A Networking Story About What a Coach Would Actually Give You — and How to Give It to Yourself
Can you coach yourself into better professional relationships? Yes — because what a coach gives you is never the answers. It’s the questions that draw out what you already know, and the discipline to act on what you find.
Let me tell you a story about a scientist who was about to pay someone to fix a problem he was already carrying the answer to.
Brendan is a character I created — his situation will be familiar to anyone who has ever concluded that they are simply not the sort of person who is good with people.
The Wrong Room
Brendan was thirty-three, a research scientist, and had just been made responsible for something he had never done in his life.
His institute had spun out a technology — his technology, in large part, six years of his working life — and the whole thing now depended on commercial partnerships. Industry consortia. Licensing conversations. Rooms full of people from the business side who spoke a language he could follow but could not speak.
He was, by any measure, excellent. He was also, by his own private measure, hopeless in exactly the situations that now determined whether any of it survived.
He had been to three partnership events. At each one, he had explained his work with total accuracy and watched people’s faces politely close. Somebody had actually said to him, kindly, “It’s fascinating — I’m just not sure what I’d do with it.” He had gone home and read the sentence back to himself in the dark.
So he did what a sensible person does. He found a coach.
Her name was Mary, and she was good, recommended by three people — which told him something in itself. She was booked solid for three months.
Mary rang him anyway.
That was the thing about her, he’d learn later: she was booked solid because she rang people anyway. She had no space for him and she asked what the problem was regardless, because a man who needed help in three weeks was not helped by an appointment in three months.
He told her. She listened for a while. And then she said something that made him put down his pen.
What She Told Him
“Brendan, let me tell you what I’d actually do in those sessions — because you might not need me for this.
“I wouldn’t give you a single answer. Not one. I’d ask you questions — the ones you wouldn’t think to ask yourself — and I wouldn’t let you off at your first answer, because your first answer is the one you’ve practised for other people. And then I’d hold you to account, to make sure you did something with what you found.
“That’s it. That’s the whole job. The material would all be yours. It always is.”
There was a pause.
Then Brendan asked the question this story exists to answer.
“So — could I do that for myself?”
He could hear her smiling. “That’s what I’m for — to get people to the point where they don’t need me. Try it. And ring me if you get stuck.”
The First Question
That evening, at the kitchen table, Brendan wrote a question at the top of a page — the one he thought she’d have started with.
Why don’t people understand my work?
His first answer came quickly, and it was the answer he’d been carrying for months: because they aren’t scientists, and the science is genuinely complicated.
He looked at it.
Mary wouldn’t have accepted that. She’d have asked the next question. So he wrote it.
Is that the whole truth?
And the honest answer, arriving slowly, was no. The woman who’d said I’m not sure what I’d do with it had understood the science perfectly well. She had understood everything except him — what he’d learnt, how he thought, why he’d given six years to this.
He had been explaining his technology.
Nobody had ever asked him about his technology. They had been trying, in every one of those conversations, to work out something else entirely: what would it be like to work with this man?
And he had given them nothing to go on.
What He Found in Six Years
He kept going, the way Mary would have made him. A question at the top of each page. Never the first answer.
What have I got wrong in this work, and what did it teach me?
It took him three evenings to write it honestly. The eighteen months he had spent optimising for a performance figure that turned out to be the wrong figure — because he had never asked a single person who would actually use the thing what “good” meant to them. He had assumed it was a technical question. It was a human one. Every project he has run since begins with a fortnight of conversations he used to consider a waste of time.
What have I got right that others walked past?
Easier, and stranger to write down, because he had never said it aloud. The whole approach had come from noticing that everyone in the field was solving for the wrong constraint — treating a limit as physics when it was actually economics. He had spent a year on that hunch, alone, unfunded, and been right. That is how he thinks: he doesn’t trust a constraint until he knows who imposed it.
Why does this matter to me?
He wrote the answer in one line, and then sat back, because he had never told anyone. His younger sister had a condition this technology will, eventually, help. Not soon enough for her. That is why there were six years.
Three questions. Three answers he had been carrying the whole time, and had never once thought to say in a room.
The Next Room
The next partnership event, Brendan stopped explaining his technology.
Somebody asked what he worked on, and he said: “The short version is that I spent a year on a hunch that everyone in my field had misdiagnosed a limit — they thought it was physics, it was economics. I was right, but only after eighteen months of optimising for entirely the wrong thing, because I never asked anyone who’d actually use it what ‘good’ meant to them. That’s the mistake I’ve built everything since around.”
The man he was talking to said: “That’s the conversation we should be having.”
They talked for an hour. Somewhere in the middle of it, Brendan asked him a question — a real one, the kind he’d learnt to ask himself: “What did you learn from the last one of these that went wrong?”
And the man told him. At length. Nobody had ever asked.
Two months later, that company was one of three in the consortium.
Brendan did not become a different person that evening. He was the same scientist, with the same six years and the same discomfort in rooms. What changed was that he had done, on his own, at a kitchen table, the thing a coach would have charged him for: he had asked himself the questions, refused his own first answers, and acted on what he found.
What Brendan Practised Has a Name
Self-coaching is the ability to guide yourself through every part of your WorkLife journey — through stable times and times of change and uncertainty. It is asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Look at what the coach described, and what Brendan then did. Three movements, and only three:
The questions. The ones you wouldn’t think to ask yourself. Why don’t people understand my work? Is that the whole truth? What have I got wrong, and what did it teach me?
Your own answers — never the first one. The first answer is the one you’ve practised for other people. The one beneath it is the one you’ve been carrying. Brendan’s first answer was that the science was complicated. His second was that he had never let anyone see him.
Acting on it. Clarity that stays on the page changes nothing. His three answers went into a room, out loud, and a consortium formed around them.
And notice what he found when he did the work: not a technique, and not a new personality. Three stories. The failure that changed how he works — eighteen months solving the wrong problem. The success that showed him his own thinking — the constraint that wasn’t physics. And the reason he does any of it — a sister, and six years.
Those three stories are what a stranger needs in order to understand you: how you think, what you’ve learnt, and what drives your work. They are the difference between a person who is explaining a technology, and a person somebody wants to build something with.
Brendan already had them. He had had them the whole time.
So can you coach yourself into better professional relationships?
Yes. He did it in a fortnight of evenings, with a notebook and one rule: never accept your first answer.
What deepens the practice is the quality of the questions. That is what my work exists to provide. My second Professional Self-Coaching resource captures the thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work — from finding your three stories to walking into the room with them — placed in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Continue the Work
Get the Client — Professional Self-Coaching for Networking and Building Professional Relationships Tell the Three Stories That Reveal How You Think, What You’ve Learnt and What Drives Your Work — and Why That Makes People Want to Work With You
Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.
Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel
Listen to the audio version here:
Share These Learning Resources
These resources are designed as short, effective learning experiences—for individuals managing their own development and companies supporting their people’s growth.
If you think this learning resource story would be helpful to others, share it forward.
Discover more from schoolofworklife.com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.