Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee - Michelle Brody

(interview blurb)

Michelle: Most of the time, when people feel criticized, the most natural reaction is actually to do less because if everything I do that’s criticized, why should I work so hard at it? And then look at how that creates this cycle and, look, I don’t think you’re causing the cycle but you’re contributing just like they are. So let’s see if we can figure out ways in which you can lessen your contribution so that this cycle can end.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an executive coach and clinical psychologist with over 25 years of professional experience. She has facilitated leadership training and mediated team conflict in themes for Facebook, eBay, and ServiceNow. She’s the author of two books, including Stop the Fight!, and illustrated guide for couples which has been translated into French, Russian, Estonian, and Chinese. Please welcome, Michelle Brody.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Michelle.

Michelle: Hey. How are you?

Alex: I’m doing very well. It’s great to have you in the podcast today.

Michelle: Thank you. Good to be here.

Alex: So, let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Michelle: Well, I hate to disappoint you coffee drinkers but it’s water. Just water. That’s my drink of choice.

Alex: Just some good old New York tap water.

Michelle: You could say. 

Alex: And so I wanted to match you so I am drinking Saratoga Still Natural Spring Water from New York state since I’m in LA and drinking the tap water is not really an option here. 

Michelle: Sorry.

Alex: No, water’s great. I will cheat a little bit in this episode because it’s 9 a.m. here in LA and I feel like I need a little coffee so I have some on the side so I will cheat a little bit and it’s kind of like a half version of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. 

Michelle: That works for me.

Alex: We don’t always drink coffee so this is perfectly fine. 

Michelle: Awesome. Cheers. 

Alex: Cheers. So, you have an amazing career, super interesting work that you do, you’ve written very interesting books. So I would love for us to get started at the beginning. How did the journey begin for you?

Michelle: Well, so the journey began in terms of me being a psychologist or a coach, actually, back when I graduated college, I worked in investment banking, which turned out to be a very bad match for me in terms of enjoying it or wanting to be there or the quality of my work even, but what I noticed there and I think what propelled me to go into psychology directly from investment banking was I was fascinated by the way that they ran meetings and the way the dynamics in a team were so complicated and I remember saying to a friend of mine at the time I don’t understand why do they run meetings in a way that just is meant to be terrifying, there’s sort of a lot of threat, a lot of aggression, a lot of a sense of the power plays all the time and I thought you could get so much more out of people if you just took it down a notch and somehow made something more collaborative and so on. So it’s funny to me that even back then, I was 22, 23 years old, and, at the time, it seemed crazy to me why do they do it this way. And, interestingly, the thread continues then because, of course, I decided in the end to go to become a clinical psychologist, I did a whole soul searching after investment banking was wrong and said what should I do instead and I looked at all things I had done in the past that had been of interest to me, like I had done some teaching, I had done some research, and I had done some work on a peer counseling hotline and all those things were interesting to me and, suddenly, it occurred to me, wait, I could do this all if I did a PhD in clinical psychology so that’s what I headed towards. And then I worked in clinical psych for 15 years, doing all sorts of things, like research and teaching and clinical work and I would say that the types of work when I worked as a psychologist that intrigued me the most were when I was doing work that was interactional, so either couples or families or groups and less so with the clinical problems. But that said, I did work in all those arenas and then, eventually, at some point, I started to feel like I was hitting a ceiling of the impact I was having and I thought I just would love to have more impact in a bigger realm and coaching was something that was always out there. I don’t know, as a psychologist, it was like something that’s not licensed and so on but I was still intrigued by it and I thought those coaches get to work in all the interactional dynamics in the workplace and that’s something that I want to get engaged in too. So, I started to work with a coaching company where I got to do a lot of leader training and individual coaching and then, ultimately, more team coaching and now, it’s kind of funny, part of the journey is this, in 2008, when a lot of the coaching work dried up, I said, “Okay, gotta go back to being a psychologist,” but I didn’t want to open up a practice in doing everything, only my favorite thing, which is working with couples, so in 2009, I opened a practice, I called it Coaching for Couples because I wasn’t letting go of the fact that I was now deciding to declare myself a coach but that’s what I did, I opened a practice in couples and then did that exclusively and it was very interesting to see one type of problem instead of the whole gamut for a change as a psychologist and so, day in day out, listening to conflict dynamics and seeing the patterns, that became — I mean, it was fascinating to me. That’s what led me to write my first book about the topic of like what are these typical fights we all get into. We all get into the same ones, I’m going to write a book about that because they’re all the same. And another piece of it, of course, was that I had a habit of drawing pictures as I worked with couples and then there was that one fateful day when I actually turned my drawing around and I said, “Is this what’s happening?” and the couple was like, “Oh, my God, that makes it so much clearer to see it all drawn out.” And so a piece of writing that book was to make it illustrated with diagrams of all the fights that we all manage to get into. And then just to finish off the story, having done a lot of work simultaneously in couples and then the coaching work came back, there just started to be so much overlap and I’d be working with individual coaching clients and I’d have this feeling, you know, there’s more to this story, there’s more in the system, there’s another person, and I would propose maybe we should get that other person engaged in this as well. And so I started to do much more mediation in the workplace, so much so that people would call it, “I feel like I’m doing like couples therapy with my coworker,” but, yes, a lot of the thinking and the techniques overlapped, so, to this day, now, that’s really pretty much a specialty. I think of myself as a person who specializes in conflict or specializes in dynamics and I do it in the home and in the workplace.

