SDS 334: No Coaching

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast ladies and gentlemen, super excited to have you back here on the show. So a couple of days ago, once this episode is live, a couple of weeks ago, I caught up with a friend, a very dear friend of mine and we were talking about, mostly about relationships, to be frank.

And so my friend is going through like some hurdles in their relationship, some challenges that they want to understand better and be able to resolve, and just be a better person in the relationship. And so I applied this one concept. So I was going into this conversation and I knew what was going to be about because like my friend is kind enough to give me a heads up about it and I just wanted, I was just asking myself, what can I, what value can I give to this person? I’m not an expert on relationships, right? I’m no psychologist. I’ve had a few relationships. I hope I’m in a happy relationship and I feel happy, but like I, I can’t say for sure like what is right to do, what is wrong to do and things like that. And I was kind of, I was being cautious of what I’m going to say in this conversation because I know myself and I tend to tell people how they should live their lives, how they should do things.

And it’s never the right approach to take. When you’re talking about business and careers, yes, you can, I guess like it’s not as as harmful if you tell a person that you should do this and so on. Even though still in that case, it’s debatable whether you should push a person and tell them exactly what you think is best for them in their situation. Or you should let them decide on their own. I think you should let them decide on their own, but I guess everybody can be grown up about it and throw away the advice that they don’t like, right? So I think it’s not as… I don’t think it can be as harmful in that situation. But in the case of relationships that can be very harmful because relationships are not always logical. Often we deal with emotions and by giving somebody advice, they might take it like very persona… Like not personally, but they might take it to a heart and actually go and act upon that advice simply because they don’t know better or they don’t know, they can’t judge whether it’ll be good for them or not because a lot of relationships are based on emotions not on logic and they might actually get hurt as a result or do worse for themselves.

So I was thinking, what can I do? How can I, how can I enter this conversation and participate in it in a way that I’m not going to cause detriment to my friend that, you know, if anything, I will not make any impact, but hopefully I’ll make a positive impact. So how do I, how do I remove this downside of potentially causing a detriment to them in their relationship? And so, what I remembered was something I learned last year when I was in Bali attending a men’s circle. And I mentioned this in the lessons that I learned. So what I learned in 2019 there’s a podcast episode recently about that. And I mentioned this specifically as one of the lessons, but I’ll mention it here again because it is so powerful. And here is another example when I was able to consciously apply it and practice and the principle I’m talking about is called the “no coaching principle”.

So at this men’s circle in Bali, which was, when was I there? I think, April, I think it was April, start of April, March, April, May or end of April, 2019 somewhere around there. There’s this like one basically gathering every Monday if you’re in Bali, it happens at the Nirvana Strength Club, which I really like as well. They have this men’s circle every Monday, I think it starts around 6:00 PM. And like guys get together to create a safe space to talk about everything. Like from business to sports, from relationships to emotions, pretty much the whole spectrum. Like nothing, there are no taboo topics. And how the safe space is created is very interesting. It is again through this no coaching principle. So the rule is basically one person speaks, everybody else listens. And usually there’s like 10 to 20 guys just sitting there listening to each other.

So one person speaks, whoever wants to speak speaks, everybody else listens. And all you can do is two things. Number one is if you empathize with the person, not sympathize but empathize, meaning that if you’ve been through something similar, if you know what that person is going through, what the troubles there are like, you can relate to them. The keyword there is you can relate to them. Then you either can put your hand on your heart or put your hand on the table, signifying to everybody at the table or to that person that they’re not alone, that you know somebody else has been through this as well, to like, help them, give them some something to hold on to. Something to feel that they are indeed, like they’re not alone. And the other thing is, what you can say is when a person’s finished speaking, you can add to that, but you can’t say, you can’t coach, you can’t.

And coaching is like saying you got to do this or I think you should do this. Or if I were in your shoes, I would do this. Right. Providing advice, like tips, actions. And so that’s a big no-no. The only thing you can do is you can speak from your personal experience about yourself in the same situation. So let’s take an example. Let’s say if somebody at the table said, says, I recently broke up with my girlfriend and I’m very, you know, depressed, feeling super lonely, very sad. I miss her so much, but I also know that relationship is not the right thing for me. And so on. I’m just talking about the process, like at the end of that, well during that I would put my hand on my heart or on the table. I think many people would because many people have gone through breakups and at the end maybe they mentioned something specific, they might’ve said, you know, like my ability to learn new skills is very low right now.

