Why Understanding Your Problem Doesn't Always Change It

By Ian Traynar, Executive Coach

Some of the people I coach understand their problem better than I do. They've read the books and done the workshops, and often they've spent time with a therapist or another coach. They can tell me when the pattern started, what sets it off and what they ought to be doing instead, usually in more detail than I'd have thought to ask for. And the pattern is still there, which is generally why they've come to see me.

A senior leader knows perfectly well that they should delegate, and still finds themselves going back over work that capable people have already finished. Someone else knows a single dismissive remark shouldn't matter, and spends the next three days replaying it. Another person has spent years becoming more assertive, and agrees to something they don't want the moment one particular colleague pushes back. None of these people is short of intelligence or self-awareness. If anything they have rather a lot of it, and it hasn't helped as much as it should.

When knowing what to do isn't the problem

Most coaching starts, sensibly enough, by asking what you'd like to achieve, and then works on goals and a plan. I've done a great deal of that kind of coaching since 2014 and I still think well of it. If someone needs to communicate more clearly or make a hard career decision, it can help enormously.

It struggles when the difficulty isn't a lack of knowing what to do, and is instead something that happens inside the person when they try to do it. The leader who can't delegate has usually been on the course. They can describe good delegation as well as the trainer could. What may still be untouched is whatever makes the old behaviour feel necessary, and that is the part I'm interested in.

Behaviour that makes sense from the inside

When someone keeps doing something that costs them, I assume it makes sense from where they're standing, even if it doesn't to anyone watching. So I want to find out what it's doing for them.

With the leader who checks everything, it might be about certainty, or about mistakes feeling personal. Perhaps somewhere along the way being competent came to mean being the one who makes sure nothing goes wrong. It might also be none of those, and I try hard not to settle on an explanation just because it sounds psychologically tidy. So I ask what they imagine would happen if they left the work entirely in someone else's hands, what it would mean if it went wrong, and, most usefully, what it would say about them.

That last question tends to take us somewhere else. Suppose they answer, "If it fails, everyone will think I'm incompetent," and as we go on it turns out they think so too, because competence has come to mean anticipating every problem and never being caught out. At that point the checking stops looking like a bad management habit. It looks like an attempt to protect something they believe about who they are, and another delegation technique won't reach it. They already know how to delegate. What they haven't yet found is a way to stay at ease with themselves when they aren't in control. I'd still want to test that rather than assume it, because the same behaviour can come from quite different beliefs, and sometimes from an organisation that really does punish every mistake.

What thirty years of osteopathy taught me about where to look

I spent more than thirty years as an osteopath, and one of the first things the work taught me was that the place someone feels the problem is not necessarily the place to treat it. A painful shoulder can be the end result of how the rest of the body has arranged itself, and working only on the shoulder tends to give you a grateful patient for about a fortnight.

Self-Concept work, which comes from Steve Andreas, gave me a way of asking the same question about the problems people bring to coaching. It distinguishes between the content of an experience, meaning what happened and what someone thinks and feels about it, and its structure, which is how those experiences are sorted and connected to their sense of who they are. [I've written more about this in this blog.]

Take someone who says, "I'm not good at difficult conversations." We could spend hours on the content: which conversations, who was there, what was said. That can be useful. I'm usually more curious about how one or two bad conversations became a conclusion about the whole person. Do they remember the times they handled a hard conversation well, and if so, what happened to those memories? Were they filed away as flukes? Is the difficulty really with difficult conversations, or with one particular person?

How a belief about yourself comes to feel like a fact

People rarely experience their beliefs about themselves as beliefs. They experience them as plain facts, with years of evidence to back them up. Look at the evidence a little more closely, though, and it has often been chosen rather selectively. The person who is sure they're unreliable remembers every appointment they've missed and barely registers the hundreds they've kept. They aren't being dishonest. The way their sense of themselves is organised simply gives some experiences far more weight than others.

Andreas described this in terms of scope and category: which experiences get included when someone decides what kind of person they are, and what category those experiences are placed in. A presentation that went badly can be filed as proof that you're a poor speaker, or as one presentation that went badly. The event is the same either way, but what it means for the person is completely different. This isn't about finding a more positive way to describe something unpleasant. It's about checking whether the conclusion someone has reached about themselves actually fits the whole of their experience.

Why insight so often isn't enough

Many of my clients already know where their pattern came from. They know their need for approval goes back to childhood, or that criticism stirs up an old sense of not being good enough. That understanding is worth having, but knowing where something started doesn't change how it runs today. You can understand perfectly well that you don't need everyone's approval and still feel awful when someone disapproves of you.

So rather than going further into why the pattern began, I'd rather look at how it's being kept going now. What does disapproval actually mean to this person? How do they decide whether they're acceptable, and what do they count as evidence? Questions like these can lead us towards the belief, or the particular way someone's experience is organised, that's keeping the response in place. And once we've found it, there's something specific to work with.

None of this involves persuading anyone that they're wonderful. If you believe you're inadequate and someone tells you otherwise, you'll probably agree politely and feel better until about Thursday. The work is to examine how the existing conclusion was reached and whether it holds up. Sometimes that means recovering experiences that were left out. Sometimes it means discovering that what felt like a permanent part of who you are is really a response that turns up in a few quite specific situations.

What changes when identity is no longer at stake

If the leader can stop treating every possible mistake as a verdict on their competence, delegation starts to feel different. A mistake by someone on the team can simply be a mistake. They can care just as much about standards and still find that the old pressure to check everything has eased, because the reason they felt they had to step in has changed. That doesn't always happen quickly, and it doesn't make real organisational pressures go away. When a persistent behaviour is being driven by a belief about who someone is, though, changing that belief can reach places that managing the behaviour never does.

Not every difficulty is about self-concept. Sometimes people need better information or practical support, and sometimes the environment really is the problem. But when someone has done the work and learnt the skills, and still finds themselves in the same place, I start wondering what they're believing about themselves that makes the response necessary, and how that belief became so convincing in the first place.

Bring the thing that hasn't shifted

If you've spent months or years trying to change something - you now understand it perfectly well but still find yourself doing it - bring it to A Clarity Call.

It's a demo of real coaching. We won't spend the time going over everything you've already tried or explaining why the problem exists. We'll investigate what's keeping it in place.

I won't assume I know the answer before we've started. But if there's a belief underneath the pattern that you've never thought to question, that's exactly what I want us to find.

Book your Clarity Call here.