What If you don’t need to be given more advice — Just Somewhere to Think?
Why coaching conversations are different.
There are times in dentistry when, from the outside, everything looks as though it should be going well.
- You have the qualifications
- You have patients.
- You may have a busy diary, a successful practice, a good income and years of experience behind you.
Other people might even look at you and think, You’re doing brilliantly.
And yet that might not be how it feels from where you are standing.
- Perhaps you feel stuck.
- Perhaps dentistry feels harder than it used to.
- Perhaps you are working incredibly hard and wondering why the success you have worked for does not feel quite as you imagined it would.
- You might be frustrated with your practice, your career, your team or yourself.
- You may know that something needs to change without being able to work out exactly what.
- And perhaps you have been thinking about it for so long that you are no longer even sure which thoughts to trust.
If any of that sounds familiar, you do not need another person telling you what to do!!!!!!!!
You simply need someone who helps you stop and think differently.
When thinking becomes noise
Have you ever had a problem that seems to become more complicated the longer you think about it?
- You replay the conversation.
- You imagine what might happen.
- You consider one option, then another.
- You decide what you are going to do and then talk yourself out of it.
- By three o’clock in the morning you can have had an entire meeting with people who were not even there.
It is amazing how noisy our own heads can become.
And when the same thoughts have been circulating for weeks, months or even years, it can become difficult to distinguish between what is true, what you fear might be true and what you have simply come to assume is true.
This is one of the reasons that saying something aloud can feel so different.
The moment a thought leaves your head and becomes words, you can hear it.
Sometimes you hear yourself say something and think:
Is that actually true?
Or:
I hadn’t realised I thought that.
Or perhaps:
That doesn’t sound nearly as impossible now I have said it aloud.
There can be something wonderfully clarifying about being given the space to hear your own thinking.
But couldn’t I just talk to a friend?
Of course you can.
Friends, partners, colleagues and family can offer enormous support.
- They know you. They care about you, they want to help.
- And because they care, they also tend to do what human beings naturally do.
- They reassure us.
- They offer suggestions.
- They tell us what they would do.
- They share a similar experience.
- They try to make us feel better.
Sometimes that is exactly what we need and usually it is not, because it does not create a shift.
A coaching conversation is simply a different kind of conversation.
The coach is not trying to find the answer for you.
Coaching conversations are forward facing, proactive, and presuppose change.
Coaching conversations are structured so that the enable you to think clearly, think well and think about solutions. They create an environment so you can you think differently enough to discover what your answer is.
That difference will feel surprisingly liberating.
Coaching as a punctuation mark
I often think of coaching as a punctuation mark in life. A full stop, comma, perhaps a question mark. A deliberate pause between what has happened and what you decide to do next.
That can be surprisingly rare in dentistry, the working day is full of people needing something from you, patients need decisions, your nurse needs an answer, the practice manager needs five minutes. There are laboratory calls, messages, targets, treatment plans, staff problems and the patient who was supposed to need a simple filling but has suddenly become something rather different.
You deal with what is immediately in front of you.
And somewhere in the background is the thought:
I really need to work out what I am going to do about this.
Coaching gives that thought somewhere to go.
For an hour, you do not have to be the person with all the answers.
You get to be the person doing the thinking.
What happens in that space?
Sometimes people come to coaching expecting the coach to tell them what to do.
I can understand why.
Much of professional development is based around expertise.
You attend a course because somebody knows something you do not know.
You seek a consultant because they have specialist knowledge.
You find a mentor because they have experience that might help you.
Coaching can feel rather different.
I may have ideas, I may have experience, I may notice things that you have not noticed, and the conversation is not built around turning you into me.
- It is about helping you understand you.
- What matters to you?
- What do you actually want?
- What are you frightened might happen?
- What are you assuming?
- Which of those assumptions are true?
- What have you stopped believing is possible?
- And what might you think if the thing that has been holding you back was no longer quite so powerful?
Those are very different questions from:
“Have you tried doing this?”
Sometimes the first problem isn’t the real problem
Someone might begin a coaching conversation by saying: “I need to decide whether to leave my practice,”, That sounds like the problem.
And perhaps, as they talk, something else emerges, maybe they do not actually want to leave,
- Perhaps they are exhausted
- Perhaps there is one relationship that has become intolerable
- Perhaps they no longer feel able to say no
- Perhaps they have spent years trying to be the sort of dentist or practice owner they think they should
Perhaps the question is not really: “Should I stay or should I go?”
It might be: “What would need to change for me to enjoy this again?”
That is an entirely different piece of thinking.
Coaching opens up entirely different possibilities. When the client hears themselves speak aloud rather than the internal voice everything changes.
I often say that the most useful solution is rarely simply A or B.
There is usually a C that we have not discovered yet.
A.G.E.N.D.A — a framework for thinking
Although a good coaching conversation can feel natural, it is not simply an unstructured chat.
There is a process underneath it.
One of the coaching frameworks I have developed is A.G.E.N.D.A.
A — Agenda
- What do you want to think about today?
- Not what do I think you should talk about.
- Not what somebody else thinks you need to fix.
- What would be useful for you to give your attention to?
- Sometimes it takes a little while to discover that.
And sometimes one of the most useful questions is simply:
What else?
G — Goal
What would you like to have at the end of this conversation?
Perhaps clarity.
Perhaps a decision.
Perhaps understanding.
Perhaps you simply want your head to feel less full.
Knowing what you want from the thinking helps give the conversation direction.