Alex: So much to unpack. Thank you, Michelle. I’m really excited about our conversation because there’s so many things that I want to ask you based on just that initial introduction. The first thing that I found interesting, you got me thinking about just how the nature of the way we relate to each other has changed, in some ways for good, in some ways maybe not as good, but when you think about just like, let’s say, the educational system of our grandparents and our parents and how that led to that kind of workplace culture where bullying and power plays, obviously, the finance industry in New York is very specific and it’s very power driven but there’s something even in the educational system where our ancestors were growing up that has shifted tremendously, both in school systems and at work where like even now I see some of the very young kids are like they’re the boss, the kids are the boss and it used to me that the kids will do anything the parents say so there’s a shift in dynamic that in some ways is good, in some ways, it’s bad, but you also see that very positively reflected in the workplace where those kinds of meetings are not okay anymore and that allows human beings to focus on flourishing. Very hard to flourish in like the 80s, 90s, early 2000s finance New York culture. So I thought that was very interesting.

Michelle: Yeah. No, I think you’re right. At this stage, it seems like command and control ways of managing are very clearly on the out. People, managers, leaders get that in order to bring out the best in their people, they have to be more collaborative, they have to be more interested in what’s happening for their people, they have to be, in some ways, more understanding of people’s outside life. Of course, the pandemic gave us that in spades. So, yeah, I agree with you that it’s partly cultural over the course of history.

Alex: And in complex dynamic systems, operating in a way where you don’t really know the answer, that changes the dynamic and it actually places you in a position where expertise is more in meshed with experience and learning from it versus having all the answers and some of those dynamics in a world where technology is accelerating the complexity of work, the complexity of our lives. There’s a whole different range of skill sets that become important in the way we interact with each other so I’m sure we’ll spend a good amount of time today talking about that. The other thing that is always very interesting to me is there’s a very definite pathway from therapists and psychologists becoming coaches and you even alluded to — you know, there was an important shift that you made, you alluded to like in 2008, where you were like, “No, I’m calling myself a coach now.” That is almost like, I was thinking like coming out in a way. It’s like you’re saying, “Look, I’m gonna leave this license path and the life that I envisioned when I was training as a psychologist and I’m gonna go to this more unregulated, and maybe a little bit more fuzzy, especially back then, field.” So can you tell me more about what that process was for you and then let’s also talk a little bit more about the differences between coaching and therapy from your own experience.

Michelle: Sure. I’d say, still to this day, if I start from now, I think of myself as a psychologist in terms of my knowledge base and I really feel proud of that. I feel like I’ve learned so much from working as a psychologist that I can bring to what I do as a coach, but I call myself a coach because, first of all, because I want to work in the arena of the workplace and so that’s a one piece, but also I am not so thrilled about the guild elements of my profession as a psychologist, or some of the rules, frankly, like the idea that you meet with clients once a week for 45 minutes or 50 minutes and that’s what fits everyone. That’s an old rule, right? It’s a rule that everyone seems to follow, but if you think about it, how does human growth happen? There’s so many flexible ways in which growth can happen, why does it have to be boxed into that sort of pattern? That’s almost in some ways more about creating a business for the psychologists necessarily than it is for what’s really going to work for this client.

Alex: I hate to interrupt you but that reminds me of a joke that appears on Annie Hall and they’re talking about like if you’re doing therapy with a strict Freudian, that if you kill yourself, they charge you for the sessions you missed. It’s really funny. It’s a little dark but funny but, yeah.

