A story of how coaching and deep reflection helped me make sense of and unlock my leadership.
The following is a true story, as unfiltered as I’m capable of sharing. It unfolded over a number of deep developmental coaching sessions — the space, support and challenge provided by Agnieszka Walczut.
For anyone I know or worked with during this time who reads this — you may not have known the internal struggles and tensions I was experiencing, how hard it felt not knowing what was happening as it was all unconscious and yet all consuming — but please know that your generosity, love and care helped nurture the seeds for change that the coaching process I went through unlocked. I want to thank you all for that.
I have had a few coaches before and to be honest they were superficial and probably ceremonial but these sessions were different — good different.
They were raw, uncut, unfiltered, deep, full of light and dark, fun, full of laughter and tears…
Why was it different this time?
I needed it to be different — I was tired — I couldn’t maintain the level of energy required to continue hiding and resisting what needed to emerge.
The previous 10 years were some of the most profound in terms of learning, developing and growing as a person and a human being. There was a growing inconsistency and tension between what was on the outside and what was emerging and growing on the inside…I would also learn that the previous 35 years left long shadows that were pulling the strings.
The following charts the narrative that consumed me before the coaching and the reflection and narrative that liberated me after the coaching.
If you are a Star Wars fan or have ever seen the film An Empire Strikes Back, the whole experience felt like Luke Skywalker’s scene as he walked into the cave on Dagobah.
That place… is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go.”
“What’s in there?”
“Only what you take with you.
Yoda and Luke Skywalker
Before:
I was a senior leader and I felt like a puppet with a mask on, while everybody was pointing and laughing. I didn’t know who I was, I kept retreating into myself, small and vulnerable. I was tolerating and adopting other people’s definitions of me. I was conscious of doing it, I was choosing safety, but something felt wrong, that much I knew. I would act small, almost claiming I didn’t know things I did know, ensuring people felt more important. I believed that in order to belong, I had to fit in. That’s how I rationalised it for myself, while I was betraying myself and slowly losing touch with who I was.
I couldn’t convince anyone that my skills and experience were relevant to help the organisation thrive. I was desperately trying but I couldn’t add value — I tried too hard and my desire to fit in meant I didn’t really challenge and stand up for what was right, instead going for the easy option. I felt like I was wasting my energy on things that weren’t creative or productive. I felt defensive and bullish in response. I took a position I had the right way and others had the wrong way. Yet, I didn’t really understand what I was doing wrong. I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working. I felt misunderstood and at the same time not understanding anyone else either.
I felt immense frustration and sadness, I felt fraudulent, disingenuous. I was swallowing down what I really believed to be right about how I should behave — constructively disagree, call things out, speak truth to power, instead, I would suck it up — save it for the safe spaces in a team or with a friend. Once I was actually told ‘get back in your box, let the adults do it, you’re just a child’. It paralysed me on the spot, I felt shame and instantly taken back to childhood trauma of bullying — But I accepted that people could bully me and I would just take it, again and again. I was exhausted by everybody putting their shit on me — I never showed any of this, it was hidden, deep down…
If the opportunity of having a coach and some developmental 360 feedback hadn’t been offered as a precursor to some work around changing the approach to leadership learning, I don’t think I would have sought out help myself. I didn’t often ask for help, I don’t think I really knew how to ask for help… I was grateful to meet Agnieszka on this journey who helped me learn how to ask… but I was careful not to show I needed help, it was a mask — I didn’t feel worthy of help unless I was giving help to others. I had to reciprocate in order to feel the bargain was fair. I never made my needs visible. I was unconsciously getting my needs met and my well being suffered as a result…I just helped others and secretly hoped I would get help back. I created a persona that I was so self-reflective that people didn’t believe they could help me. ‘He will figure it out for himself’ kind of thing. Unless in extreme cases, for example when I broke my ankle very badly — that was an emergency and it was obvious to me and others I needed help. Otherwise, I didn’t feel worthy of being helped.
After:
Agnieszka asked what I wanted. It poured out of me, first what I didn’t want: “waste my time on things that were not going to make a difference” and “take everything so personally”. If I wasn’t trying so hard to fit in, what would be my difference to make? I had to admit that I was complicit in hiding my difference. I guess I didn’t want to feel like a novelty every time I entered a room, here comes a court jester! Or feel the weight of responsibility for needing to have a different point of view every time.
I wanted to find a way to do what I loved. I wanted to know that doing that helped create safety for my family by putting the roof over our heads. I did want to feel safe but without it taking all of my energy. I wanted to stop focusing on it as the end in itself. I realised it was a form of addiction, safety created by others. It required energy from me to create it for myself but I became dependent on other people to do it for me, setting myself up for abuse in the process. Abuse masked as safety.
Whenever I attended courses or read books about leadership, leaders had all these amazing traits! I kept comparing myself to the visionaries of the past, like Martin Luther King or John F Kennedy or Nelson Mandela and no surprises but I came up short every time. A book was able to beat the shit out of me, telling me I was not good enough! I felt infected by the leadership ideals and all I wanted was to be a good human being. I decided that if I was going to be judged, I had to find a way to be ok being judged based on my behaviours, actions, morals and values. I wanted to learn, deeply learn, find joy and wonder in learning, ultimately to just be a better person, a better version of myself but I wanted to stop having to prove myself all the time.
I learnt that if I wanted to help the world be a better place, I needed to think global and act local and stopped thinking I needed an invite to the table. When I was acting with purpose, it got easier. I accepted work as an expression of me but my ideas were not mine, recycled, reused and reimagined from all the giants who came before me. So when people were rejecting my ideas, they were not rejecting me. They didn’t know me. They simply had other priorities. It actually spurred me on to understand more about what was happening for people, and this led to challenging me to develop better ideas. But fundamentally I stopped taking it all so seriously — I held it lightly. By acting and working from my purpose — I wanted to solve serious problems but I decided to have a little more fun doing it, I was longing for everything to be a little lighter and more playful. There is so much serious bullshit out there! Why can’t we have a little fun whilst we change the world…
I wanted to be kind and loving. I wanted to be in strong, mutual and trusting relationships. I wanted to help people but I wanted to be free of being taken advantage of. I thought to myself “I am generous but c’mon! Don’t take the piss”. I had to learn a thing or two about boundaries. Then address my guilt about being helped, that it had nothing to do with weakness, it was about the strength and sobriety of assessing situations realistically, not idealistically. Learning that when we ask for help, we’re already strong and afterwards we become even stronger.
In the end I guess that Leadership outsmarted me and then it helped me grow up.
The thing about growing and developing is that you don’t ever lose and let go of anything, you just learn how to integrate all that you know through a different lens.
Regards, until next time.
Is there a role in reformed public services for ‘system navigators’?