The Dread of Discovery

Anastasia felt like a fraud. She’d landed a position that was five times greater in scope and responsibility than any she’d held before. During our first coaching conversation, she told me, “Everything’s been fine on the job so far, but I’m walking on needles. I can feel it in my gut. I’m worried I’m going to get found out.”

“That you’re a fraud?” I asked.

“That I’m over my head, yes,” she said.

“Is it true? Are you over your head?” I asked.

She started to blurt an answer, then stopped. She thought a second, then said sincerely, “No, I know what I’m doing. But, damn! It sure doesn’t feel that way.”

“Is that part of you familiar?” I asked.

“You mean have I felt like a fraud before? Oh, yes. But never like this. I’m losing sleep over this.”

“When it’s happened before, what happens to that feeling of being a fraud? Does it go away?”

“Thank god, yes. I don’t feel this way all the time. God forbid! Wouldn’t that be awful?”

I asked, “Any reason to think this time would be different?”

“I don’t know. This feels bigger. If I screw this up, it’s going to be pretty public. I’d survive it but it wouldn’t be fun.”

“Lots at stake,” I suggested.

“And I don’t trust myself,” she said.

“Don’t trust yourself? Why?” I asked.

“I worry I’m missing a blind spot – some part of me that I can’t see is going to betray me. I start second-guessing myself. It makes me crazy. Truly. Like the not-sleeping. That’s crazy.”

“It sounds like you’re suffering, Anastasia. I’m sorry,” I said.

She waved her hand and blew out a breath, shaking it off. “Whatever. Like I said, it’ll probably just go away. Whew! That was intense. I feel like I’ve been in therapy.”

Loving Therapy

“You do? How so?” I asked.

“I don’t usually talk about my feelings like that. That’s what you do in therapy, right? Talk about your feelings?”

“Sure. Some. That’s not the only thing you talk about in therapy, but, yes, feelings are certainly a topic of conversation.”

“Have you been in therapy?” she asked.

I smiled. “I’m pretty much always in therapy. I’ve been working with the same therapist more than twenty years. And I was in therapy before I met her. I love therapy.”

She laughed. “Love therapy? How does anyone love therapy?”

“Because of what you said,” I answered. “You talked about being worried there was some blind spot that would betray you? That was how I got raised. You had blind spots, and your blind spots were going to betray you. For certain. I went into therapy to see if I could head off the catastrophe. And it worked! Therapy did that for me. And more. Therapy has made my life lighter.”

“Does therapy help you see into blind spots?” she asked.

I said, “It has for me.”

“How?” she asked seriously. “I would love to see into my blind spots. How does therapy make that happen?”

I thought, then said, “Two things come to mind. First, therapy taught me to look for patterns. We all have patterns in our lives, and a lot of the time, those patterns are our blind spots.  Therapy helps you recognize the patterns in your past and plan for them in your future. If they’re positive, therapy helps you create a fertile field. If they’re negative, therapy helps you gain mastery over them. You get choice and control over your life. That’s one way therapy helps you see into your blind spots.

“Second, my therapist has always been a great reflector. She sees my blind spots and she reflects them back to me in a way that I can see them. She really has been a gift in my life.”

“I am so intrigued,” she said. Then she laughed. “Do you think I need therapy?”

I laughed back. “Who doesn’t?”

“But I’m doing coaching instead,” she said. “Pretty much the same thing, right?”

Hitting Life’s Potholes

“Oh, not to me,” I said. “To me, they feel very different. To me, coaching and therapy have different goals and different methods.”

“Because therapy talks about feelings and coaching focuses on work?” she asked.

I smiled. “Are you suggesting there aren’t feelings in the workplace?”

“No, of course there are, but do you talk about feelings in coaching?”

“I almost always do,” I said. “Feelings are part of work. As a coach, I want to help make your work better. One way to do that might be to help you manage your feelings.”

She shrugged. “Well, you got me talking about my feelings! Okay! Then what is the difference between coaching and therapy? You said there was one.”