Michelle: I agree with you but that’s another rule that I feel like I’ve actually never kept to. I don’t charge my clients if they skip a session. If there’s a reason that they’re skipping a session, why would I charge for that? That never made sense to me. But, anyway, yes, right, that’s also a piece more about the profession.

Alex: There’s a lot of jokes on psychology and psychologists but they’re very funny but as two psychologists, I guess, we’re both able to call ourselves psychologists because I know even the use of the term is very restricted to your point, but, yeah.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think I’ve just gained a lot of respect over the years that I’ve been working as a coach I think for coaches who really develop their skill and are coming from a different place other than coming from being a mental health professional, for example, because people are people, there are incredible coaches who manage to train up in beautiful ways and then have just about the same types of experiences that I had and I’m also interested as many of the mental health frameworks, theories, types of treatments have evolved into methods that coaches use all the time. So, it feels like they’re meshing quite a bit more. And so, just to go back to the point about why a coach for me, I think it is I love working flexibly and really thinking about like who is the person that working with and what do they need and designing an intervention based on that, but I also am intrigued by the expansion, in a way, of what coaching has added to the field, the accessibility of this type of help for more people, which is an excellent thing.

Alex: It’s incredible. I love coaching and also being, you know, I have a PhD in organizational psychology so I think we both come from, I mean, somewhat of a similar track, I think, you know, organizational psychology is I think more geared towards like that transition to become a coach, you’re always kind of working with organizational systems, even from the early training, but the idea that people can come from different paths and learn an approach for human development and clients have access to a myriad of different coaches with different experiences, I think it’s like a beautiful thing. I think it aligns with where we are in the world today and some of the needs of people across the spectrum and I really like how the profession has evolved in a way that is lightly regulated, I think the ICF has done a tremendous job setting up standardized accreditation pathways and a network of schools and training organizations that operate under a certain standard and I think one of the criticisms of the ICF for a long time was like the psychologists and hairdressers are all training on the same kind of framework and I think they’ve done a lot of work to separate some of the life personal coaching with some of the business leadership coaching and some of the stigma, frankly, associated with being a coach and now we find ourselves in a place in a point in time on the history of coaching where I think the industry is flourishing and some of the technological innovations that will allow us to get a better sense of the impact of coaching will provide a lot of information around how these different pathways help different people and we do live in a time now where, in organizations, we’re thinking more broadly about the use of coaching and, for example, an example that I always like to think about is, for example, first-time mothers that have never been a VP of marketing at a fast-growth company and had a baby so now they can work with an expert who will help them navigate through the journey of becoming a mom, being a good mom, and also continuing to be excelling in the workplace. So, to me, that’s the kind of opportunity that the way we’re thinking about coaching today provides, which is fascinating.

Michelle: Yeah. I also think that if you think about what was under the umbrella of clinical psychology training, what were all the different parts, there was obviously a lot of focus on clinical problems so anxiety disorders, depression, substance abuse, etc., and there was also a lot of focus on modalities, like different types of frameworks for working with clients and also even the modalities of individual therapy versus couples therapy, family therapy, and group therapy. I often think all of those other pieces, and this is why I’m now so interested in helping coaches to make that shift from working as individual coaches over into working with these more interactional types of problems, that’s something that’s also super interesting to me and I’ve always tried to be involved in training throughout my whole career because I love that part, as well, but I think there’s really a place to kind of look at that whole umbrella of all the things that I learned as a psychologist, and right now, I’m really not working in any of the clinical problems at all. I’m working in just the interactional problems and so, it seems to me there could be a whole cadre of interactional coaches as well. Right now, most people train as individual coaches to be able to work individually with people and some programs I know provide team interventions, training in how you do work with teams or training in how you work with pairs but it seems, just as in psychology, much more minimal, right? Most of the focus is all on individual work and then you get a little bit of family and a little bit of couples and a little bit of group and that’s it, and I think that we’re seeing that as well in the coaching world now as well and you’re noticing how the trend is moving towards our clients are asking us to do more team development, they’re asking us to intervene in a retreat, “Create a retreat for my team, I’ve got bad dynamics on my team,” or they’re asking us to help them with interactional problems between several leaders on their team and then I think it comes back to coaches just as the same as it does with psychologists to look back at their training and say, “Do I really know how to do this? And is this something that I need to kind of learn more about?” because it’s not the same thing, and when you approach an interactional problem with an individual mindset, it usually doesn’t work out too well.

