The six little ones who taught me coaching!

I was on my journey to pursue mastery in coaching. My mentor coaches insisted that I stop being cognitive and enjoy the whole process as it unfolds and somewhere I was struggling....

Around the same time our Labrador - Angel delivered six breathtakingly beautiful pups. We were overjoyed but also overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility- we knew that we would be giving them for adoption to the right families but for 45 days they were our responsibility- a time when they are most susceptible to all kind of infections !!! So we went on an overdrive mode - we went out and bought 6 trays and created beds for them with soft bedsheets and all!  For the uninitiated about puppy world - the pups when are born have eyes closed and can only crawl for first 10-12 days! The real fun then started! My daughter, mother-in-law, wife and I started a round-the-clock vigil - as soon as any puppy wailed, we would quickly check if  it has wetted the bed or else put the puppy for feeding with mother. Angel - their mother - being a pampered girl was pretty relaxed as she saw us efficiently working like well-trained assembly-line line workers with her puppies! End of three days and we were looking like zombies! “There must be a better way” I muttered to which my wife replied  “babies are like this and we have six of them and you can’t even run to your corporate life now as you’ve none!” - we both laughed and then she said,”you are right - let’s talk to people who have gone through this earlier” - so we made couple of quick calls to our friends who had experience of puppy-sitting- as soon as they heard what we were doing they were in splits .... ‘Are you folks crazy?’ Being used to this question in general in life, we did not mind the comment! They further said “just put a safety boundary so that the puppies don’t crawl all over the house and possibly get trampled - other than that just leave them with their mother and let her figure it out with her pups!”. Not convinced... but out of sheer exhaustion we agreed and AHA! the constant wailing stopped - as soon as they wanted to feed, they would crawl to their mother and feed themselves! As soon as their mother thought they had enough, she would get up and walked away! The whole thing looked sorted out!! We actually for the first time started enjoying the whole stuff!

.....And it’s then that the penny dropped for me! Just by creating a safe zone and treating them like perfectly capable beings, the first-time mother and her little pups who hadn’t even opened their eyes figured it all out! Less pain for them (the amazing and constant wailing stopped!) and much lesser to do for us!! .... the problem is that we were looking at it from our perspective and trying to help which in the first place was not required!! Just create a safe boundary and watch them figure it out - it’s actually fulfilling!!

So the six little ones had a lesson for me - when you coach someone- you are dealing with someone who is perfectly capable of figuring his/her way out, the moment you try to “help” - you as a coach are looking at things from your perspective which is irrelevant from the point of view of coaching!! You actually can create more confusion... just be there holding the mirror as a coach and then observe your client waltzing like a star!!!