“Can I make it a metaphor?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

“Let me start by saying I think coaching and therapy share a belief in common. Coaching and therapy both believe that the behaviors we exhibit as adults are driven in large part by experiences we had when we were young. Coaching and therapy both start with the belief that we all carry wounds from our childhood. And, as adults, those wounds can create problems in our lives.

“But here’s where they differ.

“Suppose you’re driving down the road of life, and you hit a pothole. And you think to yourself, ‘I hit a pothole just like that a while back.’ You recognize the pothole as a pattern. Then you hit another pothole and think, ‘I want to stop hitting these potholes!’

“If you put a therapist in your passenger seat to help you stop hitting the potholes, the next time you approach a pothole, the therapist is going to have you stop the car. Get out of the car. Walk to the pothole. Look down in the pothole. Get down into the pothole. Then the therapist is going to teach you how to repair the pothole from the bottom up. You put down layer after layer and the pothole gets smaller and smaller until one day, the pothole is filled in. The road’s smooth. Healing has happened. And there is a possibility that that pothole may never appear on your road again. That is therapy.

“If you put a coach in your passenger seat, the coach is going to teach you to drive around the pothole.”

She laughed.

I went on. “The pothole is still going to be there. There was no healing. But coaching can help you manage your patterns. That’s the difference.”

Different Goals – Different Methods

“So, the goal for therapy is…?” She invited me to fill in the blank.

“Healing,” I said.

“And the goal for coaching?”

“Improve performance,” I answered.

She said, “Huh! Healing is inward facing. Improved performance is outward facing. Was that intentional?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know. I’d never split it up in my head like that. Therapy is inward facing. Coaching is outward. I like that a lot.”

She said, “You said everyone has wounds. I believe that, too. In that metaphor, are the potholes people’s wounds?”

“In way, yes, sure. Not always consciously. People might recognize a pattern without seeing how far back it goes in their lives.”

She said, “Or they might not even have any concept that wounds are a real thing, let alone that they show up in our adult lives.” She took a breath and said, “You said coaching and therapy have different methods, right? What do different methods look like?”

“Do you remember when I asked if the fraud part was familiar to you?”

She nodded.

I said, “A therapist is going to ask that question and follow it up with lots of ‘why’ questions. ‘Why do you think that feeling happens?’ ‘Why did the feeling change?’ ‘Why didn’t the feeling change?’ ‘Why is that pattern in your life at all?’ Whatever answers come to you, you’ll talk about them. Therapy’s method, like you just said, is inward facing. Lots of ‘why’ questions.

“When a coach asks about the fraud part of you being familiar, the coach is going to follow it up with ‘what’ questions and ‘how’ questions. ‘What was the best part of that?’ and ‘How could you do things differently?’ Outward facing. We don’t explore ‘why.’”

“Because you’re going for performance, not healing.”

I nodded. “So the methods are different.”

“Plus, you’re not trained to be a healer,” she said.

Coaches Are Not Healers

“How true! I think about that a lot. Just because I’ve been in therapy twenty years doesn’t mean I know how to be a therapist. Heck, I’ve been taking some medications for twenty years. That doesn’t make me a pharmacist.”

She laughed.

I continued. “Our profession hammers into us that we are not healers. And having watched what my therapist does with me, I know there’s no way I could do that for anyone else. That is not my gift.”

“But seriously, why not?” she asked.

“It’s a different discipline. Plus, we don’t have time.”

She shrugged, “Our contract is six months, with an option for another six.”

I said, “Healing takes longer than six months. If I even knew how to do it, which I don’t.”

“But you can still help me feel like less of a fraud?” she asked.

“I think so, yes,” I said. “It’s the idea of the pothole. At the moment, your pothole is feeling like a fraud. I’m going to help you drive around it.”

Anastasia’s coaching gave her tools for managing her feelings of being a fraud. She could feel herself driving around her pothole. But she longed for healing. When we last spoke, she had begun working with a therapist. She was enjoying the process. She could see the combination of coaching and therapy was easing her path to The Look & Sound of Leadership.