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Why Doctors Make Terrible Professional Coaches

Last week, I ran a post called Why Doctors Make Great Professional Coaches where I highlighted what I thought were the key ingredients that helped physicians excel at coaching. Today’s post delves into the challenges physicians face as coaches.

I don’t truly believe these are reasons doctors make terrible coaches. Instead, these are the areas in which doctors may struggle and need to work on to become effective coaches. The title is click-baity but serves as a nice foil to the prior post.

Holding Space? You Mean Like in the Elevator?

My first three blog posts constituted a series entitled “The Space Between” (found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) that focused on the idea of harnessing the power of the space between stimulus and response. Those posts were written from the perspective of coaching oneself.

The idea of space is just as important for coaches working with clients.

However, when coaching others “space” takes on an additional meaning: a judgment free zone where clients can unload everything and unburden their minds. Master Coach Brooke Castillo who heads the Life Coach School calls this “holding space.”

Coaches must be proficient at holding space. They remain neutral and objective without reacting to what clients say, unlike this guy:

This means not empathizing with clients’ situations, because to do so would require coaches to insert their own emotions into clients’ space. And the space belongs to the client.

Coaches are simply outsiders observing, deconstructing, and understanding their clients’ thoughts and emotions. They don’t get caught in any of the drama. It is only from here that they can help clients do the same.

Physicians create judgment free zones as I referenced in last week’s post. But we empathize with our patients because it is fundamental to the doctor-patient relationship and the therapeutic process. We simply can’t not empathize.

Pool Party, Anyone!?

In fact, doctors jump headfirst into the space with our patients. Castillo calls this “jumping in the pool.” She expands the analogy stating that you can only help a client if you remain outside of the pool and offer an outstretched hand. If you’re in the pool with them, you can’t pull them out of the pool.

The role of doctoring is different from coaching. Jumping into the pool is necessary with medicine, and destructive to coaching. So in order to become effective coaches, physicians need to learn how to hold space without jumping in the pool.

And let me tell you: this is very challenging because my decade-plus-some long journey in medicine thus far has involved mastering all manner of jumping into pools with patients without nary a thought of hesitation!

As a physician coaching peers, it’s even harder because the struggles we share are often so uniquely ours that they hit too close to home.

Answer Charmer

The central truth to mindset work is that clients have all the answers. A coach’s job is to help the client realize and find the answer for which they’re searching. It’s like drawing out a cobra from a basket with a flute, except less scary and with slightly less chance for envenomation.

In medicine, the physicians typically have the answers to patients’ ailments. That’s why patients seek us out. We use those answers to allay fear, determine diagnoses, make decisions, and prescribe treatments. Doctors give advice and recommendations—it’s the nature of our jobs.

Moreover, there is often a “right” answer to a medical problem. For example, the answer to how to stop bleeding from an arterial injury is to apply firm pressure for an extended period of time.

Clearly, the Black Knight from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail needed a physician and not a coach:

There are no “right” answers in coaching. Coaches do not know the answers to clients’ problems a priori. Nor should coaches impose their will in terms of what they think is the right answer. That is coaching malpractice.

Run Two Mindset Models, and Call Me in the Morning

Given this predisposition to giving advice, physicians naturally coach on the action- or A-line. That is, they give specific recommendations on what actions to take.

True coaching coaches on the result- or R-line. After eliciting the results desired, coaches work on thoughts that will create the feelings that ultimately drive the actions to get to those results.

Therefore, doctors entering the coaching world need to learn to pause and check their reflex to spout off recommendations. To do this they must coach themselves and practice R-line coaching until it becomes second nature. Only then, can physician coaches help their clients achieve their greatest results.

So those are my reasons why physicians make terrible coaches. Really, these are ways in which coaching differs from and is sometimes at odds with medicine. Physician coaches must learn new skills to overcome these apparent contradictions in order to help others with mindset work.

What do you think? Comment below with your thoughts.

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