A story about noticing, questioning and learning from our experience as we work
Self-Coaching: A Practice for Everyday Working Life wasn’t how Otto would have described what he was doing when he first began setting aside a little time to think about his working week.
There wasn’t a problem he was trying to solve.
Work was going well.
Otto enjoyed his role.
He had a good relationship with his manager.
He liked the people he worked with.
The work interested him.
There were challenges, naturally, but there was no particular difficulty demanding his attention.
Otto had simply become curious about something.
He spent a great deal of time doing his work.
How much time did he spend learning from the experience of doing it?
Paying Attention to Our Working Lives
Like many people, Otto was good at noticing when something needed attention.
A project falling behind.
A conversation that hadn’t gone well.
A decision that needed making.
Something he needed to improve.
Problems announced themselves.
They interrupted.
They demanded thought.
The things that were going well were quieter.
A good conversation ended and Otto moved on to the next one.
A project succeeded and another began.
Something that had once been difficult became easier and eventually he stopped noticing that it had ever been difficult at all.
There was always something else to do.
Otto began wondering how much he might be missing simply because nothing was wrong.
One Friday afternoon, he opened a notebook and wrote:
What’s going particularly well at the moment?
Paying Attention to What Works
Otto thought about his team.
They had recently completed a complicated piece of work.
It had gone extremely well.
Normally, Otto would have acknowledged the achievement, thanked everyone involved and moved on.
Instead he asked:
Why did it go well?
That question required more thought.
People had understood their responsibilities.
They had raised problems early.
There had been enough structure to keep the work moving without making people afraid to adapt when circumstances changed.
Then Otto noticed something about his own contribution.
He had stepped back.
Earlier in his career, he might have involved himself in far more of the decisions.
This time he had trusted people to make them.
And they had.
The project hadn’t succeeded despite Otto being less involved.
His willingness to step back had contributed to its success.
He hadn’t consciously thought of that as development.
Now he did.
Learning from Our Successes
The following week Otto returned to the notebook.
He asked himself:
What have I enjoyed most this week?
The answer surprised him.
It wasn’t the successful presentation he’d given on Wednesday.
Or the problem he’d solved on Thursday.
It was a conversation with a colleague.
She had taken on a new responsibility and wanted to think through how she might approach it.
Otto had resisted the temptation to tell her what he would do.
Instead, they had talked.
He had asked questions.
Shared some experience when it was useful.
Helped her think through different possibilities.
By the end of the conversation, she knew what she wanted to do.
Otto had enjoyed it enormously.
He began thinking about other moments like it.
There had been quite a few.
Then he wrote:
What is this telling me?
Becoming Curious About Our Own Working Lives
Otto began setting aside a little time most weeks.
Sometimes ten minutes.
Sometimes half an hour.
There was no rigid process.
He simply became more deliberate about noticing his experience.
What am I learning?
What am I enjoying?
What am I doing differently that’s working?
Where am I becoming stronger?
What am I curious about?
What do I want more of?
What should I keep doing?
Some weeks the questions led somewhere interesting.
Other weeks they didn’t.
That was fine.
This wasn’t another task Otto had to perform well.
He wasn’t trying to extract a profound insight from every Friday afternoon.
He was developing the habit of paying attention.
And gradually, patterns became visible.
Noticing Change While It’s Happening
Otto realised he was increasingly interested in developing other people.
He still enjoyed solving complex problems himself.
But something else had become equally satisfying.
Helping other people become better at solving them.
He noticed he had become more comfortable stepping back.
More interested in asking a good question than immediately providing an answer.
More attentive to the conditions that helped people exercise their own judgement.
None of this represented a dramatic change.
There hadn’t been a moment when Otto decided:
This is who I want to become professionally.
It had happened gradually.
Through experience.
And because he had begun questioning that experience, he noticed it.
Working life wasn’t standing still.
Neither was Otto.
Self-Coaching Is More Than Problem-Solving
It’s easy to associate coaching with something that needs attention.
A problem.
A difficult decision.
A change.
An obstacle.
Something we want to improve.
