So what have our FEELINGS got to do with business coaching?
Traditionally, business coaches and the training they received have tended to stay away from discussion of their clients’ feelings and emotions. They stuck to ‘facts’ and ‘business topics’.
But as coaching has become more professionalised, a newer generation of coaches has firmly embraced the knowledge and skills from various other psychological professions of helping clients work with their emotions to improve their performance, success, stress management and key relationships.
As the Thoughts-Feelings-Behaviour cycle vividly shows, our feelings are fully inter-connected with our thinking and our behaviour. If I’m working with a client as their business coach, we can’t limit ourselves to merely lots of ‘thinking’ about their business and deciding what ‘behaviours’ they need to act out. Action plans, strategies, growth steps, attempts to change working styles, etc… none of these will be sustainable or perhaps even tried out in the first place (after the enthusiasm gained in the coaching session has died down) without an exploration and acknowledgement of the emotions that come as part of every thought and every behaviour.
The Beast in your In-box!
One good example of the need to explore your emotions in business that may be familiar to you is what I call the ‘Beast in the In-box’. For many successful, busy people, their in-box can become a place of both excitement but also stress, threat and sometimes fear. The sheer weight of unanswered emails bearing down on you. The fear that an email from an important client or colleague might contain heavy demands or even a complaint. The pressure of assuming they all expect a same-day response.
Sometimes our fears over what we’re going to find in our in-box and whether we are feeling strong enough to tackle all that it contains cause us to avoid even opening them for a while. I’m sure we can all think of emails we’ve avoided opening for an hour/day or two because, at some level, we’re not too sure we want to find out what’s in them!
A traditional business coach would help you realise that avoiding your in-box or certain emails was not logical, and you might end the coaching session having cheerfully made a commitment to change your ways. Yet, if you are rather avoidant of some emails because of underlying fears around the ‘Beast’ – which you might not be consciously aware of – then this well-intentioned discussion and commitment to change your ways is likely to end up with… you not changing your ways.
Coaching without exploring your emotions simply isn’t very effective.
Emotions are the key to better performance
Good business coaches these days will invite their clients to explore how they feel about the pressure on them of the contents of their in-box and, in many cases, this is where real coaching transformation can happen. Clients will often reach their own realisations about what’s going on for them ‘behind the scenes’ of their awareness and make sense of it at a far deeper level.
Very often, simply the act of bringing a buried fear to the surface has the effect of reducing or neutralising it, and clients are able to approach their daily in-box with a powerful appreciation of what’s going on for them emotionally as the open it. This, in turn, helps them confront and overcome the effects of the fear in a sustainable, repeatable way. In other words, they are able to say “Aha, I know what’s going on here! I can see I’m avoiding this email… Familiar old pattern… Well, no time like the present for opening it, then!”
Selling Feelings
Another very familiar process happens with sales and marketing. Few of us are born with a natural joy of making sales calls, with all the risks that lie within this of being ‘rejected’, etc. And if we run our own business, sales and marketing can feel 100 times worse than if we’re working for someone else – a daily opportunity for us to feel small, worthless, unimpressive, foolish...
While there are of course a number of great tips and techniques to use when seeking to conquer sales-phobia, the most effective business coaching techniques for improving sales and marketing for most of us is to spend time exploring what emotions may be holding us back from being a fearless salesperson and then tackling them, one by one. What blocks us, what makes us avoid stuff, procrastinate, deflect and so on.
Rationally, we know how to send a sales email, make a call, send a proposal. And sure, we can always benefit from a few tips and learn a few good habits. Yet if we’re sabotaged and hijacked by emotions that block us from putting them in place, or from keeping them going for more than a few days, we get no-where in the medium or long run.
And I intentionally say “we” because I’ve been there too, I really have! All those wonderful excuses I’ve used to myself and others over the years as to why I will make that sales call “later” or send that proposal document “tomorrow”. All that sales training where I came out knowing loads about how to develop a healthy sales habit - and then found I’d reverted to the sales equivalent of hiding, quivering, like a bunny in a burrow within a fortnight.
No, if you want to tackle an avoidance mindset around sales, you need to spend time bringing to the surface all those nasty little inner saboteur fears* - expose them in the sunlight, laugh at them, forgive yourself for having them, and move on in a self-aware way.
What about you?
And now I’d like to ask you a question:
What are you most avoidant of? What do you find you keep putting off? What wonderful excuses do you give yourself for this? What might be your underlying fears behind this behaviour?
If you’d like to explore any of this with me, I’d love to talk…
* If you’re interested in learning more about your inner saboteurs, it’s fascinating work and can be transforming for many people. See my Positive Intelligence page for more information on how to spot them and disarm them.
