Easy change And Hard Change

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This blog post is taken from our podcast on the same topic which you can listen to here.

All coaching is about change.

And all Change lies at the heart of transformational coaching.

What do we mean by ‘all change’?

Well, not all change is equal.

The chances are that, if you’d only ever learned to coach using the GROW model, for example, you’d only ever be able to cope with easy change. You would probably steer away from the hard change.

But as a coach, easy change could be as simple as following the GROW model;

• What’s your goal?
• What’s your current reality?
• What options have you got?
• What are you going to do?

And your coachee tells you. And they go off and do it. That’s easy change.

So, we are saying that it’s not just that change lies at the heart of transformational coaching, but that all types of change lie at the heart of transformational coaching. Some of it easy, some of it hard. And that’s what we’re going to explore today.

Sometimes we can decide to make a change and it can feel almost effortless. Off we go, and we just do it.

And then other times, we feel like we’re really struggling to bring about any change at all.

Tom says:

“I love playing tennis. I don’t have to think about it. Sometimes when I’m sat on the couch and I’ve got a game coming up, I think, ‘I’ve got to get up now. I’m going to play tennis’. But it’s never, ‘I’m not going to go’. I’m always going to go because I love my tennis. Now, I had a shoulder injury that caused me pain if I played a top spin backhand. I have a one-handed backhand, and if I played a top spin, it meant my arm flew up in the air and jarred at my shoulder, and it was causing me a lot of pain.

I had four options.

• I could stop playing tennis for a while and let my shoulder recover, but I had no idea how long that was going to take. And I was loving my tennis, so I didn’t want to stop and do that.
• I could carry on playing the same shot and just put up with a pain and potentially ruin my shoulder even more. I didn’t really want to cause more damage to my shoulder.
• I could develop my backhand slice because the action of a backhand slice doesn’t seem to trouble my shoulder.
• Or I could switch to a double-handed backhand, which tends to put all the pressure on your left arm rather than your right arm.

I had a couple of lessons switching to a double handed backhand. This one didn’t work, I was rubbish. So, what I did in the end was to opt for the easy change, which was to develop my backhand slice. And that’s what I tend to play now, backhand slice.”

Sometimes easy change is exactly what we’re looking for.

What is it that makes easy change easy?

Easy change, typically, requires very little emotional and psychological effort. There’s not much of a shift required. It might take a bit of a change of perspective, but it could simply be, following the GROW model works out for our coachees.

Where the desired outcome aligns closely with our existing habits, our values, our mindset and it’s like a natural evolution rather than a revelation. That’s easy change.

It could be something like adopting a new fitness routine after realising how much you enjoy running. It’s a change that feels good. It doesn’t create a huge amount of internal conflict. It’s maybe driven by that intrinsic motivation, and you’re not going to be fighting any big barriers to make the change.

It’s smooth, almost effortless, but there’s no significant psychological shift.

How are you defining hard change?

Hard change is something entirely different. It’s the change that is more of a battle. It’s difficult. It takes a lot of emotional and mental energy. It often requires us coming face-to-face with deeply ingrained patterns, fears, or those limiting beliefs we might have. It’s a shift that feels like you’re trying to move a mountain, and it’s not just about changing a behaviour. It’s transforming the way we see ourselves and how we relate to the world around us. It could involve overcoming deep-seated fears, unhealthy habits, changing a deeply-held belief system, saying goodbye to a way of living or to the people we live with.

It could be huge.

It’s very much identity, mindset, and limiting beliefs. And that’s where a transformational coaching approach comes in.

Just to Clear – All change is welcome in the coaching room!

If you’ve learned how to use the GROW model and maybe done some solution-focused coaching and motivational interviewing, they’re great basic forms of coaching that will allow you to have a really good coaching conversation. People will probably go away thinking, ‘Yeah, I’ll go and do this.’ And they may well do it. If indeed it is an easy change.

But there are a lot of people that have a coaching conversations that don’t make the change they said they were going to make, because it’s hard change.

And if we only have a solution-focussed approach, or a M-I approach, how we can explore this further. Perhaps, we won’t have dug deep enough to know whether it’s going to be easy change or it’s going to be hard change because it’s going to be different for different people. Easy change for one person might be hard change for another because they’ve got some emotional or psychological barriers getting in the way.

We use solution-focused coaching on our training programme as one of the introductory models of coaching because it’s useful, because sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer. Sometimes that’s all we need to do.

What Other Approaches Might Help?