Alex: I love that you’re bringing up the team component, systems component. We’ve trained over 2,000 coaches, doing that with coaching.com and GTCI WBECS approach and the Global Team Coaching Institute. Team coaching is such an up and coming area of coaching and it’s such a different skill set as well. So, even when you become a coach, then you’re like, “Okay, I know these different types of methodologies and how do I apply them in different ways in different systems,” and that, to me, is like one of the most exciting parts of what I do every day is that we are in a position where we can work with experts to create programs that will help coaches find different pathways to work with their clients. I mean, that’s the whole model and the vision that we had for coaching.com and WBECS coming together. A good example of that now is we’re launching Red Team Coaching which is applying — I’ve never really talked in detail about what we’re doing in the podcast but I think you brought it up and I think it’s just aligned with my why of why I do what I do and so Red Team Coaching, we’re pulling from the military and intelligence agencies some tools and techniques that work really well to get to critical thinking. So, one of the gaps that a lot of research has identified is our ability to make choices based on critical thinking so now we’re equipping coaches with tools and techniques coming from military intelligence services that are tried and true and tested to be able to work with clients to enable them to make better decisions across a broad spectrum of situations. So that kind of approach in coaching where you can have this dynamism of different certification pathways that, again, all connect to the ICF, I think it’s just fascinating and there’s so many competencies that coaches will continue to build as the world emerges and I think coaching, when I’m hearing you talk, I’m really thinking about like the dynamism that comes with the coaching profession where if you do like the ICF pathway, you do it right and you have a layer and an understanding of what you’re getting from a coach and then you can find a coach that really has the approach that appeals to you, it unlocks a new way of elevating the human potential. So, for me, it’s no coincidence that coaching is growing as much as it is now. In the next 10, 20 years, I think it’s just going to become even one of the most exciting professions, if not already so. That’s really cool and I’d love to explore a little bit more kind of what are some of the differences between coaching and therapy and do you find yourself sometimes thinking, “Oh, well, I was gonna ask this or do these but that’s probably more a therapy framework, how do I bring it back to coaching?”? Do you find yourself kind of having some of these internal dialogue?

Michelle: I think I actually don’t because I was thinking about this for this other WBECS event where we had a number of mental health professionals who were on a panel talking about this, but my feeling about it is I know where my lines are when I’m working with someone but I also know where I can go slightly over the line and test whether the client wants to go there with me. So, for example, asking someone about their family of origin. That’s not something that you would do in coaching, you would do that in therapy, but I might ask the client something like, “Is this interaction that you’re having with your manager or your peer, is it familiar to you? Is this something that feels like something that you tend to get into in your life?” And now, a client can pick that up and say, “Yes, this reminds me of my brother,” or they might say, “Yes, this reminds me of my past job,” and that’s where we go, right? And I’m not going to assume that they want to do a full long explanation into what their relationship with their brother is but if it becomes something that feels relevant, we go there. On the other hand, if something comes up that’s the hint of a clinical problem where I can see kind of the beginning of the bud of something coming up, that’s something that I feel comfortable I can ask about and say, for example, “Have you ever gotten tested for ADHD? What you’re describing sounds a little bit like some of those symptoms. It might be helpful to check that out.” So, again, it’s not — it’s just using my expertise to help a person identify something but not going down a whole, for example, exploration of whether they do have ADHD or not, it’s just that line. And I think that I used to — like you used the word “coming out,” I used to not tell the clients that I was a psychologist also because I wanted them to kind of see me as a coach in the beginning of that transition time but, now, I very openly will share it because, sometimes, people do want to know that you have some expertise that’s beyond just the workplace. So, I was thinking that for coaches who don’t have a mental health background, it might actually be harder because they’ve got to be much more careful about holding that line, like is this veering into something that seems more like therapy, where I feel, because I have both areas of expertise, I feel like I can flexibly go and test across that line and it’s not — you know, if someone says, “Wait, this is feeling like therapy,” I can easily say, “Well, let’s get out of that hole then and go somewhere else.” I don’t feel it’s as much of a risk, to be honest.

Alex: I do the same on the dating setting because if someone asks me, “What do you do?” and then when you say that you have a PhD in psychology, you see their faces just melting, you know? Like, “Oh, so…”

Michelle: You’re at a party and try saying you work with couples, that’s like, “Oh, no. Don’t hang along with us.”

