Don’t Be a Coach, Be a Catalyst

There are a number of words that are so overused with a market so saturated as to be meaningless. “Coaching” is becoming one of those words.

Sometimes it seems that everyone who isn’t currently employed by a company and hasn’t retired is a coach. There are also a myriad of coaching approaches, programs, certifications, and rankings that further dilute the coaching brand.

Coaching

And when it comes to coaching, whoever pays for it owns the outcome. If a large company is paying to have an executive coached, they get to dictate what result they’re paying for and the coachee needs to know that, i.e., the company gets to say what they’re going to behave like as the coachee. And because it’s frequently about changing something in the coachee’s personality and their interpersonal/working with people, there is often resistance to coaching.

The oft-made comparison with athletes having a coach feels like apples and oranges when the focus is someone’s personality, which feels too personal.

If you as the coachee want to dictate what the result of your coaching will be, you need to pay for it and this is often available from life coaches. However, life coaches often come off as less rigorous and lightweight, and although many are quite competent and capable, the quality appears quite variable.

Coaches — executive or life — focus on goals and then reverse engineer back to today and then come up with steps to get to those goals. And as the saying from Robert Burns goes, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Implementing those steps is often resisted or, at the very least, not sustained even when they make sense and the coachee agrees.

Why does that happen and what can be done about it?

It may be because those steps connect logically but not emotionally, and it’s the emotional disconnect that gets in the way of implementation. This brings us to the notion of catalysts.

Catalyst

A catalyst in a biological reaction is an enzyme that attaches so firmly and completely to a substrate that it won’t wiggle loose and holds on until it is transformed into a product (a.k.a. outcome).

In regards to helping humans, a catalyst (in this case, another person) so firmly and fully attaches to a person such that the person attaches firmly and fully to the catalyst in return. Because of that, when you as a catalyst meet with a client, you zoom in and drill down into what matters most to them, their hopes and dreams, and also their fears and doubts (which often they don’t express in traditional coaching because they feel too embarrassed or ashamed). You then keep drilling until they identify what is going on foundationally and at ground zero in their psyche and soul.

As a catalyst vs. a coach, you should ask them to take 24 hours to come back to you about their most personally meaningful goals and to go through a process where they think of what first comes to their mind and then discard that. Then repeat that a second time and do the same. Then finally have them do it a third time and come back with what they come up with. You do this to firmly connect to them at their core and also cause them to connect to you with trust and enthusiasm.

This goes along with a quote from my late mentor and “deep listener,” Warren Bennis: “When you get where people are coming from and care about them when you’re there, they’re more likely to let you take them where you’d like them to go.” He’s describing how a catalyst connects to a substrate.

But I would modify that slightly to be how a catalyst does what it does, “When you get where people are coming from, attach to them non-judgmentally and without any agenda when you’re there, have them feel that you get them and then together guide and lead them to where they (not their company and not you) want them to go and don’t let go until they land there, they are more likely to remain attached throughout the entire process.”

With this approach, there is little problem holding someone accountable as there is with coaching.

By working as a catalyst with people, they will often tell you they feel: inspired (deeply and accurately understood and deeply cared about), energized, and motivated and they’ll usually commit to taking action immediately after speaking with you. That is because what comes out is so aligned with what matters most to them and has doable, actionable tactics attached to it. And that causes them to act before they become distracted.

That’s the power of a catalyst vs. a coach.