Ever wondered why withholding secrets may often feel like an overbearing load on your shoulders? Your host, Sean, a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, unveils the intricate dynamics of truths kept hidden in a client-coach setting. Drawing from a rich fountain of experience, he shares a unique strategy he employs - the "withholding game" - to aid clients in unburdening themselves, detailing the essential role of trust, honesty, and openness in a coach-client relationship. Delving deeper, we unearth the roots of guilt and shame that often fuel the urge to hide truths, impacting not just client growth but also the overall essence of their lives.
Yet, the dialogue doesn't halt there; we broaden the horizon to encompass the scope of withholding and deceit in the spheres of personal and professional relationships. Here, we scrutinize the potential corrosion of trust, the fear that sparks dishonesty, and the enduring impacts of these actions. You'll learn that honesty is not just a golden rule; it's a crucial ingredient for a fulfilling life. So, buckle up and join us on this enlightening journey, as we navigate these captivating topics and equip ourselves to lead more genuine, satisfying lives.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Ever wondered why withholding secrets may often feel like an overbearing load on your shoulders? Your host, Sean, a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, unveils the intricate dynamics of truths kept hidden in a client-coach setting. Drawing from a rich fountain of experience, he shares a unique strategy he employs - the "withholding game" - to aid clients in unburdening themselves, detailing the essential role of trust, honesty, and openness in a coach-client relationship. Delving deeper, we unearth the roots of guilt and shame that often fuel the urge to hide truths, impacting not just client growth but also the overall essence of their lives.
Yet, the dialogue doesn't halt there; we broaden the horizon to encompass the scope of withholding and deceit in the spheres of personal and professional relationships. Here, we scrutinize the potential corrosion of trust, the fear that sparks dishonesty, and the enduring impacts of these actions. You'll learn that honesty is not just a golden rule; it's a crucial ingredient for a fulfilling life. So, buckle up and join us on this enlightening journey, as we navigate these captivating topics and equip ourselves to lead more genuine, satisfying lives.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Welcome to the Reload, where we help unconventional leaders craft the life they truly want by questioning the assumptions they have about how life works. My name is Sean and I'll be your host on this journey. As a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, I help high performing executives kick ass in their careers while connecting with deeply powerful insights that fuel their lives. Well, hello there. Today, I want to talk to you about keeping secrets from your coach. Whoa, what a fun way to use the Voice Disguise app on my mixer. But yeah, today I do want to talk to you about keeping secrets from your coach, or your therapist, or your shaman, or your healer, or whatever person you have hired to help you, because you're not alone. You are most certainly not alone.
Speaker 1:My first coach, to whom I will forever be grateful, has what he calls the withholding game. After he's worked with someone for a few months, you know he's gotten their trust and they have a good rapport and etc. Etc. Well, he will ask them what is one thing that you've been holding back that you want me to know? And often times, the answers are things that I don't know. They're proud of Things that they just haven't mentioned yet, and so it gives the client an opportunity to talk about themselves in a positive way. You know what is the work that they have been doing in between sessions that communicates or that demonstrates the work that they're putting in. And on top of that there are times when somebody has been holding on to something that's pretty sensitive for them and they've finally gotten to a place of either inner resolve or strength that has them ready to communicate and they're looking forward to digging into this thing, whatever it is. And then he asks them what is one thing that you've been holding back that you don't want me to know?
Speaker 1:Now, this question, obviously, is more charged and not every coach out there is going to do quote unquote deep coaching. Many coaches good ones, who are very good at what they do will stay with more superficial topics that there is this kind of I don't know overt communication, that they're not there to go into deeper territory with you. They want to focus on things that are more transactional. They want to focus on more sort of black and white, open and shut, material things that are more tactician based, action based. How do we make you more efficient? How do we help you better understand and communicate the essence of a project to someone else? How do you think more strategically? How do you have more forward planning in your leadership behavior? So not every coach is going to go deep and it just because a coach does not go deep doesn't make them a bad coach. It's just something that you want to be clear of when you get into an engagement with someone. Do you want to go deep or don't you? If you don't want to, that's totally fine. But this question what are you holding back that you don't want me to know?