E — Evaluate
Then we become curious.
What might you be assuming?
This can be where things become particularly interesting.
You might hear yourself saying:
- I can’t say that.
- They’ll leave.
- I’m not good enough.
- I should be able to cope.
- I can’t get this wrong.
- They won’t listen to me.
- I have no choice.
Perhaps those things are true, and perhaps they are not. If they are not true, what is?
Coaching gives you somewhere safe to examine them rather than automatically living by them.
N — New Thinking
Then comes a small question that can sometimes create a surprisingly large shift:
What if that wasn’t true?
Or:
If you knew the opposite were true, what might become possible?
You do not have to force an answer.
You simply get to explore.
And very often this is where a new thought appears.
Something you had not considered because your original assumption had made it invisible.
D — Decide
Once the thinking becomes clearer, you can ask:
What would I like to do now?
Not what should I do.
Not what would somebody else do.
What will you do?
Perhaps there is an immediate action.
Perhaps the first step is very small.
Perhaps you decide not to act yet.
The decision remains yours.
A — Appreciation
And before rushing back into the rest of the day, there is value in noticing what has happened.
What feels clearer?
What have you understood?
What are you pleased to have recognised?
What have you noticed about yourself?
We are often remarkably good at noticing everything we have not yet sorted out.
It can be useful occasionally to notice the progress too.
The quality of the listening changes the quality of the thinking
There is another important part of coaching that can be difficult to describe until you experience it.
It is the quality of the attention.
Being listened to without interruption.
Not being rushed.
Not having somebody mentally preparing their response while you are still talking.
Being allowed to feel whatever you feel without somebody immediately trying to make the feeling disappear.
Being treated as capable of thinking for yourself.
Being challenged without being judged.
Being given permission to explore an idea that may initially sound ridiculous.
In other words:
A space that quietly says, your thinking matters.
And perhaps that is something many of us do not experience very often.
You might not need to work harder
When dentists feel dissatisfied, there can be a temptation to look for the next thing to do.
- Another qualification.
- Another clinical course.
- Another target.
- Another marketing strategy.
- Another associate.
- Another surgery.
- Another day at work.
- More, more more
Sometimes more is exactly what is needed. Sometimes it isn’t.
Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is stop adding things long enough to understand what is already happening.
What do you want your life to look like?
What do you want dentistry to give you?
What matters enough that you are no longer prepared to compromise it?
What does success mean to you, rather than to everybody around you?
These can be uncomfortable questions and they can also be wonderfully freeing.
Because being successful and feeling successful are different things
I meet clinicians whom other people would describe as very successful.
And yet privately they may feel frustrated, anxious, overwhelmed or deeply unfulfilled.
They sometimes wonder what is wrong with them.
After all, they have achieved many of the things they once thought would make them happy.
- The practice.
- The qualifications.
- The private work.
- The income.
- The reputation.
- And yet something is missing.
- Perhaps there is nothing wrong to fix.
- Perhaps there is simply something important that has not yet been understood.
Becoming more you, not more like somebody else
This is one of the things I value most about coaching.
It is not about creating a standardised version of success.
The profession does not want or need every dentist I work with to run the same practice, work the same hours, communicate in the same way or want the same things.
That would rather miss the point.
The profession needs your uniqueness
- Your values matter.
- Your personality matters.
- Your way of thinking matters.
- Your relationships matter.
- Your ambitions matter.
And your version of a fulfilling life may look completely different from somebody else’s.
For me, sustainable success begins when we become curious about those things rather than fighting against them.
I often describe SuCCCess in dentistry as having three Cs:
Clinical skills. Communication skills. Coaching.
Clinical skills allow us to do excellent dentistry.
Communication allows us to create trust and relationships.
Coaching gives us somewhere to understand ourselves and decide how we want to use all of that ability.
A truth-full conversation
There is one phrase that sits at the heart of much of my work:
A problem can only be present in the absence of a truth-full conversation.
Sometimes that truth-full conversation needs to be with a patient.
Sometimes with a colleague, a partner or a member of the team.
And the truth full conversations need to begin with us.
- What am I really feeling?
- What do I really want?
- What have I been pretending is all right when it isn’t?
- What am I assuming?
- What am I frightened of?
- And what might I choose if I genuinely believed I had a choice?
You do not necessarily need somebody to answer those questions for you.
You may simply need somebody who knows how to create the space in which you can hear your own answers.
Perhaps that is the real magic of coaching.
Not somebody telling you how to live your life.
But finally having enough space to think about how you would like to live it.
If you are feeling stuck, overwhelmed or unfulfilled in dentistry, you do not need to arrive at a coaching conversation knowing exactly what the problem is.
Sometimes discovering that is part of the conversation.
And sometimes one truth-full conversation is a very good place to begin.
I help dentists and clinicians who may look successful from the outside but feel overwhelmed, anxious, stuck or unfulfilled on the inside so you can rediscover joy in their work and life, fulfil their potential and create sustainable success as the clinician and person they once imagined becoming; unlike the prevailing dental narrative of working harder, gaining more qualifications, chasing higher targets or following somebody else’s formula for success, I partner with you at a deeper psychological level, creating the space for a truth-full conversation in which you can understand your values, thinking patterns and limiting beliefs, reveal the answers already within you, and build your own path to success through the three Cs of dental SuCCCess: Clinical Skills, Communication Skills and Coaching.
If you would like a thinking space e mail Jane@IODB.co.uk to schedule a call.
