Hey, this is Mark Butler and you are listening to a podcast for coaches.
I.
This week I've had two different experiences where clients have struggled
to trust their own assessment of situations and behaviors and feelings
because they were looking first through a pathological diagnostic lens.
and what I mean by that is that they had studied these definitions.
they had types for themselves, they had labels for themselves.
And so their primary question wasn't what can I learn from my thoughts and feelings
and behaviors in this specific set of circumstances, but something closer to.
Well, is this an example of the pathology or of the label that I've applied
to myself or that someone else has applied to me and am I consistent or
am I not consistent in my way of being?
So it was a way of disconnecting from their experience and trying to make
sense of themselves through the label rather than through their lived reality.
It's this way of.
Essentially othering themselves through the potential diagnosis or the type
that they've assigned themselves, and it creates distance from their own
experiences instead of leaning into those experiences and learning from them.
What struck me most was how they were.
Externalizing their own authority through these labels.
So instead of asking what feels true to me, what aligns with
my experience, my values, I.
My desires, they were asking, am I fitting my definition?
So I have this definition of myself?
Am I fitting the definition?
And it seemed to be true that their desire to fit their definition was part of an
attempt to feel internally consistent.
The label had become more the authority and they felt compelled
to consult that authority before trusting their own experience.
I totally understand the comfort of labels I have experienced the comfort of labels.
If a person who has struggled to make sense of themselves and their
behavior, and then they find that a practitioner or a book, or a podcast
or a YouTube video has given a name to a way of being that they believe maps
pretty well onto their own experience, it can feel incredibly validating.
I experienced this a few years back when I did start to learn things
about A DHD and I observed that there was probably a an A DHD thread
that ran through my way of being.
And I had a couple of different coaches who helped me feel like I wasn't crazy
and that I wasn't alone, and that there was hope for me in situations where I
had felt like there wasn't that much hope, that I was sort of stuck in a way
of being that was essentially doomed.
So I understand the allure.
And the benefit, the real benefit, of looking to these categories,
looking to these labels as a way of self-validating and saying, okay,
I'm not alone and I'm not crazy.
And as coaches, having these labels ready and having these what are essentially
diagnoses reduces the uncertainty that we might feel in our coaching interactions.
If a client is coming to us with a whole.
Sort of mess of thoughts, feelings and behaviors, ways of being.
And if we feel that we have to guide them in what to do,
it's very comforting to say, first, let's categorize you first.
Let's label and validate you, and then let's work through
the lens of that category or through the lens of that label.
These things have a name, they're called heuristics.
Humans love heuristics because they reduce uncertainty.
They make it easier for us to shortcut, to insight, and to action, and they
can be very helpful and very powerful,
especially because as coaches we put so much pressure on ourselves to be
helpful to help our clients get results.
And if we want to get our clients to some different place, and especially
if we wanna do it as quickly as possible because we're trying to
prove our value or prove our benefit in some way, then having a heuristic,
having a label, having a category, and running the whole coaching experience.
Through that category can be extremely comforting.
And I wanna be clear.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing necessarily.
I think there can be incredible benefit in this approach unless the label and
the category become the whole person.
yeah, it's fine to have hobbies, but.
People who make their hobbies, their whole personality are kind of annoying people.
They're kind of odd.
They're kind of weird.
you are multifaceted, you are complex, you're nuanced.
When you take one thing, especially a diagnosis or a label, and you
make it your entire personality, you reduce yourself too much.
And if we, as coaches attempt to do that with our clients,
we've reduced them too much so.
My concern is that our eagerness to label our enthusiasm about categorization.
Might serve us as the coach more than it serves the client, because it might
make us as the coach, feel like we're imparting knowledge and we're being very
supportive and we're cutting through a lot of noise, and we're helping
our client move more intentionally and more quickly to a new place.
But I'm afraid it sometimes can serve the coach more than it serves the client,
because the client isn't as simple as our category seeks to make them.
Instead, what I want to do is I want to always emphasize the client's agency.
I wanna look at the client's experience through the lens of their thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors, because that gives them, a more open space in
which to consider cause and effect, where they look at thoughts and
feelings and actions as causes In case it's not clear, I don't hyperfocus
on the pure causality of thoughts.
I believe that actions have causal effects feelings, have causal effects
and thoughts have causal effects.
All of these have causal effects.
The reason I like to focus on them is that I perceive more agency for the client
in emphasizing their thoughts and their feelings and their actions than I do in
emphasizing their type or their category.
