How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances

This book is in B&W, not color - Print page in Grayscale for Correct view! hopefulness. The statement itself hopes. (By contrast, the statement “I eat” doesn’t eat; it merely claims that I do.) I am amazed at how seldom my clients tell their stakeholders their hopes and wishes. Even if your hopes and wishes are quite different from those of your stakeholders, expressing them is still humanizing; it establishes that you are a person who has hopes and wishes. If they are hopes and wishes your stakeholders share, then expressing them builds commonality. And if they are hopes and wishes your stakeholders share but cannot easily acknowledge, expressing them is profoundly empathic. “I wish we were back in a pre-9/11 world.” “I hope someday our enemies will agree to live and let live.” “If only we could just nuke ’em all.” (There are some hopes and wishes that your stakeholders daren’t acknowledge and you daren’t acknowledge either. One or more of these three may well be in that category.) Achievable hopes are well worth expressing. In fact, every time you are tempted to make a promise, consider whether you’d be wiser to downgrade it to a hope. And every time you are tempted to say you’re “confident” about some good outcome (getting the fire under control quickly, for example), consider whether it would be more accurate, more credible, more sustainable, and more empathic to change “confident” to “hopeful.” But expressing unachievable wishes is even more valuable than expressing achievable hopes. “I wish I could give you a definite answer” is more empathic than “I simply cannot give you a definite answer.” “I wish that damn accident had never happened” is more empathic than “I know you wish the accident had never happened.” “I wish we could take every conceivable precaution” is more empathic than “It’s foolish to imagine we could take every conceivable precaution” (and more honest than “we’re taking every conceivable precaution”). Regrets are unachievable wishes about the past. And so expressing shared regrets is also extremely empathic. The actual word “regret” has lost its empathic power from overuse in legal contexts; “management regrets to inform you…” doesn’t sound regretful or empathic anymore. “I wish we had realized…” does. So does “If only we had realized….” Finally, fears and worries are the flip side of hopes; they are what we hope won’t happen. Not surprisingly, then, expressing shared fears and worries is a powerful way to show empathy, especially if they are feelings that your stakeholders have trouble expressing for themselves. Choose your words carefully. If you say you’re “concerned” when stakeholders are terrified, it’s going to sound minimizing rather than empathic. If you say you’re “terrified” when stakeholders are merely concerned, you may frighten them more than you intended, or they may start worrying empathically about the state of your emotions. Needless to say, the first error is a lot more common than the second. But in a frightening situation, even official expressions of concern are more empathic than the conventional (and convent

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