Self-coaching can help us enormously in those situations.
But working life gives us far more material than difficulty alone.
A successful project gives us something to examine.
So does a conversation we enjoyed.
Something that came more easily than it once did.
A moment when we handled something particularly well.
A new curiosity.
An opportunity.
A sense of satisfaction.
A good decision.
Something we want to do more of.
Self-coaching allows us to work with all of it.
Not because every working experience needs analysing.
But because our everyday experiences contain information about how we’re developing, what matters to us and where we might want to go next.
From Awareness to Learning
Otto began to recognise a simple movement in his self-coaching.
First, he noticed.
That went well.
Then he questioned.
Why did it go well?
He became aware of something.
I stepped back more than I usually would.
He considered what that meant.
The team exercised more judgement because I gave them the space to do it.
Then he made a choice.
I want to do more of that.
And eventually there was another experience to learn from.
Notice.
Question.
Choose.
Act.
Learn.
Then notice again.
Self-coaching wasn’t separate from Otto’s working life.
His working life was providing the material for it.
When an Opportunity Appears
Several months later, Otto’s manager mentioned something during one of their regular conversations.
The organisation was considering creating an internal initiative to help managers become better at developing their teams.
Nothing had been finalised.
The shape of the work was still being discussed.
But she thought Otto might be interested in contributing.
“Have a think about it,” she said.
Otto did.
But the opportunity didn’t begin a completely new line of thought.
It connected with something he had already been noticing.
What have I been learning about what I want more of in my working life?
Developing people.
Helping others strengthen their judgement.
Creating the conditions for people to take greater responsibility.
The opportunity hadn’t created Otto’s interest.
Self-coaching had helped him notice an interest that was already developing.
Knowing More About What Matters
Otto didn’t immediately say yes.
He wanted to understand what would be involved.
He talked with his manager.
Asked questions.
Considered how it would fit alongside his existing responsibilities.
Thought about what he might have to do less of to create space for it.
But he wasn’t beginning from a blank page.
He knew more about himself than he might have done several months earlier.
Not because he had completed an assessment.
Not because somebody had told him what his strengths were.
Because he had been paying attention to himself at work.
He knew what had been energising him.
He knew where his interests were moving.
He knew what he had become better at.
He knew what he wanted to explore.
That knowledge helped him make a conscious choice.
Otto joined the initiative.
A Practice, Not an Intervention
The new work gave Otto more material.
Some of it confirmed what he had already noticed.
Some challenged it.
There were aspects of developing managers he enjoyed enormously.
There were others he found more difficult than expected.
So he kept questioning.
Kept noticing.
Kept learning.
His notebook continued.
Some weeks there was a decision to think through.
Some weeks there was a success worth understanding.
Sometimes Otto noticed something he wanted to change.
Sometimes he noticed something he wanted to keep.
There were questions prompted by curiosity, opportunities, conversations, mistakes, progress and ordinary working days.
None mattered more simply because it was difficult.
They were all part of his working life.
And they all gave him something from which he could learn.
Self-Coaching as Part of How We Work
Perhaps that’s what it means for self-coaching to become a practice.
We don’t need a problem to give us permission to examine our working lives.
We can pay attention when things are going well.
Learn from success as well as difficulty.
Question what interests us.
Notice what energises us.
Recognise how we’re changing.
Become curious about what we’re becoming good at.
Think about what we want more of — and what we may want less of.
And make choices informed by what we’re learning about ourselves along the way.
Otto hadn’t transformed his working life.
That wasn’t the point.
He had become more attentive to it.
He noticed.
He questioned.
He made choices.
He acted.
He learned.
And then working life gave him something new to think about.
Self-coaching wasn’t something Otto reached for when working life became difficult.
It had become one of the ways he engaged with working life every day.
A practice for noticing, questioning and learning from his experience as he lived it.
Continue Exploring Self-Coaching
Read more Professional Self-Coaching stories and explore practical self-coaching resources in the Professional Self-Coaching collection
Work With Me: Individual WorkLife Coaching, Commissioned Learning Resources, Speaking Engagements and Organisational Partnerships.
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