A story about seeking different perspectives, asking better questions and learning to trust your own thinking
Self-Coaching: When Other People’s Perspectives Drown Out Your Own wasn’t something Lucia had considered until she found herself explaining the same opportunity to yet another person.
Lucia worked in communications.
An internal role had become available in another part of the organisation and she had been approached about it.
The work was interesting.
More than interesting.
There was greater creative scope, projects with a wider reach and the opportunity to work with people whose work Lucia had admired from a distance.
When she first heard about the role, something in her immediately responded.
She wanted to know more.
Then she learned about the travel.
There would be considerably more of it than in her current role.
Some months, she could expect to be away for extended periods.
Lucia loved travelling.
But travelling occasionally wasn’t the same as regularly being away from home.
The role excited her.
That part didn’t.
So Lucia did something entirely reasonable.
She began gathering perspectives.
What Does Everyone Else Think?
Her manager thought the opportunity was excellent.
“You’ve wanted more creative scope for a long time. This would give you that.”
A colleague knew the department well.
“The director is brilliant. People really like working with her.”
A former colleague reminded Lucia of conversations they’d had over the years.
“You’ve been saying you want to stretch yourself. Isn’t this exactly that?”
Lucia spoke to a friend who worked in a similar area.
She spoke to someone who travelled regularly for work.
Each person noticed something different.
Each conversation gave Lucia something to consider.
Then she talked to her partner.
He knew immediately why the role appealed to her.
“I think you’d love the work.”
Lucia smiled.
“So you think I should take it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
He smiled too.
Then he said:
“I think you’d love the work. I’m just not sure you’d love being away that much.”
Lucia knew what he meant.
He wasn’t asking her to stay.
He wasn’t threatened by the opportunity.
He knew how much home mattered to her.
Not simply the house they lived in, but their life there.
Time together.
Family nearby.
Friends.
Ordinary evenings.
Weekends that weren’t spent recovering from another journey.
Her working life mattered enormously to Lucia.
So did the rest of her life.
Her partner knew that.
His perspective was worth listening to.
When More Perspectives Create Less Clarity
Lucia kept thinking.
And talking.
Someone who travelled extensively told her she would get used to it.
Someone else said frequent travel had been exciting initially and exhausting eventually.
Her manager talked about what the role could lead to.
A friend wondered whether Lucia would regret turning down an opportunity because of something as practical as travel.
All reasonable perspectives.
And Lucia could see something in nearly every one of them.
That was becoming the problem.
Someone would say something and Lucia would think:
That’s exactly right.
Then she would speak to someone else who saw it differently and think:
That’s exactly right too.
The more perspectives she gathered, the less clearly she could hear her own.
One evening she was talking to her partner again.
“Marina thinks the travel could actually be good because it would expose me to more of the international work, and Tom was saying—”
Her partner looked at her.
“Lucia.”
“What?”
“I know what Marina thinks. I know what Tom thinks. I know what your manager thinks. I know what your old colleague thinks.”
Lucia laughed.
“I’ve talked about this too much, haven’t I?”
“A little.”
Then he asked:
“What does Lucia think?”
Lucia opened her mouth.
And realised she didn’t immediately know what to say.
What Am I Actually Asking For?
The following morning, Lucia wrote the question down.
What do I think?
Her instinct was to start rehearsing everything she had already considered.
The opportunity.
The travel.
The career possibilities.
Home.
The people.
The work.
Instead she tried to separate what she knew from what she didn’t.
What do I already know?
She wanted the work.
That surprised her with its clarity.
She didn’t need another perspective on that.
The creative scope excited her.
The projects interested her.
She wanted to work with the team.
She wanted the challenge.
Then:
What am I genuinely uncertain about?
The travel.
Not whether she was capable of it.
Not whether she could endure it.
Whether she wanted the amount of it the role appeared to require.
Lucia looked at what she had written.
For weeks, she had been asking people for their perspective on one large question:
Should I take the role?
But perhaps that wasn’t what she needed their perspectives on.
Asking Better Questions
Lucia began asking herself different questions.
What am I looking for when I ask someone what they think?
Sometimes information.
Sometimes perspective.
Sometimes reassurance.
And, if she was truthful, sometimes permission.
Then:
What might I not be seeing?
That question mattered because Lucia didn’t want trusting herself to become assuming she always knew best.
Other people could see things she couldn’t.
Her partner had.
His comment about the travel had brought something into focus that Lucia, caught up in the excitement of the opportunity, hadn’t been giving enough weight.
The answer wasn’t to stop listening to other people.
It was to become more intentional about why she was listening.
What do I know?
What don’t I know?