If I'm emphasizing thoughts and feelings and behaviors, I think
I'm sending the client the message.
You can change any of these and all of these in order to
have a different experience.
If we lean too much into a category, there's risk and it's not guaranteed,
but there's risk that the client looks primarily at the label and
says, I am X, therefore I am.
doomed or determined to do and to be why there's a risk in a category view
or a diagnostic view, or a label based view of a client that they slip into.
What I would call, that's just the way I am thinking The label becomes.
Both an explanation but also an excuse.
It absolves them of responsibility.
I've had client interactions where you can't get through five minutes
of coaching without them referencing the diagnosis, referencing the label.
Well, that's just my this and it's because I'm that, and it's a way of
completely disconnecting themselves from.
Their own ability to go a different direction.
And I think there's another risk here.
The risk is conformity to the label itself.
The more a person identifies with being X, the more compelled they
feel to reference the definition when they're deciding what to do.
So if they, in their study, of their own category, in their study,
of their label, have learned that people who are X typically do y.
They might find themselves doing why?
Just as a way of maintaining internal consistency, whether or not it's actually
what their true instinct or their wisdom or their intuition, or whatever you
want to call it, steers them toward.
If the label and the category have given them relief, then they might fear
losing that relief if they act against their understanding of the label.
You may have heard the saying that the map is not the territory.
That is what we're talking about here.
Diagnoses.
Categories, types, and labels are maps.
They're not the territory.
They may help the individual understand themselves sometimes in very important
ways, but they're not the individual.
and if the individual gets it flipped and they start to view themselves
not as territory, but as map, and if we as coaches are part of that.
I think we're off track and I think we need to correct ourselves.
There is balance to be struck here.
I'm not suggesting that we abandon frameworks entirely.
Now, as coaches, we are legally prohibited and rightly so, from
making diagnoses that are like anxiety disorders or depression or things that
are left to clinical professionals, licensed clinical professionals.
so of course we leave those diagnoses to the clinical professionals.
But I'm in favor of some amount of categorization and exploration
within categories in coaching.
I love a good personality test.
I've taken, I don't know, a dozen personality tests.
I find them very entertaining.
I.
I do gain insight into myself through those personality tests.
I do like to be able to reference certain ways of being and saying, oh, that's that
part of a personality sneaking in here.
How interesting.
But I do it as a secondary thing, not as a primary thing.
If we approach these categories, these types, these labels and diagnoses
as a primary thing, I think we're guilty of a pathological approach as
opposed to a developmental approach.
And what I mean by a pathological approach is it's viewing a person
primarily as their diagnoses.
And viewing them as something to be fixed within the context of their diagnoses,
as opposed to viewing a person as an individual with incredible capacity
and looking at them developmentally and saying, what can you learn?
How can you apply the thing you learn and how do you become something
different through that applied learning?
I think we as coaches are at our best in a developmental view of
ourselves and our fellow human beings as opposed to a pathological view.
So what do we do?
Let's educate ourselves about types and labels and diagnoses.
I think there's benefit in studying these things.
I have friends and peers and colleagues who create programs who do coaching
within the specific context of some of these labels and diagnoses.
And I wanna say clearly, I think they give incredible value.
They help people self discover.
Self accept and self-direct in very positive ways.
These programs would go awry if they didn't also encourage people to see
themselves as separate from their label.
You are not your label.
You are an individual and there's a lot to you, and even programs that help you
develop specific parts of yourself within specific contexts need to treat you as
an individual and to constantly remind you that you're an individual and that
you have strength and capacity outside of any particular label, type, or diagnosis.
We keep them as a secondary focus or even a tertiary focus.
We keep them on the shelf and we take them off the shelf for a minute
when it benefits the situation and it benefits the client.
That's my opinion.
But we never give our clients the impression that they are the
label that we've applied to them.
we never in our own heads and hearts and in conversation with our clients,
define them as the type or the label.
Never.
We never.
Ask our clients to view themselves primarily through that lens.
We have our clients view themselves as a nuanced, complex individual
who has a lot in common with other nuanced, complex individuals.
And to the degree that it's helpful to reference the collective
experience within those types.
We do.
We reference it, we learn from it, and maybe it helps us direct
ourselves, but we keep it apart from the individual because we don't want
the individual to ever feel like they need to conform or correct within
these made up transient definitions.
And with that, I'll talk to you next time.