Transformation: Just hype?
Posted on August 28, 2013 by Russell Heath, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
Transformation is a word that gets kicked around a lot by coaches. It'd be easy to dismiss it as hype. Bust out of your cocoon: become a butterfly!
Here’s the deal: Transformation is real. In nuts and bolts terms, transformation happens when a person sees (often suddenly) the world in a wholly new way, and that new way opens up an entirely new set of behaviors, feelings, actions that weren’t previously possible.
Let me tell you a story:
Jessi (names have been changed, etc.) was a bright, ambitious woman in her early 30s who wanted to be a motivational speaker. She was stopped—dead in the water—however, because she was timid; she called herself a wallflower. A motivational speaker wouldn’t have much street cred if she couldn’t bust out of her own cocoon.
When we started working together, we distinguished her perception of herself that resulted in her being shy and timid. No surprises here. She didn’t think she was “likable.” With that controlling her self-understanding, Jessi wasn’t going to risk (in her mind—certain) rejection by engaging people she didn’t know.
“When you’re walking towards someone, what do you do?” I asked.
“I wait to see what they do. If they ignore me, I ignore them; if they smile, I smile.”
“What do you think is going on inside their heads as they approach you?”
“I don’t know. I suppose the same thing I’m thinking.”
“You mean…”
“They’re worried I might not smile back, that I might not like them.”
“How do you feel when they ignore you?”
“Not so good—like screw you.”
“And when they smile?”
“Great.”
“Great?”
“It’s like they’ve given me something."
“A gift?"
Silence. Seconds tick by.
“Are you still there, Jessi?”
“Hold on. I’m having an ah-hah moment.”
In her ah-hah moment, Jessi understood that by smiling first she was offering a gift to whomever she was approaching. Suddenly, smiling first was something she was eager to do.
Technically, a coach would say that she had shifted her context—from “I’m unlikable" to “I’m a gift.” In that shift, she transformed her relationship to herself and to others and was now able to do what she couldn’t do an instant before.
At our next session, she said she couldn’t stop smiling at strangers. Which in New York City is odd, if not downright deranged, but it was a joy to her to be a gift.