And that is not good because I really need it for my work, I’ve got this exam coming up or this whatever else coming up. And so I could say from my experience then that, “Hey, look, I’ve been in a similar situation and when I was going through a breakup, I also had an exam coming up and I knew that I really have to somehow get it done. I can’t let myself fail this exam. And so what worked for me was I told myself, look, I’m just going to pass this exam. I’m going put all of this on pause. I’m going to forget all these problems exist. I’m just going to prepare for the exam. It’s like seven days left. I’m going to pass that exam and then I’m going to let myself like be depressed and be sad and lonely and whatever else. I just really need to put this on pause. And the principle I’m going to apply there is compartmentalization.”

So something along those lines. And so basically I never once in that conversation, in that reply mentioned that, spoke to the other person, addressed them, that they should do this or whatever else. Like I was just saying what I did, what worked for me and so on. And that’s it. You don’t even say maybe that will work for you. No, you just say what in that situation, what I did, what worked for me is I applied compartmentalization and I paused my life for seven days until the exam was over, told myself to completely forget about this. But at the same time I gave myself the freedom to or the promise that I will return to these emotions and actually allow myself to experience and go through them after this important period is over.

And that’s it. And I say just that. The other person might react in a certain way, might say thank you, or whatever else. And we move on to the next topic or somebody else says something, something from their experience or someone else you know, starts talking about their problem. Or wherever, of their success, you can also be talking about success. Anyways, so that’s how the no coaching principle works. And that’s where I learned it in that men’s circle. And it was extremely useful. It was one of the most liberating experiences of my life, like sitting and like I was very tempted. I found myself all the time tempted to give people advice and then, but returning to no coaching principle, I realized there was all like most of it was pulled out of thin air that I didn’t, I haven’t gone through these experiences, it’s just what I think should be done.

But really I have no clue what is the right thing. And this is… Especially for this specific person. And so I had to tell myself to shut up and just listen. And also when I was speaking, it was really cool knowing that like there and then other one of the rules was like no judging. So like no one is judging, but also if somebody is going to speak up, they’re not going to tell me what to do. They’re just here to listen and if somebody is going to speak up, well then they’re going to be talking from their experience. So that was fantastic. And I went to that men’s circle, I found out about it quite late, so only went there like twice or three times. I think it was twice in total. I would love to go back and go again.

But since then I’ve held that no coaching principle very dear to my heart and I’ve been applying it where I can. On this specific example, I knew we were going to be talking about relationships and we were talking for in the end, we were talking about for two hours. And so for most of that time, for I think about like one hour, 45 minutes, like the first one hour, 45 minutes, I didn’t allow myself to talk to like tell the other person what to do. I consciously focused on listening to my friend. And then if like a situation they’ve been through a situation which I hadn’t been through, I’d say, Hey, look, I really can’t speak from experience here. You know, I don’t have any advice or I don’t have a device full stop in this whole conversation, but I don’t have an experience similar to that where I can talk from it.

So, you know, I hope you will be able to figure it out, but like I hear your pain, I’ll just listen to them. But those were rare. Most of the time I had an experience, a similar experience. And what I would say is, well, this is what happened to me. This is what I did, or this is what I do. This is how, you know, one of my past relationships, how things went down. And like what I learned from that and how I do things differently now. I always talk about me just like focus on me and my relationship or past relationships and provide examples but never once said “you should do this”. And I specifically, even if I tried saying that I caught myself, I explained this principle to my friend during the conversation as well, when he was curious like, why am I doing this in a certain way, trying to avoid providing specific advice?

