Affordances
As a coach who trains and mentors coaches, over the years I have heard a recurring pain point. It is when a coach has attention on producing breakthroughs with clients. Specifically, that there is insecurity about the value the coach provides if the client is “not having breakthroughs.” When we excavate the concern, what typically becomes apparent is that these same coaches, do in fact, work with clients who are reliably producing breakthroughs, as evidenced by client feedback during and after the coaching sessions. Nevertheless, there is some persisting story or expectation that it is a coach’s job to produce breakthroughs for the client. What I am curious about is why we have any attention on creating a breakthrough—the “a-ha moment”—at all, insomuch as the (perceived) presence or absence of a breakthrough is problematic for the coach.
The attention on self-assessment and the job we are doing is both normal (Am I doing a good job?) but also, not our job. It is the coach’s job to have no attention on the job we are doing (!) as that would mean our attention is on ourselves and not the client. Putting attention on how we’re doing creates an internal experience separate from the conversation. It is a distraction and can be disempowering. At that moment, we are not connected to the client. Instead, we are connected to our real-time self-assessments.
The form of our job is the coaching conversation. It occurs through communication: the coach receives communication—verbal and non-verbal, apparently and intuitively—and then responds with skill and intention, given the client’s coaching request. The coach experiences what their response creates for the client, again through verbal, non-verbal, apparent and intuitive cues, which also is perceived inside the context of the coaching request, and so on. Therefore, the experience for the coach is as simple as the experience of the conversation at hand:
“The outline of the common pattern is set by the fact that every experience is the result of interaction between a live creature and some aspect of the world in which he lives…An experience has pattern and structure because it is not just doing and undergoing in alternation but consists of them in relationship. The action and its consequence must be joined in perception. This relationship is what gives meaning; to grasp it is the objective of all intelligence.”
John Dewey, Art as Experience
Where, in the “doing and undergoing” of experience, as experience, in relationship, through perception, does the need for the “a-ha!” moment live? It does not live in the present moment. It lives in a story about the value of coaching and the value of ourselves as coaches. One thing we own as coaches is that our clients’ results are our clients’ accomplishments. The flip side is that we cannot “make” a client produce any result. Leaving the “results produced” outcome of coaching entirely in the client’s lane creates a sort of vacuum in the coach’s lane…What “result” am I producing here? An answer I see coaches arrive at to fill the vacuum is “breakthroughs.” Meaning: we as coaches are responsible for creating breakthroughs with our clients. This is where our ego, our attention on self, slips into the client’s process.
I’ve seen this swing a few ways. I’ve seen coaches who are confident to the point of arrogance that they can “create” a breakthrough with a client. I’ve seen coaches with persisting angst about their value be soothed by having a session in which the client has a breakthrough. I’ve seen coaches wallow in insecurity because they are not creating breakthroughs with their clients, regardless of their client’s actual report of having had breakthroughs.
Today, I am going to play skeptic on the whole breakthrough construct for us as coaches. I do this because the breakthrough, the insight, the “a-ha” moment, has sadly become the money shot of coaching. It’s where coach and client both get a nice dopamine hit. When we as coaches self-identify with the breakthrough (“I did that!”), it is not unlike how we may self-identify with “making” a person orgasm. Sorry to have to go there, but there it is. And the danger here is that an “a-ha” moment becomes the upper limit of what is possible, where value lives, both the value of coaching and the value of the individual coach in the coach’s own estimation. (I could draw out the orgasm analogy to here, but I trust you to fill in the blanks. It’s a direct corollary.)
I submit that creating breakthroughs for our clients is not our job, though it may be a consequence of it. Their reinvention is also not our job, though it may be a consequence of it. Their having something, some result, that currently seems unattainable without sufficient support is not our job, though it may be a consequence of it. And this is where coaching becomes opaque, mysterious, hard to put into words—what, exactly, is our job? What is the coaching conversation “for”?
I say our job is: Affordances.
The structural importance of an affordance is relative to its practical use. The cave affords shelter to a bear, but not a fish. The spoon affords scooping relative to soup. The fork affords piercing relative to meat. Neither the spoon’s scooping nor the fork’s piercing affords anything relative to a paper airplane. The symmetry of the folds of a paper airplane, though, affords flight.
The function of the coach, as the carrier of the coaching conversation, is to be an affordance—or more specifically, the possibility of an affordance—listening for the shelter, the soup, the meat, the paper airplane, that the client is pointing to. The client may not know yet what they are formulating, and the process is spent on discovering what “that” is…. Shelter? Soup? Meat? Paper Airplane? They know they want coaching, and in the knowing, the client is already connected with their deeper longing that has them seek out the coaching dialog. Through conversations, we get to know the thing and at the same time, get to know what affordances that thing requires for it to come into being as a lived experience. And how do we know when this happens? I hold this as Dewey describes: the self in concert with one’s environment, doing and undergoing experience, through perception, in relationship. Some affordances will come from within the client. Some affordances will be discovered in the client’s interaction with the world. Some may even be spiritual. And yes, some will be experienced as “breakthroughs.” Because even as the client comes to understand the thing they seek to have through coaching—soup, let’s say, we do not necessarily know what they want from this soup. Do they want to eat it because they are hungry? Do they want to create an award-winning soup? Are they reproducing their grandmother’s recipe, now lost?
The coach plays with ideas, through which the client further and further understands the nature of themselves, the thing they are creating, the experience they seek to have, how it will look in the real world. Over time, the client discovers how it will come to be in the real world, and the consequences of that for themselves and the world. The client manifests the desired outcome, goal, and experience, as afforded by the coaching conversation.
The coach provides a perspective outside of the closed system of a client’s subjectivity. Importantly, that perspective is grounded in a space that is open, whole, free and blank. In this space, there is nothing wrong and nothing missing. There are no expectations and no past. This space, which is generated and held by the coach, is the foremost condition that affords the coach to do her job. The space contradicts--it negates--any attention on self-assessment for the coach because it is impossible to do both: it is impossible self- assess and hold that space. The coach, grounded in this spacious way of being, can then afford an opening of the client’s subjective perspective. Subjective thinking is challenged by the coaching conversation, which occurs in this luxurious clearing of uncompromised curiosity and creativity. Then, the closed system of subjectivity transforms into an open, generative system. The client gets to play, to dream, to dare, to experiment, to learn, to grow, to transform as affordances require in order to become.
As ontological coaches, we are trained professionals whose work affords the becoming of a person in the world. The person, then, is themselves in the world: being, doing, and having as they would, naturally. It is a subtle art, because the person is, of course, already in and of the world! The becoming we afford speaks to the proactive evolution of the self that a client initiates when they hire an ontological coach. And I, as the coach, get to have my own experience of being and becoming, as I generate the space of presence for the client to play in. It is a peaceful, ease-filled, connected and creative way for me to be. My own ego gets to take a vacation as there is nothing for me to do except be and be with, in relationship, lending affordances to the moment as inspiration plays with possibility.
It's everything and it’s nothing.
©2024 by Marita Bollici. All Rights Reserved.
