stretched out of shape by their professional identities and responsibilities that come with it. Career choices we made 10, 15, 20 years ago force us to stretch our current selves back into forms and shapes we took long ago when, in fact, we’ve simply outgrown them.

A coach friend recently told me of an exercise she did with a client. She asked him to write his full name on a sheet of paper. He did as instructed and looked up at her for the next instruction within seconds. She then told him to change hands and perform the same task. A few minutes later, a scribbled version of his name appeared after much careful laboring on his part. The exercise illustrates what it’s like when somebody is placed in a job that’s not a good natural fit. Certainly the job can get done but with much more effort expended and probably with not as high of quality as can be done with the right person.

So how much are you willing to give up of your natural self to fit into your company’s mold? Are there specific areas you constantly bump up against that you know will strike up that inner conflict? The better question might be what are you NOT willing to give up for any job, no matter how much money?

In the past few years, much has been said of corporate accountability and responsibility. Truth is, corporations are neutral organizations; they’re a set of a papers and a tax status. Only the people within them can act and do so based on a combination of the company line and their own moral character. Certainly the case can be made that there would be no need for regulations such as those imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley if people had been less willing to mold themselves to their corporate environment and more attuned to what they knew to be right and wrong.

Think back to your career; if you’d had put your own instinct above the company line, what things would have gone differently? I recall working as an ad agency exec for a car account and holding the agency stance that the logo did not need to be bigger on an outdoor billboard. Anybody who’s worked in advertising knows this is the quintessential client-agency debate: clients always want the logo bigger, art directors want other images to balance it. I took the initial stance, as I felt was my job, to “tame” the client and influence to keep the logo small. I stood in front of a group of clients going through bullet point by point as to why the logo needs to stay the same size. At the end of the discussion, I was invited by a client to take a drive with him by the billboard. We did so. Much to my amazement, I was wrong. Based on where this billboard was placed 40 yards off the highway, the logo was indeed too darned small. The creative looked awesome but truly, I had to squint and nearly rear-end the car in front of me to determine who it was advertising. Had I trusted my own gut when I looked at it and not been so quick to tow the company line, I would have saved us all some effort and saved myself some credibility. My lesson was to listen to my own voice first and then to the voice of my company.

What would be some of the benefits of more of the real you in your work? How might it be easier to interact with your supervisor? Your peers? Your subordinates? Most importantly, your clients? You have one thing in common with every person you deal with every day: you’re both human beings. Each of us has a natural way of doing things and an adopted, harder way, like writing your name with your non-dominant hand. Are there ways you can show up in your work more naturally and more in line with who you know yourself to be?
- Jeanne Schad, President and Founder, Internal Relations

Why coaching in a slowing economy?
Posted 6/17/08

The end of second quarter is only a few weeks away and we’re all bracing for the release of corporate earning reports. My guess is that many will have the same adjectives: “down,” “less-than-expected,” and “declining.” One SVP in real estate told me this week that the first round of budget cuts “hurt” and the next round would, “hurt really badly.”