Alex: I’m like, no, no, I’m really more like an entrepreneur, which comes with its own set of issues, right? But, yeah. So, I’d love to talk about your books. I mean, it’s very interesting that we all kind of engage in similar patterns and you’ve spend time really thinking about what those patterns are, why we fight, and I think when there’s fighting, there’s an internal component and, obviously, the external component that gets manifested in interactions with other people but I’m really curious to learn more about the book, the process that led you to write that book, and also talk about like these different ways in which we’re all similar when it comes to fighting and what are some of the major kind of trends that you’ve identified? 

Michelle: Okay. So I’ll first start off by saying, we can talk about either book but I’ll just mention, so my first book was about couples and it was about the patterns in couples and my second one, called Own Your Armor, and that’s about the dynamics in teams. And actually there are similarities between some of the dynamics that happen because, look, when you sit and you watch, when your days are filled with watching couples in their conflict and then your days are also filled with times when you watch leaders and managers and coworkers and teams try to navigate the same things, you see the same human emotions that come up in both places. So, the way I conceptualize it is we respond to threat with some sort of armor. It happens at home and it happens at work. And when you put your armor on, inevitably, you are protecting yourself, which is good, but armor is cold, armor looks like fighting, and it usually has a negative impact around you. So, similarly, in the same way that at home, if you kind of lose yourself in the TV because you’re frustrated with your partner so you don’t want to talk to them, that’s totally self-protective but your partner is going to feel ignored. And similarly in the workplace, if you are the kind of person who’s like sensing there’s dynamics on the team and it’s difficult to manage and, therefore, as a result, you just put your head down and don’t get involved in any dialogue with anyone else and then just try to just hand in your work products without interacting with anyone, that’s also quite self-protective, we totally understand why you would do that, but it has an impact, a negative impact on others who then see you either as a lone wolf or someone who’s non-communicative or unwilling to collaborate or unwilling to help others when they’re stuck in some dynamic. So, there is this — I think of it as, you know, there’s kind of the fight armor and there’s the flight armor so the example I gave before is one of flight where you just like put your head down, stay away from whatever the difficulties are, but then there’s also the fight kind of armor, which is when people are actively trying to engage to solve the problem or to solve the problem that they see in front of them and as a result of their effortful trying to solve it, they create other problems for others. So, in other words, if I have a really big project and I’m really nervous about it succeeding, I might get very controlling because I want to make sure it gets done right, which is good because it helps me feel more confident and more comfortable but it’s going to have bad impact on people who I’m micromanaging. And so I think when you think about dynamics on teams or between people at home, when you conceptualize it, another reason why it’s helpful to conceptualize it as it’s we’re putting on armor, the armor then causes more problems, it starts to get — you get circular armor, you know, I get more defensive, you get more defensive, and then the circle gets stuck. It also gives you a mindset for how the heck we’re going to solve that. How are you going to ever change that problem? Well, the answer is you’ve got to take off the armor. And how do you take off armor? No one’s going to take off armor in a threatening situation. Why would you do that? That would make no sense. Self-protective. But if you own your armor by speaking about it with others, then they experience you as less armored, therefore, more vulnerable, more relatable, and then they can also, that then projects less threat towards them and they can then own their armor and take some of it off. So that’s just sort of a simple explanation of the patterns and so I can say more about some typical circular patterns that happen but I’ll stop there for now.

Alex: No, would love to learn more about that. Removing our armor is difficult so working with people to be able to enable that is really fascinating so maybe before we go kind of like the next area you just mentioned, what’s your experience like as a coach in kind of helping bring awareness to what our armors are and how to unlock a path for people to feel comfortable removing it? 