Whose perspective could help me understand what I don’t know?
Those questions changed the conversations Lucia began having.
Perspective as Something to Think With
Lucia went back to the person she knew who travelled frequently for work.
This time she didn’t ask what she thought Lucia should do.
She asked:
“What did you underestimate about travelling that much for work?”
The answer was useful.
Not the flights or hotels.
The disruption.
Plans that were difficult to make.
Arriving home tired.
The amount of ordinary life that had to be reorganised around being away.
Lucia spoke to someone already working in the team she might join.
“What does the travel actually look like in a typical month?”
That conversation gave her information rather than opinion.
Then she spoke to the hiring manager.
How predictable was the travel?
Which trips genuinely needed to happen in person?
How far in advance were they usually planned?
Were there periods when travel was particularly intense?
For the first time, Lucia wasn’t collecting answers to the question of whether she should take the role.
She was gathering the information and perspectives she needed to think well about the parts of the decision that genuinely remained uncertain.
And one question kept returning:
What would need to be true for this role to work for me?
Questioning the Choice Itself
Until then, Lucia had been treating the decision as though it came in a fixed package.
Interesting work.
Creative opportunity.
Greater responsibility.
More travel.
Take all of it.
Or leave all of it.
But why?
The work excited her.
The extended periods away from home didn’t.
Why had she assumed that wanting one meant she had to want the other?
Some travel was integral to the role.
Lucia understood that.
She wasn’t looking for a version of the job that removed everything inconvenient from it.
Every worthwhile choice involved trade-offs.
But there was a difference between accepting a trade-off consciously and assuming there was no room to question it.
So Lucia asked another question:
Is the role exactly as it has been described the only version of the opportunity that’s possible?
There was one way to find out.
She asked.
Self-Coaching Doesn’t Mean Thinking Alone
There can be a misconception about self-coaching that it means having all the answers within ourselves.
It doesn’t.
We don’t experience our working lives from every possible perspective.
Other people know things we don’t.
They have experiences we haven’t had.
They notice things about us that we sometimes overlook.
They can challenge assumptions, introduce possibilities and help us understand consequences we haven’t considered.
Lucia’s partner had done exactly that.
His perspective hadn’t weakened her ability to trust herself.
It had helped her notice something important enough to examine.
The problem wasn’t that Lucia had sought other people’s perspectives.
It was that, for a while, she had gathered so many of them without being clear about what she needed that her own thinking had become harder to hear.
Self-coaching gave her a way to move between the two.
Look inward.
What do I think?
Look outward.
What might I not be seeing?
Seek perspective deliberately.
Who could help me understand this?
Then return to herself.
What do I think now?
Other people’s perspectives became something Lucia could think with, rather than something she needed to think for her.
Shaping the Opportunity
Lucia spoke to the hiring manager again.
This time the conversation wasn’t about whether she wanted the role.
She did.
It was about whether there was flexibility around the travel.
Lucia explained that she understood travel was part of the job and was comfortable with that.
What concerned her was the expectation of extended periods away and whether all of them were necessary.
They talked.
Some travel couldn’t change.
There were projects and meetings where being there mattered.
But other trips could be consolidated.
Some meetings could happen remotely.
There was more flexibility than Lucia had realised because she had assumed the original description represented something fixed.
They agreed an arrangement.
It wasn’t perfect.
There would still be occasions when Lucia was away longer than she would ideally choose.
She understood that.
It was a trade-off she was willing to make for work she genuinely wanted to do.
Lucia accepted the role.
Trusting Your Own Thinking
The new role was as interesting as Lucia had hoped.
The travel took adjustment.
Some weeks she loved it.
Other weeks she was very glad to come home.
She learned things about the work she couldn’t have known before doing it.
She learned things about herself too.
But perhaps the most useful thing Lucia carried with her wasn’t an answer about travel or even the decision to take the role.
It was a different way of seeking perspective.
She still asked other people what they thought.
She still valued people who saw things differently.
She still listened particularly carefully to the people who knew her well enough to notice something she might be overlooking.
But she no longer began every uncertain decision by immediately looking outward.
First:
What do I think?
Then:
What don’t I know?
Then:
Whose perspective could help?
And afterwards:
What do I think now?
Lucia hadn’t stopped seeking other people’s perspectives.
She had stopped expecting them to replace her own.
Trusting herself didn’t mean believing she always knew best.
It meant trusting herself to listen, question, weigh what she heard and decide what fitted the working life — and life — she wanted.
Sometimes we need another perspective.
Sometimes we need someone to challenge what we think we know.
And sometimes we need to stop asking long enough to hear ourselves think.
Continue Exploring Self-Coaching
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