Speaker 1:In some cases, by calling it out like that, he will actually invite them to talk about the thing that they've been keeping secret. Sometimes, when we put our finger on something very directly, it causes us to say you got me, I didn't want to talk about this. As in, I didn't have a warm fuzzy feeling about talking about this, but I know that it's going to be for my benefit, so let's get into this, let's talk about it. And alternatively, there are times because I stole that withholding game from him and shamelessly use it with my clients, but there are times when clients will say I'm still not ready to talk about it, and so in that function it serves a different purpose. It helps the client see where they still have fences around something or walls around something, where is something still in a box, and it causes them to begin to ask themselves if, if not the coach as well. And when a client doesn't want to talk about something, a coach can still actually help them by asking questions about the thing, even when they don't know. When the coach does not know what the thing is, it is still possible to ask powerful questions. Why is this thing off limits to talk about? What about it is so damning or so scary that we can't talk about it.
Speaker 1:In some cases, maybe there isn't sufficient rapport between client and coach, in which case it provides a great opportunity to close up that gap. You know, what's funny is oftentimes, when people hire you hire me, I guess I should say when they hire a coach, even though they are hiring that person to help them, there is still a tremendous amount of mistrust. Now, you might think that that makes no sense whatsoever. Why would somebody hire a person and then not trust them? Aha, well, I guess, hopefully in rare instances hopefully in rare instances the coach or the therapist has done something that would merit that distrust, in which case why haven't they been fired, I don't know, but more often it's because the client is operating foundationally from a place of mistrust or distrust and they quite frequently, when they're in that headspace, don't trust their own judgment, and oftentimes this is the result of many years of abuse being gaslit Right. So they lack a certain confidence and they lack a certain intuitive trust in their own ability to trust and to discern when a relationship is healthy and helpful, even when it might be tough. So, even when the coach doesn't know what the subject matter of the secret is, the coach can still ask questions to help the client better understand what's going on inside of them. What's holding them back? Why are they connected to fear?
Speaker 1:But ultimately, mm-hmm, when you keep secrets from your coach or your therapist or your whomever, it comes with certain costs. Now, clearly, it is your choice if you want to pay those costs, and often the causes of keeping the secret tend to be rooted in either shame or guilt. The client is so so much so, so much so that he's not going to be able to make the client feel ashamed or feel so guilty about what they have done or, in the case of shame, more often what has been done to them that they're unwilling to bring this out into the light of day, metaphorical day. But the cost of that? The cost first and foremost, is that the coach cannot help really truly deeply. Yeah, the coach can sort of nip around the edges, around the periphery, but they're not going to be able to help you really truly tackle whatever the dynamic happens to be.
Speaker 1:And potentially worse is that by withholding whatever the deeper subject matter is or, in some cases, outright lying, I have had clients I know this will be shocking actually lie to me. They often forget that I take copious notes, meticulous notes. So if you are one of my clients listening to this episode, be warned. I take copious, meticulous notes and have a wonderful search function and people have lied and it wasn't until weeks or months later that it came out. And then, of course, we get to, as coach and client, have a little bit of a come to Jesus moment where we clarify what is this relationship going to be like, because oftentimes, when there's secret keeping, when there's lying, misinformation, disinformation, things like that, that is also something that's happening elsewhere in the client's life and this is probably I don't know, probably a topic for another episode.
Speaker 1:But oftentimes clients do the same head trash thing with the coach that they do with other people in their life. The coach is not exempt from whatever the client's behavior is You'd like to think. It would be like to think that this is some carved out safe space where the client shows up totally raw and vulnerable and open to get all the help that they could possibly get, which is typically what coaches are willing to offer all the help that the client can benefit from. But quite frequently clients do the same shit with their coach that they do with everybody else. So when you keep a secret from your coach, or if you outright lie and misrepresent what's happening inside of you or what's happening in your life, then you really fuck things up because you derail the engagement to a really significant degree, because now, all of a sudden, the coach is thinking one thing, but that thing is completely different from what's actually happening and the coach, if they're any good at all, is probably spending a lot of time thinking about where you are headed in your life and what are the deeper developmental areas that would benefit from you, that would cause your life to be more fulfilling, fuller, freer, et cetera, et cetera better relationships, better contribution in this world, better reward and remuneration in this world. And so when clients lie, oh boy, that sets things off on a level that can sometimes be very difficult to recover.