Michelle: Yeah. Okay, so I think like this one core moment and I think it’s really a very exciting moment when I’m doing this work with people and you sort of see the penny drop. I remember like every time this happened in couples therapy, I’d say, “Oh, my God, this is such a good tool,” and then it happens with working in the workplace as well. And it’s this: I need to be clear that every human being, every human being has a normal self and their armored self. And their normal self is quite wonderful. That’s the person you hire, who’s eager to do good work, who’s very skilled at what they do, who’s a great team player. But if there’s threat in the system, then any one of us is going to get armored. And I often will say about myself, like, okay, you’re interacting with me right now, I seem like a nice, normal person, but when I’m armored, that’s my evil twin, you’re not going to like that as much, of course not, and you have an evil twin too and so does every other human on the earth. And so let’s understand that when you’re exhibiting a certain behavior at work that’s non-optimal, that’s just drama. That’s not the real you. I’ll often engage with someone and I’ll say, “Look, I understand that the way you come across in the team is hypercritical. Now, I have to bet that that’s not the real you but something is really pushing up against you that’s causing you to become more critical so can we just — can I understand what your real self is like and what’s triggering you to get into this kind of armored self because I’m betting that you actually would prefer to be your unarmored self here too,” and the person almost always will say, “Exactly. You have to understand what I’m up against. I mean, I get it. Yeah, sometimes I’m a little harsh but, basically, if you knew what my workplace was like and the ways in which people here don’t take any initiative and the way they don’t finish anything and the way you have to prod them and get them and the way, it’s so frustrating.” So, already in that dialogue, you’ve already split them into their two parts, such that there’s a little more motivation because I can then say, “What would it take for you to be able to just show up here as your regular self? And I get one of the ways is if people around you perform differently but is there anything else that your way of operating, like when you put that armor on, do you recognize what your impact is? What would you say your impact is?” And I ask people, I say, “Look, it’s not your regular self. You get a little uptight and then you start acting in this like evil twin sort of way,” and I keep it light, right? You know, this is your evil twin sort of way and then what do you think the impact of that is? And then they’ll say, “Well, I guess some people get annoyed with it because probably seems like I’m criticizing them as people but I’m just criticizing their work.” Okay, so you come across as critical. That is not optimal, correct? What happens when you come across as critical? What do they do then? What impact does it have on their side of the cycle? And often people will say things like, “I don’t know, what do you think?” I say, “Well, most of the time, when people feel criticized, the most natural reaction is actually to do less because if everything I do gets criticized, why should I work so hard at it? And then look at how that creates this cycle. And, look, I don’t think you’re causing this cycle but you’re contributing, just like they are. So let’s see if we can figure out ways in which you can lessen your contribution so that this cycle can end.” And so I would say it’s like two parts. It’s, one, helping people see that their armor is different than who they are at the core, which builds up some motivation to actually show up less as your armored self and more as your regular self. And then, second, to have people really understand what their impact is. What is the impact of your armor and how is that inadvertently driving a cycle that frustrates you? You don’t want this cycle either. I will often say, “This is kind of like stuff at home, isn’t it?” That also is a way that people recognize it immediately, right? It’s like, “Oh, yeah.” What happens when your wife, your husband constantly reminds you to turn off the lights, that you’re always leaving the lights on, you turn them up, or when your wife or your husband always reminds you to clear your dishes or whatever. Does that make you more likely to do it or less and why? And so understanding those cycles, which we all get on such a fundamental level, because we’re in them at home, if not with our spouses then with our kids, but owning the fact that you have an evil twin, that it’s your armored self, is the way to crack it open and begin to make it change.

Alex: Makes a lot of sense. Makes me think about coachability and Marshall Goldsmith always says you have to be careful choosing your clients and that he always has successful engagements because he’s really good at picking the clients he works with. Obviously, not everyone has the opportunity to be as selective in terms of who they work with, a lot of coaches do, some not as much, and I think it depends on where you are in the cycle of your coaching career and have more optionality. But coachability is so important because just being in that conversation with someone that is willing and open to see what those chinks in that armor are and to try to operate better as a person, as an employee, as a partner, as a CEO, whatever you’re doing, it’s so important. It’s hard to navigate people through the process of change when they’re open to change but when you’re having conversations to just get people open, that’s like a very different starting point, right? And there’s an art to both.

