Honesty and Authenticity
In a conversation yesterday, a friend asked me if I knew the difference between honesty and authenticity. I had to mull it over for a while, but all my experiences with life coaching provided me an answer.
Honesty is really about being true to yourself and with yourself and from there extending that to other people. Honesty involves being responsible for how you feel, what you want, and how you act, but also the consequences of all of those. Honesty is learning to face who you are and accept that person and then grow.
Authenticity is how you present that honesty to the world. Being authentic does mean being in touch with yourself, but it also means living that truth in your thoughts, actions and words, hopefully in a way that honors both yourself and others. When you authentic you are re-presenting the honesty you have with yourself to others.
The difference is fine. A person can be honest, but not authentic. For example you know you hate your job, but instead of looking at all the options you stay at that job anyway. That’s honest, but inauthentic, because you are denying that honesty…and ignoring it’s effects on you and others around you.
Taylor Ellwood
Resources are a choice as well
If life coaching is about helping a person recognize that s/he has resources available to hir that weren’t recognized before, I also think that sometimes it’s about recognizing what you are really attached to, resources as it were that others have shown you that aren’t always as useful because they represent the “shoulds”…what other people feel you should be as opposed to who you really want to show up as.
What I’m getting at is that a life coaching relationship involves not just helping a client realize what s/he wants, but also helping a client recognize what s/he does not want in hir life. I use help, because it’s not for the life coach to tell the client what doesn’t work…The client has to figure out what resources aren’t useful, or what patterns of behavior hinder the realization of a success. The coach asks questions, helps the client realize well-formed outcomes and effects that changes will have on the client and other people, but the client, in the end, has to choose to act. The coach can help the client realize steps, even set up an acocuntability structure, but the client has to make the ultimate choice and follow through on what s/he wants to do, but also recognize what s/he does not need to accomplish those goals.
When I show a client a process, and we do the steps in the process, what is really happening is that the client is using the process to identify both the useful and not useful resources and then making a choice about what to do with those resources. Once the client knows what resources to use, then the client can make effective changes.
It’s an important distinction to remember. I’m not ust helping the client access resources, but also providing the client an opportunity to choose the resources that will help hir manifest hir imagination into reality.
Learning openness as a life coach
While I can be fairly open in some ways, I can also be fairly secretive. I’m already working on undoing some of those communication patterns in my personal life, but while at life coaching training one dilemma I faced was the fact that some of my cohort will be life coaching me! This is just a bit intimidating for me, because it necessarily involves me opening up to people I don’t know that well, to some degree.
However, I think it’s a good challenge, because while I won’t necessarily be developing relationships with my clients, beyond the professional relationship, I still need to be open enough with them that they feel they can talk with me. So I’m treating this as an excellent opportunity to help myself mindfully continue working on how open I can be.
And this very weekend I did get some opportunities to practice. In three situations I was coached to some degree or another and I had to consider what it was I was going to talk about that could help my cohort gain skills, while also helping me experience what it could be like to be a client. I did pick situations that weren’t too high on my scale of what I could work on, but they were still situations that I could use some help on.
It was a little hard to open up, but I did get comfortable and I realized it was good to talk with some people and get some feedback on those situations. I definitely had a different perspective on each situation I was coached about by the end of each session, which speaks to the effectiveness of what I’m learning.