Speaker 1:So why am I raising this at this particular juncture? Because this has happened for years and I guess I thought about it and…. You know, recently I had another instance where a pretty critical detail had been withheld from me. There was infidelity in the marriage of one of my clients and this client chose not to say anything about it, even though the moment of infidelity coincided with the decision to hire me. So I guess you know we have that going for us at least. But then by not mentioning anything about the infidelity, it put me in a pretty blind spot. And again, to be totally clear, the client doesn't have to divulge anything if they don't want to, but it will very directly hurt the results that they're trying to get, the improvements that they're trying to make, and it also hurts the coach in the coach's ability to help the client understand how to navigate things that are pretty turbulent. And the way that I found out about this infidelity in the marriage of the client was that the client, something happened that caused the client to just confess out of the blue. Needless to say, the spouse did not take it well, which then increased kind of the chaos and the intensity of the moment.
Speaker 1:And I can't help but think, gosh, if I had known we could have one, had more conversations around why that choice was made in the first place, why the choice to be unfaithful to the marriage vows and there is a whole lot in that particular bucket and there usually is. Most people don't just casually cheat on their spouses and again, I haven't mentioned this in a while. But if you're in an open relationship or a polyamorous relationship and everyone knows what the score is great, awesome, good for you. It's just that most, at least to most Americans and from what I understand culturally, most people on the planet are not in open relationships. They are in committed monogamous relationships, or at least that's what the agreement is, and then they go outside of that. So they're outside of their stated agreement and they're misaligned with themselves and what they committed to. So anyway, usually if people are going to go outside of their stated commitment, typically there's something deep inside of them that doesn't feel right, and the same is true for this particular client. There are a lot of things that were misaligned.
Speaker 1:There was a lot of pressure, and I'm not trying to excuse the behavior. No, no, no, no, no. The client is definitely responsible for their choice. Choice is. But what I am saying is that we can have a deeper exploration of what created that pressure in the first place, to try to A alleviate the pressure, b keep it from coming back so that you can actually behave in a more aligned way. And then, on top of it, just from a pure tactics perspective, there are ways of broaching infidelity that are either more or less inflammatory, and if you just drop something on your partner, that's gonna most likely lead to a pretty big explosion or conflagration. So this ability to navigate with a little bit more grace can come in only when the coach has a real understanding of what's happening.
Speaker 1:But again, I wanna be clear that this is not an episode trying to point my finger at clients and tell them how fucked up they are because they don't tell me the details, that of which they're either ashamed or feel guilty, or both. It is simply an attempt to communicate and to warn you, if you are working with a coach or you're working with a therapist, or if you're thinking about hiring me, for that matter, that when you choose to withhold or if you go one step further and choose to misrepresent what's happening, then you are directly hurting the results that you say you want to achieve, because whatever professional that you have hired or are thinking about hiring has to know what's going on in order for them to really be able to give you top level help that is accurate and fit for purpose. That does it for today's public safety or not safety. Public service announcement. Excuse me, obviously, if you are enjoying the show, I would love it If you would like follow, subscribe and share it with people.
Speaker 1:May not be this episode who knows? This may have been too inflammatory for people, but hopefully it's still making you think, because everything that I've said about a coach can to some degree also apply to friends and family. When you're misrepresenting what's happening, they cannot help you either. Now you may have friends and family who are more meddlesome or directive and clearly are probably not trained in terms of how to help people in a objective way, but basic principles still carry over, and so if you are in that place where you are withholding things or lying about things, ask yourself why.
Speaker 1:What is the insecurity that is holding you back?
Speaker 1:What is the perceived cost that you're afraid of, and how is the withholding or the lying, the misrepresenting, going to affect you in the short term and the long term, how's it gonna affect your relationships?
Speaker 1:Because one thing I will say and I know this PS moment has sort of lasted a little bit longer than I intended but one thing I can say is that when a client lies to me, it does alter the basis of trust, because even in a professional relationship where there is a coach and a client, or a therapist and a client or what have you, it is still ultimately two humans, two humans who have to base their relationship on trust.
Speaker 1:I have to be able to trust that what you tell me is the truth In order for me to be committed to what you're going through and to actually see clearly what are the factors involved, so that when I make an analysis of what might be happening and I ask questions accordingly to better help you achieve the more fulfilling life that you want, that we actually get there. And the same is true with your personal relationships, and it's probably more obvious in that context. So, anyway, ps over and I release you back to your regularly scheduled programming. Anyway, I hope that this has been beneficial for you and until next time, take care of each other.