I’ve just read through The Advice Trap – a new book which was very kindly given to me as a leaving present, and very much a thoughtful gift to help me continue my learning in the coaching domain.
So, as part of that learning process, my key takeaways are:
- When we assume one of the three roles in the Karpman Drama triangle (victim – persecutor – saviour), there are actually some superficial and short-term benefits to these ‘bad habits’, hence we why we keep doing it.
- Therefore we need to build new habits.
- There’s Easy Change: tinkering with our current self
- Hard Change: creating a new future you, to which you need to work towards.
- With this in mind, the focus of this book is on advice: that is, how you can be a better person / coach by giving less advice.
- Advice is an anti-pattern, which is bad for the advisor, coachee, teams, systems, because typically the advice given is not the solution to the real problem (thus ineffective and should be avoided if possible). So …
- To start creating that new future you, we start by reflecting on what’s holding us back: what is triggering us in a work environment that prompts us to slip into one of the three roles in the drama triangle.
- To override the short-term benefits from slipping into these roles, we need to create a new feedback loop that has positive reward – to make sure the new habit sticks. We reflect on what the drawbacks of the bad habits are, and then consider some of the ‘prizes’ of not doing these bad habits. I reflected that ‘it’s about the team and the upside comes much later on through improved team work, resilience and harmony’. I was able to link this to my own goal of ‘being the best coach I can be’.
- We then look at some of the core elements of coaching and then how we can link a new habit of ‘less advice’ to ‘better coaching’.
- Here are three principles of coaching to bear in mind:
- be curious
- be lazy
- be often
- Here is a structure for a coaching conversation based on ‘what’ questions:
- what’s on your mind?
- what else (and what else)?
- what’s the real challenge here?
- if you do that, what won’t you do?
- what do you want from me?
- what did you find valuable?
- Within a typical coaching conversation, there are more anti-patterns which becloud the situation (aka foggifiers)
- twirling (identifiying something tooearly)
- popcorning (one thing after the next)
- coaching a ghost (talking about someone else)
- settling (the conversation too soon)
- big picturing (anything but the issue)
- yarning (long tales)
- Clearly, any advice given to a coachee during one of these foggy moments would be useless.
- As a response a coach can counter these by essentially staying curious and with some key ‘what’ questions to either guide or focus the conversation back to the real challenge.
- Again, the curiousity needs to have a positive feedback loop to stick.
- There may, however, be fears holding one back to staying curious – again linked to the Karpman triangle and it’s worth reflecting what they could be for you.
- The final step is to create some tests to validate you’re on the right track (with a positive feedback loop) towards your future you. I’ve now put a couple of these tests on my own backlog.
I enjoyed the journey that the book took me through and the eagerness to encourage active learning and participation throughout.