Coaching Tip: Thinning-out Gives the Best Results

Originally Submitted on 4/12/99.

Introduction

Clients often have many ideas, many goals, many plans when they start working with a coach. There is a fine line between encouraging them to have it ALL, and first helping them to focus their energies on just a few, which may feel as though they have to discard the others.

The Coaching Tip

Those of us who are gardeners know the agony of "thinning out." Having planted the seeds, we survey the resulting groups of seedlings as they cluster together. We know that if we leave them all in the ground, they will crowd each other out, will be competing for the soil, the nutrients, the water and the sun that they need to develop. As a result, all will be pale, weak, and slender, nothing like those healthy plants pictured on the seed packet. When we can bring ourselves to ruthlessly discard some, the others will flourish, and we will be rewarded with healthy growth and plants that are all we had hoped for.

Sometimes clients, too, need help with thinning out their tasks and priorities. They may expect that hiring a coach will magically enable all their dreams and plans to be realized with magic speed. Certainly with a coach they have a far better chance. Yet at times, the first task is to prioritize, and to prioritize does not only mean to decide which is most important. It also means to be willing to put some things on the back burner. Perhaps some of the less vital plans can be postponed, rather than permanently discarded as we must do with seedlings. Even that can be difficult for a client who wants it ALL--now! It is the coach's job to encourage plans for eventually "having it ALL" while yet helping the client to focus first on the most important task(s).

Just as soil, space, water and light are limited when the seedlings crowd each other, so, too, are time, energy, and other resources. If we allow all our plans and dreams to crowd into a very limited amount of time, energy and resources it could be that none of our plans will come to fruition.

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About the Submitter

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