We Can't Do It All Ourselves

Ἰατρέ, θεράπευσον σεαυτόν

It may look like Greek to you, yet the phrase “Physician heal thyself” – from St Luke’s gospel, alludes to the readiness and ability of physicians to heal sickness in others while sometimes not being able or willing to heal themselves. This suggests something of “the cobbler always wears the worst shoes”, or the “taps are always dripping in the plumber’s house.” It also suggests that physicians, while often being able to help the sick, cannot always do so and, when sick themselves, are no better placed than anyone else. Certainly in the case of dentists, extracting one’s own teeth is well nigh impossible.

Of course there’s the assumption that in the case of doctors they should practice what they preach and, in the case of dentists, put their money where their mouth is.

And so it is, also, with colleagues in my own domain – Coaches. And in this regard I would place coaches of every hue from Life, Sport, Business, Leadership, Voice, Performance, Personal, Transpersonal, Transformative, Informative et al.

I know in the sporting arena that when I (in spite of perhaps being the oldest member of the side) take the field of play in a cricket match, my team mates expect something miraculous from me. I coach technique AND performance, so when I walk off having been bowled for a golden duck they feel, quite rightly, let down on both counts.

But of course Coaching doesn’t work like that, though non-coaches think it does. And in that whole domain lies the misunderstanding. “You seem to know all the answers for other people so why can’t you do it for yourself,” is the unspoken criticism – a criticism that seems to ignore the fact that we are all human. And as humans we are thoughtful creatures who rarely understand the Power of Thought, and have an inconsistent understanding of our relationship with our Thinking.

A lad who I was coaching once said to me – after I’d corrected some part of his technique – “Thanks, Pete that’s great! How is it you seem to know all the answers?”
“I don’t know all the answers,” I replied. “However, I do know pretty much all the questions – and that makes my providing the answers for YOU a lot easier.”

Coaches, most of the time, don’t know all the answers – yet they do know all the questions, in the general scheme of things. The same goes for doctors, dentists, cobblers and plumbers as well!
However – enshrined within all of that lies the very reason why none of us can “do it very well for ourselves.”

We don’t know all of OUR OWN answers.

Back last autumn I arranged to spend some time with a Personal Development Coach. I was faced with a load of imponderables in terms of my life going forward and, quite frankly, needed some advice in sorting out the wood from the trees. There were choices to make and I was unclear and, to a degree, overwhelmed. Some direction was required.
Could I have done this for myself? – after all I know a whole raft of stuff and this is also part of what I do for other people. Surely, s u r e l y ... I could “apply to self.”

Well, I remembered doing an impromptu session at an establishment where I once worked in a consultancy role. The client was not only a coach herself, but also a high-level trainer of coaches. She was far more qualified and experienced than I was and was certainly well placed to perform a “Heal Thyself” scenario, or so I thought.

She was approaching a crossroads regarding a business decision and was unsure as to which pathway to take when the time came. I spent just over an hour with her and took her through a process that she had not previously encountered in all of her professional life (curiously enough). Just over half way through she encountered an embodied sense of transformation – an Insight, a Light-Bulb Moment! She knew, I knew, and I knew she knew, that right then and there was the answer she had been looking for.
Could she have done this for herself?
Maybe – however she smiled at me and said, “Oooh! That was rather special – almost magical! You really are very good at what you do.” I smiled back, trying to hide the glow of satisfaction I felt inside. It was, for me also, a very special moment in my professional career. This was a moment of interpersonal connectivity over and above what she had been expecting. And this over and above, or above and beyond, was what she meant by “special, almost magical”. It is not written in the script, and doesn’t always happen either. And above all it will never happen if we “apply to self” because in that route only WE are involved.

SDL

SDL or Self-Directed Learning is described as where the individual takes the initiative and the responsibility for what occurs. Individuals select, manage, and assess their own learning activities, which can be pursued at any time, in any place, through any means, at any age. Although it is a process, it is more readily accepted and pursued by particular personality types. As a coach across a wide spectrum of learning, personal change, and performance, including therapeutic change-work, I’ve seen those people who expect everything to be “done to them” as well as those who have taken an active responsibility – in SDL terms – for their own change. We are all different – is my way of describing it.

In terms of the client in the story I have just related, she was without doubt a self-directed learner. Another feature of SDL types is that they recognise Insights when they appear in the mind. They notice when the light-bulbs shine, and they acknowledge the Wisdom that has arrived. They intuitively know and never question that knowing – they merely apply it to self from that moment on, and take over responsibility for how that application is directed.

Personal Change

So, given my own SDL and my experience with the client just described, I was confident, when I started to work with MY coach, that I was much better placed to have her guidance towards helping me sort my wood from my trees, than if I had done it myself. I would probably have still been wrestling with decisions and imponderables now, almost six months later – for this was decision guidance rather than directed learning!

And then, in a seemingly special and almost magical way, there started arriving a lot more things of an unscripted nature. Interpersonal connectivity, though already present, seemed to come much more alive. I can best describe it as if suddenly the bandwidth of communication between me and my coach had just got a whole load wider and superfast. As a result, I gained an enormous amount of Insight, vision and personal change that I hadn’t expected and at times I almost hadn’t bargained for. I wouldn’t have changed any of it, however, for it was life-changing. Along the way, my own SDL played an important part – needless to say – but the truth of the matter was that I could not have initiated ANY of the ways my changes unfolded by myself.

So who coaches the coaches? Other coaches! It is a partnership, a collaboration – that can, on occasions, be special and magical. It is exactly the same as the client-coach relationship.

And the key to it all, at the end of the day, is this –

We are all Human – And we are all Connected!