Michelle: No, it’s so true. I mean, I think when you’re dealing with conflict, so, for example, a kind of client that I get a lot is I get two leaders on, let’s say, a CEO’s team, they’ve got two leaders on their team that are really amazing and you need to keep both of them on the team but they don’t get along with each other so the CEO will typically say, “Can you just get these guys to get along?” But the starting point is literally the same as it would be in couples therapy in some ways, which is like I talk to person A and they say, “It’s all person B’s fault,” I talk to B and they say, “It’s all A’s fault,” so that is as stuck as you can be. And you’re right that some people have more psychological awareness of why they are the way they are, that there is a difference between their regular self and their armored self and that there’s something that they might be contributing, different people have different exposure to systems thinking and so on. And, typically, when I have a pair like that, one person might be more stuck on the idea that they’re right and the other person is wrong and the other one might be more open to saying, “I might be contributing something to this and I’ll think of it,” but the art of this is really helping both sides get to some place of owning a piece of it. And it’s not just owning something at the surface, like, “We’re both contributing.” Okay, yes, but how are you both contributing? Let’s like really get to the guts of how you’re contributing and get into the dynamic that you’re co-creating with each other. And that’s why I think of this as sort of the — I call it the final frontier of team coaching because I think there’s a ton of things we can do to help a team align and get more in sync with each other that are — I call them above the table, right? In a lot of ways, it’s like, you know, make sure all the OD things are in order. You know, you have clear goals, you have clear communication, you have clear processes, you have good roles and responsibilities and everyone knows what they’re supposed to do, that’s all related to the work, and then under the table is all this junk, all the stuff that’s related to how people feel about each other and how judgments of one another and previous alliances and previous history of how they felt, that, “You were uncollaborative three months ago and therefore I’m not gonna help you with this thing,” that junk under the table I think of as the final frontier because if we can’t dig in to how to like unpick those knots, you know, we do a lot of beautiful work about getting everyone aligned and everyone says, “Yes, I’m aligned,” and in their deep heart, they are not, because they’re not going to work with that guy who said, “Put that idea in.” So I think helping people really see those dynamics and see them, (a), that they’re universal and that they have some — and we’re all stuck in them so that you don’t have to feel like such a pathological person because you’re stuck in something, any one of us can get stuck in one of these, and helping people pick it apart and really understand it on a deeper psychological level changes them for life. It’s like a sense of, “I now know how this type of thing develops and where I contributed,” and so I think it’s hard work and I don’t think — it’s not like a slam dunk every time, it’s not like you can walk away going, “Did it again.” Half of the time, you run into serious challenges that really have you thinking like, “Okay, where else do I need to bring support and empathy and challenge in order to help this person find their role in it?” But I do think it is a really important piece of work that coaches are asked to do. And a lot of us stay above the table on that and don’t actually go there because we don’t know what the heck we’re doing down there. It’s like how do I change that?

Alex: Absolutely. So much to unpack with everything you’re saying, Michelle. In my experience as a coach and also as an entrepreneur and building a business, one of the things that I see a lot is usually when there’s problems with someone, usually there’s a lack of ownership and I think it’s pervasive and I don’t know what the root causes are but, typically, for me, like the most high functioning people, let’s say, in a workplace setting are the ones that take ownership of their mistakes, take ownership of the things that perhaps they’re doing in ways that could be optimized, that could be better, and that sense of ownership, I think, is connected in my experience with being able to be more receptive to feedback and that openness, the people that are open just do so much better engaging in coaching. And I think the coachability component, and this is qualitative, but I think it is really, truly connected to that openness for feedback and openness to take responsibility for your actions. And, as coaches, it’s one of the things that we can work with with clients, whether they already have it and we can get started or whether you need to work on helping them open up to that. 

Michelle: Couldn’t agree more. I think there’s something so interesting about our instinct to give feedback when we see non-optimal behavior. So you have a person that’s working for you, non-optimal behavior, every leader does the same thing, which is you give the person feedback. But when you think about that feedback as another potential threat, which it often is because none of us love feedback, I think there’s a joke about that where what’s the scariest words in the corporate world? “Can I give you a little bit of feedback?”

Alex: It’s like in a relationship where like, “We need to talk.” It’s like similar kind of, yeah.

Michelle: Exactly. So when you think about how are we giving feedback, so much of the time, the feedback comes across as an attack on someone’s person, like you have an anger management problem, right? I hear that, if that’s being directed at me, I hear that as a massive threat and so my instinct is going to be to just defend the heck out of that, right? I’m going to defend myself and I’m going to say why this and how it’s somebody else and finger point and all you’re going to get back is defensiveness. so the reason that asking people to own it as separate of their person is so important, I’m not saying you are a human with an anger management problem, I’m saying you are a person who’s quite great but, under certain circumstances, a behavior comes out of you that’s non-optimal and I’d like to extinguish that but I need to understand what causes it, where does it come from, what part of that is you and what part of it is from other places, but as soon as I separate it and say, “It’s not you, but I have noticed there are certain times when this gets worse,” it changes things. I mean, this is what prevents — also, if you think about it like sometimes people, the more you give them feedback, the worse they get, there’s like this decline. You give them feedback and then their behavior goes down a little bit more and more feedback, it goes down even more, and you’re like what is going on here, it’s just it’s because they’re experiencing it as more threat and then what you’re getting is more armor, they’re just armoring up even more and then you get more of the non-optimal behavior. So, I think a huge part of the tools in terms of thinking about this dynamically is even about the very simple topic of how do you prevent defensiveness in feedback? Because that’s just what people give you is defensiveness. So it’s not just defensiveness in the moment of hearing it but it’s also then their subsequent behavior just reinforces all the stuff you were trying to give them feedback about. So, that’s I think a piece of this model that can be very helpful is understanding it as a threat means I can’t give it in the same way, I got to give it in a completely non-threatening way, which is hard to do.