And then like at towards the end I think we changed up the conversation a bit and I allowed myself to provide some specific advice or you know, specific pointers for the person. But most of the time, the first, like one hour, 45 minutes, I was just talking about myself, myself, myself, my experiences, and I got to tell you, like at the end of this conversation, I felt so energized. This was so rare. I really remember this feeling of feeling uplifted and just full of energy. Usually after a conversation like that, I would feel drained. I would feel like I’ve given everything I got because I’m sitting there, I’m coaching a person, or like I think I’m coaching. I mentioned actually just telling a person what to do, like battling their inner resistance.

And that takes a lot of energy. But once you stop doing that, once you don’t intrude on a person’s boundaries and you don’t tell them what they should do, you rather talk about yourself. Imagine this, like if you’re pushing someone, you try to push them off their chair, they’re going to resist. They got to like push back. And so you’re going to have this tug of war and you’re going to eventually run out of energy or you’re going to feel you’re going to lose energy. So that’s the usual, or how a usual conversation feels to me. I’m trying to put some ideas in a person’s head and they’re like resisting or they’re arguing or they’re kind of like, I can see there they have doubts. So I approached from a different perspective. Like, I feel it almost feels like I have an agenda in the conversation, which I don’t, but at the end of the day, that’s what it feels like.

So it’s like a battle. But once you start talking about yourself and just your experiences, it’s another, it’s the other way around. It’s like you’re sitting on your chair not touching anybody and the person, instead of pushing away like we’re fighting, you’re trying to push them off. Instead of that, they’re leaning into you. They’re like listening, they’re curious. Oh they are listening to your story. So all you’re doing is telling a story of your life or what happened to you. They’re leaning in, they want to find out more. They’re asking questions. They’re the one trying to get, you know, like absorb this information and get value. And guess what? They’ll take what is valuable to them out of it. And now they don’t feel like you have an agenda. Now they feel like, “Hey, you’re just sharing ideas and experiences”. Not even ideas, you’re just sharing, that’s wrong.

You’re not sharing ideas, you’re sharing experiences from your life. And they’re here to listen to them. And that completely changed the dynamic. And also the resulting, like my friend was happy. I didn’t feel any pushback. Our friendship was like untouched by this whole situation. I know I didn’t, I couldn’t have done any harm to them because I didn’t tell them what to do. All I focused was on myself. And so, and from my stories and what they take out of there is already totally up to them. And I felt totally energized, totally happy after it, walked out of there with huge smiles on our faces. It was fantastic. So that’s the no coaching principle. I highly recommend trying it out. Like next time we always, we all are human. We have our communities, our friendships, our families, and we talk to people, whether it’s our parents, our children, our colleagues, friends, anybody, people on the street, whoever we meet, we have conversations and often we are tempted and pushed.

And I would say especially this is evident in like for men, men are usually like problem solvers. Not that women are not problem solvers. Everybody’s a problem solver. So, but I just find that, from my experience, speaking of me from my experience, like I’m able to easier, like just, I feel that women listen better. It’s like when I’m talking I can talk about my problems and they’ll just hear me out. Whereas with men, it’s like, okay, here’s my problem. Let’s solve it, so on and so on. Try whoever you are, man, woman, whoever, anyone doesn’t matter. Just when you’re having this conversation next time, a conversation next time, try to, rather than coaching someone and telling them what to do, try to just listen to what they have to say and really relate if you can, empathize, try to understand, like try to feel what they’re going through and if you had a similar experience, just talk about that.

Like say, rather than saying, “this is what I think you should do”, just say “this is what happened to me and this is what I did, it didn’t work or it did, this is what I learned or this is what came out of it” and that’s it. And you don’t even have to do it for the whole conversation. Just try it like in one answer, like one response. Try doing that. See how the person reacts. And if you like it, try another one and try another one. See if you can have 10 minutes of conversation like that, only talking about yourself without providing advice. I personally think you will enjoy it.

And on that note my friends, I wish you a fantastic weekend. Hope you have a great time. For those of you who are in Australia, a huge, huge, huge congratulations on the upcoming Australia Day on our 26th of January, is going to be super, super exciting. I’m personally looking forward to the fireworks and it’s going to be legendary to say the least. I like the fireworks in Brisbane, by the way, if you are in Brisbane, from South Bank, I love those fireworks with the music that they time to the fireworks. Anyway, happy Australia day, everybody. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.