NEVER EXCHANGE YOUR ADVICE FOR THEIR RESPONSIBILITY

Last week we learned one valuable lesson in why you need to be coached. That is believing in people and believing that God is at work in their lives; thus coaching them to come up with a formula to solve their own problems. Letting them take ownership for their own solutions and not blaming you after advising them and things fail to go the way they expected and that is what will look at today.

 I will never forget one Sunday morning when as Pastors we were praying for people before the Sunday service and this young man who had been jobless for a long time came and asked me for advice on whether or not to take up a certain job he had been offered at a Bear distribution center. I was at a loss as to what to tell him. I knew that he had been jobless for a long time and was really in need of a job. On the other hand I could see that he was struggling with the idea of taking up that job based on his religious convictions. 

I prayed that God would give him the wisdom to make the right choice and refrained from giving him any advice. That was hard for me, I had to die to myself and trust that God would show this man what to do. That week on Tuesday, the young man called me and informed me that he had decided not to take up the job because his religious convictions would not allow him to do so. I breathed a sigh of relief and was happy for him. I sensed such a peace and joy, a sense of achievement in his heart as he relayed that information to me. 

What this person did was that they came up with the solution to their own problem. They thus took ownership of it as opposed to me giving them a solution.If I told him to take the job and latter on he realized that he was conflicted because of his convictions, he would have blamed me for it. If on the other hand I advised him not to, when things got hard for him financially he would have blamed me for his misfortunes. But I am glad he came up with that decision himself. 

From that day I discovered something that I later came to learn as very crucial in coaching, “Never exchange your advice for someone else responsibility.” Mine as a Coach was to help him by giving him a broader perspective of the issue at hand, asking him powerful questions that would help him think through the whole issue instead of telling him what to do. That is what a Coach is there for in your life.

WHY YOU NEED COACHING

Our organization is known as Two-ship solutions. We came up with that name because we felt our mission was to offer solutions to leadership and relationship issues.

Now by offering solutions, it doesn’t mean that we have the answers to all your questions or solutions to all your problems. What we have is a solution, a formula, to help you come up with a solution to your own problems and situations as far as leadership and relationships are concerned. This is what coaching is all about.

 I have been helping my boys with their school work lately. What I have observed in them is that they always want me to give them the answer to the problems instead of helping them work out the problems and come up with the answers themselves.

Apparently we are all like my kids. We want someone to give us solutions to our problems and that’s why we ran from this person to that person and from this place to that place in search of answers. As leaders and Pastors we have also not helped a lot because we have made people dependent on us by always giving them advice and solutions to their problems. We feel good when people give us credit for the input we have had in their lives. Nothing wrong with this but let it be that you have come alongside them and helped them find their own solution to their problems.

Why is this important? It is important for this reason. Within each of us is a God given ability or rather capacity to solve our own problems.  One of the values of coaching is believing in people. Now it is easy to say “I believe in you” but from my experience, I learnt that what I told people (“I believe in you”) and how I handled them was very different. In dealing with them, I dealt with them in such a manner that showed I didn’t believe in them at all. That’s why I wanted to be the one to tell them what to do, give them answers to their problems, not realizing that what I was doing was making them dependent on me.

What people simply need is to be coached into how they can solve their own problems.  If you give people answers, what happens the next time they have a problem? They aren’t anymore equipped to solve it on their own than they were the last time, so they come back to you again… and again and again. This is what I have seen in counseling married couples. Like they say, “don’t just give people the fish to eat, teach them how to fish so that next time they will get for themselves the fish to eat.”

"Coaching is practicing the disciplines of believing in people in order to empower them to change."

                                                                               - Tony Stoltzfus