Alex: It really is. Hearing you break that down reminds me of the great Bob Keegan and the way he describes the evolution of growth in terms of stages, which is really the subject of one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next. So once you’re able to separate those behaviors and separate yourself and not identify with them, then you’re able to see a clearing and a pathway and that’s a lot of what we’re doing in coaching with someone that’s resistant. And if they see it, they can just unlock this new stage where they become disidentified with some of those behaviors, they’re able to recognize them, be more present, and when you think about the organizational impact of having thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and, ultimately, millions of people engage in these thought processes and being able to get this clearing of development and getting to higher stages, I mean, I’m not saying coaching necessarily leads to higher stages of human development as a whole, I think meditation is the only thing that’s been proven, very interestingly, actually, to help people go through from one stage to the next, but even within a stage, to be able to grow and see a clearing of development, it is really amazing that we’re in the profession that helps people do that. And as you were unpacking that, I just thought about that and, to me, it’s always made a lot of sense. It sounds very opaque at first, the subject at one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next, but once it hits, it’s just like, yep, but that’s a lot of what we’re doing here, you disidentify with some of these behaviors and then you’re able to see them in action, almost like a movie playing in your head. It’s like, “Wow, I’m doing this and that and it’s leading to that impact. Well, what about when I experience that, I do this other thing?” and, boom, and then coaching becomes really fun because you go and implement and they come back to your coaching, “Look, in that meeting, I was about to blow up and I realized that and, instead, I asked a clarifying question and we figured it out.” Isn’t that the best when the client comes back to you and has an experience like that?

Michelle: Totally. Actually, what you’re saying reminds me also of, you know, at some point in your training as a psychologist, you also come to this bridge, I think almost everyone comes through at some point where it’s like, “Oh, my God, everyone should be in therapy.” Why? I’ll say to young adults, one of the best things you can do is use the counseling services at your college when you go to college because that’s the perfect stage of life to start figuring yourself out because I think what we’re talking about and what we do as coaches so much is help people figure themselves out and I think when you imagine what like a good exploratory therapy is about, if it’s not focused on a clinical problem, it’s focused on how did I get to be this way? Why am I who I am? What are all the inputs in my life, from my family of origin, my life experiences, from everything who I am, that helped me understand how did I get this way? Why do I have the particular sensitivities that I have? Why do I have the particular motivations that I have? And the more that a person understands that about themselves, I mean, I think about it in both of the realms I work and the more a person understands that about themselves, the better leader they are and the better they are in a couple and the better worker they are I think as well, because you can say, “Huh, I’m reacting really strongly to that coworker right now. Wonder why that’s happening? Oh, I know, I tend to be sensitive when people leave me out of things and that person just left me out of yet another meeting. And I know that I’m sensitive to being left out of things because I was the youngest kid and I got left out of things and so it all connects and I understand that I have a little sensitivity about that. Hmm, interesting. So that’s going to come across as potentially threatening to me but now I understand it so it doesn’t actually bother me as much.” It’s like coming up and above yourself and looking down and seeing the wholeness of who you are with a lot of compassion and a lot of understanding of like, “Yeah, I got this way, honestly, because, you know, so that’s my sensitivity.” And so I think that helps everyone who’s done a journey like that, with a coach or with a therapist, really, truly be able to marshal their emotional intelligence in a much greater way and so I think that’s kind of the holy grail there.

Alex: Love that. I mean, I love that you provided a very specific example. I tend to like just abstract kind of thoughts so it’s very helpful to kind of hear you operationalize that a little bit more so I love that. I couldn’t think of a better note to kind of finish our episode today but, also, there’s so many things that I would want to continue to talk to you about so I’m sure we’ll do this again but thank you so much for joining us today. Really enjoyed this conversation and looking forward to continuing to have conversations with you, Michelle.

Michelle: I do too. Thank you