The See/Say Principle
By Tony Stoltzfus
Maria is
a coaching client with too much on her plate. She has trouble meeting her
commitments, she is always a day late and a dollar short, and her life is a
jumble of competing demands and half-remembered promises. As her coach, the
change agenda that would make the most difference is pretty obvious: Maria
needs to get her life under control. But she doesn’t see it that way. What do
you do? As the old song goes, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”
Coaching
is the art of helping people change by believing in them unconditionally.
Instead of telling them what to do, you listen and ask, because you believe in
the person’s relationship with God and their ability to make the changes they
need to make. That means you let go and let Maria choose what to work on.
That’s the simple answer.
But
letting go of an obvious blind spot to work on something else is a
counterintuitive concept. At first hearing, people always raise a million
practical objections. The discussion usually boils down to a question like
this: “If I see my client doing something wrong, don’t I have an obligation to
say something about it?”
Here’s
how I respond. Pause for a moment to really ponder the following question, and
answer it with a number:
How many
things does God see right now that are wrong with your life or that don’t meet
His standards?
______
As the expression goes,
there’s a hole with no bottom! The gulf between God’s holiness and yours is
larger than the universe. If we saw a true picture of God’s holiness alongside
our own depravity, it would literally kill us (See Exodus 33:18-23). Yet of all
our infinite number of shortcomings, how many is God explicitly prompting you
to work on right now? My experience is that I can count that number on the
fingers of one hand. Of all that God sees in me that needs to change, he only chooses
to reveal a few things at once. Applied to coaching, I call this the See/Say
principle: Just because I see something
doesn’t mean I’m supposed to say it.
Seeing a
problem in a client’s life does not make me responsible to address it. At any
moment, God sees many things wrong with me, but asks for change on only a few.
Therefore, I need to figure out what things God is speaking to the client about
and limit my agenda to match His. I’m only responsible to say the things that
God prompts me to say. Even Jesus accepted this limitation, when He stated,
“…The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father
doing” (John
So, you
are not responsible to speak to everything you see in others. Your mandate is only
to address what God specifically prompts you to address. Accepting this
principle frees you to let go, love your clients and believe in them
unconditionally. That letting go of responsibility for others is a big part of the greatness of the coaching relationship.
Adapted from the book Leadership Coaching, by Tony
Stoltzfus. Tony@CoachingPastors.com