In my experience, one of the factors that dictates the level of impact and ease involved in an executive coaching engagement is whether the client enters the coaching container only as a Leader, or as a Human Being who also happens to be a Leader.
Most of the people I work with are senior executives in global organizations. Many spend their days maintaining an engineered persona for their stakeholders. This created identity can be a useful survival mechanism, designed to focus on work and compartmentalize the rest of their existence.
When they enter the coaching container, my first invitation is for them to drop this armor. My own work here involves showing up in a way that invites them to also show up simply as a human being.
Many leaders can do this immediately. But some, especially those whose sense of safety is enmeshed with their corporate function, cannot. They show up as the role.
When this happens, there is limited transformation possible inside a created identity. The persona comes with its own preset ceiling, beliefs, and values. If we only coach the persona, we are just optimizing the armor.
When faced with this resistance, fighting the persona only validates its necessity. Instead, the invitation I offer is to understand the function of this persona. We make the armor itself the object of our inquiry, and champion what is possible for them beyond this. We observe the usefulness and the effort required for them to maintain this construct, especially in a room where it is completely unnecessary. When they eventually release it, they are instantly rewarded with a sense of relief and feeling at home in themselves.
The impact can be made more sustainable by focusing the work further upstream – in letting this role-identity dissolve, and recreating it in a way that aligns with who they actually are beneath the title. This is akin to dissolving a piece of ice into water, and allowing the water to refreeze into a different shape, rather than taking a limited frozen ice cube and recycling it into a different shape using force.
Paradoxically, this deeper transformation is infinitely more effortless. Because the effort required is in maintaining the created identity. The persona is the effort.
When a leader finally drops the role and shows up simply as a human being in our coaching, they stop fixating on a single compartmentalized aspect of their life and reconnect with their full capacity.
Even if the ultimate goal is purely tactical and involves enhancing one specific area of their work, like communication or executive presence, accessing the whole of themselves is a more sustainable way to achieve it, as this uses inspired action, without an underlying sense of sacrificing themselves in the process.
This makes the coaching process enjoyable for them, and the tactical results feel natural and happen with ease, because we have gone beyond the identity that creates the effort. By coaching beyond the persona and addressing who they are beneath the limited identity construct of their roles and the corresponding values & beliefs, the specific behavioral shifts they need to exhibit in the organization no longer require force. They become a natural expression of alignment.
