Easy Change vs Hard Change:
The Transformative Coaching Approach

For months, I have struggled with the poor quality of my laptop webcam video. It was a new laptop, and the specs said that it was of decent quality, but none of my zoom calls reflected that. I use zoom almost every day – all of my coaching sessions with clients are on zoom these days. After putting up with the low quality video for a bit, I felt the lighting was simply not sufficient, so I bought a fill light, hoping that it would increase the video quality. And it did – a little bit. It was enough to satisfy me for a while before I started noticing how this wasn’t the real deal either. It was better than before, but not the best. I pondered about buying a separate webcam to compensate. I thought, this surely would fix the problem of low video quality. 

And one day, when I was just playing around, I stumbled into a feature called ‘HD’ on Zoom. I turned it on, and it changed everything dramatically. For the first time, I realised that my laptop webcam was inherently capable of high quality streaming even in low light. Neither did I require an external webcam, nor a fill light. It blew my mind. And then I realised, ha! of-course. This is how it works. I just didn’t know it.

I found this story to be a perfect metaphor for what I’ve come to see in my experience with transformative coaching. Whenever we notice something is not ideal, we try and compensate that by changing external circumstances. Just like I bought the fill light or thought of buying another webcam, we go around trying to fix that situation or this person, hoping that it would solve our problem. And it would help a little, until it doesn’t anymore. That’s how we all act, given we see our experience as outside-in. And it makes perfect sense if our experience was really outside-in, but it isn’t. Just like I failed to notice that HD setting that’s already there to be tapped into regardless of anything external, we fail to notice that our experience is coming from the inside-out. 

My coaching has evolved significantly over the last few months, as I started seeing this truth deeper than before. What I found to be most helpful for my clients is to help them look in that direction and tap into that state of mind within us that helps us be not just a little bit better than before, but at our best more of the time. And when we are at our best, we are capable of creating the results we desire – be it a career opportunity or peace of mind. We all have the innate potential for creating extraordinary results from happiness, joy and wellbeing. 

We all have the equivalent of the ‘HD’ setting inside us, and it gets turned on when we understand how it works. Or we can ignore it, and unknowingly do it the hard way – creating mediocre results from stress and burnout, hoping that the results would give us happiness and joy. But the biggest leverage and the easiest progress comes from realising how our mind actually works, and how the human equipment has an inbuilt potential that’s always waiting to be tapped into. That’s the secret to dramatically improving how we do at our life and work without changing anything external – by helping people be at their best, more of the time, by helping them have their ‘HD’ setting on at all times.