I call myself a coach because people know what that means. It is a useful word. It gets you into the room without a fifteen minute explanation. But it does not really describe what I do, and the longer I do it the less accurate it gets.
Here is the actual pattern, and I have seen it now in law, in finance, in sport, in a few people whose faces you would recognise, and in a reasonable number of people who just run something that a lot of other people depend on.
They have everybody. That is the thing. They are not isolated in the way we normally mean it. There is a partner, usually. Friends, often very good ones. A board. A team. Colleagues they have known for twenty years. On paper the support is comprehensive.
And there is nowhere to put anything down.
Why having people is not the same as having somewhere
Think about who you would actually tell.
You cannot tell your team, because they are relying on you to be certain, and your uncertainty becomes their uncertainty by about eleven the next morning.
You cannot tell the board, obviously, for reasons I do not need to spell out.
You could tell your partner. Except your partner has to live with the consequences of whatever you say, which means they cannot be neutral about it, and they should not have to be. There is a particular kind of loneliness in loving somebody enough not to hand them something.
You could tell your friends, and some people do, but there is a version of a very senior person who has quietly become the one everybody else brings things to, and who therefore has no practice at going the other way, and who would not really know how to start.
So the thing does not get put down. It gets carried. And what I notice is that people are usually not carrying anything enormous. It is very rarely a crisis. It is the accumulation. It is nine or ten unresolved things, none of which is individually serious, all of which have been in the bag for a while, and the bag has been on the same shoulder since about 2011.
What actually happens in the room
I want to describe this properly, because the word coaching brings up a picture that is not quite right. People imagine goals, and frameworks, and me asking what success looks like in twelve months.
Sometimes it is that. Genuinely. Sometimes somebody has a decision to make and we work it through and it is quite practical.
Often it is not.
Often what somebody needs is a person they can say the thing to. The thing they should not say. The thing that would be misinterpreted, or would frighten someone, or would end up in a WhatsApp group. And what they need from me in that moment is not advice. It is that I am not alarmed by it, I am not judging it, I am not managing them, and I do not need anything from them.
That last one matters more than people expect. Almost everyone in a senior person's life needs something from them. A decision, a reference, a job, reassurance, attention, money. I am the only person in some of my clients' lives who wants nothing, and that turns out to be the thing that makes the conversation possible.
Sometimes we are unpicking a pattern. Sometimes I am challenging how somebody is thinking about something, quite directly, because they have been circling it for a month and nobody around them is in a position to say so. And sometimes, honestly, somebody just needs to put their actual life on the table for an hour, in front of somebody who has seen a lot and does not flinch.
I think that matters far more to how well a person performs than we generally admit. We talk endlessly about resilience as though it were a personal quality, a thing you have or lack. Most of the resilience I have seen is structural. It is about whether there is anywhere for the pressure to go.
Is this therapy? No.
I get asked this a lot and I want to be clear, because being unclear about it would be a bit dishonest.
I am a Registered Mental Health Nurse. I have worked in mental health since 2001, in community teams, in crisis, in psychiatric liaison, in PICU and in forensic settings. So the clinical knowledge is there and it does not switch off. If somebody in front of me is unwell, I know, and I will say so, and we will do something about it.
But most of the people I sit with are not unwell. That is the important bit. They are functioning extremely well, by every external measure, and they are tired in a way that does not have a diagnosis attached and does not need one.
Therapy is for treating something. This is not that. It is closer to what people used to have, before we professionalised every part of being a person. A confidante. Somebody outside the structure who knows the whole picture and is not in it.
The bit people find hardest
Asking.
Almost everyone I work with waited too long, and almost everyone says a version of the same thing at some point, which is that they did not think it was bad enough to warrant it. As though there is a threshold, and until you cross it you are just being self-indulgent.
I understand where that comes from. If you are the person everybody else brings things to, then bringing something yourself feels like a category error. It feels like breaking the arrangement.
But the arrangement is not sustainable, and I would say that most of what I do is not crisis work at all. It is the ordinary maintenance of somebody who is carrying a lot, done regularly, so that it does not become crisis work later.
Anyways. If you have read this and recognised the bit about having everybody and nowhere, that recognition is the useful part, whatever you decide to do about it.
Who do you actually tell? And when did you last tell them anything?
Until next time, Stacy