Master Surgical Compassion for Deeper Client Connections

Coaching, the age-old art of trying to get humans to do what you tell them and titling yourself appropriately for doing so. Yet despite that seemingly simple ideation of what Coaching is, it is so much more. 

Coaching vs training

Let's start with the basics. If you are reading this, there's an assumption that you likely own a gym and have coaches and are one yourself. You are responsible for coaches, or at an absolute minimum you are one yourself or aspiring to be. So, let's start with what that actually means. So we can get to what it's going to take to be “great” at it.

You have no doubt likely heard me espouse the belief that training is physical, and coaching is behavioral. The key point behind this is that trainers tell, and coaches sell. But before you get bent over the idea of selling, I will explain. Later. 

9:10 aspiring coaches I meet, and I have met many traveling the globe teaching seminars, are after one thing. That missing link that can get people to understand what they are trying to say, to get them to care, so they seek information. But in this pursuit that distinction makes you a trainer, not a coach. There is nothing wrong with information, its invaluable, but the truth is you likely have enough already to be a fantastic high-level coach.

The skill set most coaches are trying to sidestep, and frankly gym owners too, is conversation. Specifically, conflict and confrontation. In a perfect world these coaches would love to be able to show up, deliver a few key nuggets of useful information, and elicit an improvement and move on. Spoiler alert; that's training.

What It Takes

When it works, it works, it's just that it often doesn't, or doesn't for long. Let me be clear on one thing, there is nothing wrong with being a trainer. It's a great field, easy to scale, and quite enjoyable. Coaches, however, are drawn to a larger calling. They have an unspoken willful investment in going the long haul with their caseload. Coaching is hard, it's frustrating, it's often thankless, it can be heartbreaking, yet it can also be the greatest reward. To be a part of another human's breakthrough, to know you have changed them for the better, you were instrumental in the development of a better life for them? That's unlike anything anywhere.

What coaches do that is different is connect to a layer much deeper in an effort to affect the behavior of their clients. To affect behavior, you must affect their decision-making rubric. Simply telling them to do or try something is often met with failure, or misunderstanding. However, rather than telling, you instead start with understanding, in this case the limitation or the struggle for them. You then have the ability to lead them to their own epiphany, their own idea, their own solution. And when you have done this, likely on accident once or twice the result is far faster and greater.

Why? The mind drives physical behavior, and physical behavior drives the mind. When the client takes ownership, the behavior loop is broken and is repaired much quicker. This is referred to as plasticity. The remodeling of the brain. Advice, information, although received, when not owned is simply just cataloged. What is the distinction between ownership and information? Failure. Turns out failure is the key to plasticity, and while Ill spare you the neurobiology, getting to the limitation with the client, allows them to understand their failure and inefficiency, and this is enough to trigger a state of plasticity. Turns out no amount of talking at them can do this. Simply because Information doesn't come with identity. They must understand.

While that is a lot of information, I'll boil it down for you. Advice doesn't work. Questions do. If you find yourself talking at humans a lot and asking them questions less? You are training them, teaching them, speaking to them. If you speak less, and question more, you are coaching them. The key here being using leading questions to lead them to the answer you seek for them, and their own realization.

If you are our client, you already know this. Your coach has been doing this with you since day 1, and you’ve seen the difference. If you aren't a client, you may have still experienced this from a high-level coach maybe a red shirt in which they likely asked you a question in a breakout like: Why is this a struggle for you?

Enter: Surgical Compassion

Let's start with defining Compassion as its often mistaken for empathy and sympathy. Empathy is to feel what the person is feeling, sympathy is to understand what the person is feeling, but compassion is the willingness to relieve the suffering of another.

Willing or not, if you are in this business, this is what you contractually agreed to do. Every client, whether a games-level athlete or straight off the coach, arrives at your door, your class, or your desk because they are in pain. This pain can be physical, or emotional, but pain, nonetheless. Pain in this case is defined as the willingness or need to escape from it. In the case of a games athlete this pain could be not podiuming, in the couch-client this could be they are dying.

The severity differs greatly, but your intention should not. If they pay you, you agree to help them. And here is where it often goes completely wrong. At the point they reveal their pain to you, you have a predisposition as to how you will help them, and you employ that strategy. When it doesn't work you fault them, because it worked before, but the fault is on you. Because rather than deciding what works, you needed to understand what hasn't worked for them first.

Surgical compassion is the act and term coined by us, in which you will, like a surgeon, cut to the root of the problem with as little collateral damage and exploration as possible. You will use razor-sharp questioning to get to the trauma and work efficiently to remove it. Most importantly, you will do no harm and aim for the fastest route to recovery. 

Just as the medical field is bound by the Hippocratic oath, we too shall be. We must agree to do the right things for the right people every single time. 

I will apply for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife and chemist's drug. I will not be ashamed to say, “I know not”.

One of the oldest binding Oath's ever recorded. This is commonly overlooked in our field of beginners. If someone is paying you, they aren't always asking for kindness, they are asking for help. Further, if we allow someone in our care to slip into negligence due to our unwillingness to approach the problem you are violating this oath.

As an example, the client who has been with you for years, pays regularly, comes regularly, and is somehow gaining weight. Its uncomfortable to intervene, but the oath you take as a coach implores that you do.

Surgical compassion is “I will help, I won't promise it won't hurt, but I promise I will help”. Surgical compassion is the act of questioning and helping to both understand and resolve limitations and pain. It is investing in this art as much as the tools of your trade. The willingness and ability to sit down and understand your clients. Both new and old alike.

This skillset, and willingness to engage in is the rarest, and important. While this may seem like a lecture in the art’s its merely an assertion that if they pay you, you owe this to them. Unless they are paying you for training, then you can charge them far less, serve them far less, and owe them far less. The choice is yours.

But if you choose coaching, and I suspect you will, this becomes a part of the entire system. From their first day in, regardless of background, to their last day with you. And yes, that is the goal, to solve their problems as such as they no longer need you, but they keep you because they want you. There is no route to this without coaching, and there is no route to coaching without questioning, because understanding is impossible without it.

Coaching is not teaching it is understanding. Coaching is Surgical compassion. Oh, and I bet if you made it this far, you can see why coaching then would be worth far more to someone than say, training. Not only has this been the overlooked skillset in professional development, its the overlooked model in your pricing.

Decided you’re in need of a coach?