When we look at a cognitive behavioural approach coaching, it’s a twin track approach. So some of it is the behavioural element. And we might have someone leave the coaching room and try something new, and that might work. If it does, we don’t have to do anything else. But then if it doesn’t, we have the cognitive bit element. Why hasn’t it worked? Let’s look at the cognitive side and the emotional. Let’s look at everything else.

Other Things To Consider

• Sometimes the ease of change depends on whether it’s well-aligned to what is going on for the person in their life at the moment.
• If a change is aligned to your values and aligned to your sense of purpose, it should be the easy change for you. But it could be that by following your path, you’re going to upset everyone around you, which makes it harder.
• Timing, or your environment, perhaps because of other things that are going on in your life, might make it harder.
• If you’re under-resourced, if you’re exhausted, that’s going to make it harder. Maybe some of the inner resources need to be in place before change can happen or before easier change can happen.

Obviously, a lot of our doctors that come on our training programme, want to make a change to their working patterns, but they’ve been used to those working patterns for a long time. And quite often, they will have ended up in the roles they’re in because they like the security. They like the certainty of those roles and have carried on doing them because it doesn’t upset the status quo. We have to acknowledge that making changes, maybe it’s not even a big change, but something that’s going to upset the status quo, feels like a huge change. It’s not for us as coaches to dictate whether it’s an easy change or a hard change. What looks on the surface like easy change could be really hard for someone because they’ve got these ingrained ways of being, limiting beliefs, or set of values. For a lot of our doctors, they have a commitment to the NHS. If they were considering doing private work, working for a private health company, that could really conflict with their values and could be a really hard change for them to make because they have been conditioned to be loyal to the NHS.

And thank you for that commitment.

It could be that’s what’s getting in the way of them living the life they want to live.

When a change taps into our values, our strengths, it doesn’t feel like a chore. It can feel empowering, in fact, because we’re utilising the things that we’re good at, the things we feel passionate about. But when change is in opposition to our values and our beliefs, it just becomes so much harder. Let’s think about someone who’s been through a series of career changes, but is deeply rooted in the belief that stability is the most important thing. Making a career change after that might feel like they’re going against everything they’ve ever known.

The NHS is full of people that have made that choice to have a career in the NHS and thinking of leaving the NHS or even just having a portfolio career with some outside work can feel like a big shift.

The harder the change, the more likely we are to encounter some internal conflict; maybe some ambivalence, or some cognitive dissonance that occurs where maybe the actions we’re thinking are taking go against core beliefs that we’ve held. That’s a really high barrier to overcome. But within the coaching room, we can actually stop to think about the values that we have. Where do those values come from? Are they actual values or are they just learned ways of being that we’ve taken on from other people? To actually stop the think, ‘What do I believe? What are my values?’ That’s important work to do.

Then to recognise those barriers, to explore those thoughts and beliefs that might be holding them back. Because sometimes those beliefs are really deeply rooted.

Another factor that might come into this is the level of control we have over the situation. The more control and the sense of agency the coachee has, the easier the change tends to be.

If you tell a coachee what to do, the chances are they’re not going to do it because that’s not their choice, it’s not their decision. They might actually resent you making those suggestions. If people feel like the change is being forced upon them, so maybe some external change in work patterns, things like that, again, that’s harder for them to accept, harder to take to.

When we feel like we’ve got the power to choose our change, and it’s something we’re actively deciding to do, that’s empowering.

How Can We Help Our Coachees With Hard Change?

Creating a safe space is essential. This helps our coachees explore their fears, doubts, values, and beliefs in a way that they know they are not going to be judged. That space where they feel really heard, really understood.

Hard change often involves confronting some really uncomfortable truths. We do need to make sure that our coaches know they’re not alone in the process and we can validate their experience before we help them to move forward.

Loss of the status quo. This is especially relevant with big changes. There may be a sense of loss. Some people aren’t ready to give up the status quo, and are happier to complain about it. But if we want to embrace the hard change, we have to accept the loss. Understanding what will be lost, acknowledging that sense of loss and allowing for some grief to emerge is important.

The model of ‘Cartesian Coordinates’ might be useful in this scenario, it breaks the situation down to:

If you make this choice, what will you have?

If you make this choice, what will you not have?

If you don’t choose that, what will you have?

If you don’t choose that, what will you not have?

Those four different questions sound very familiar, similar. But it covers all the bases and really helps with exploration of this nature. It’s a bit like a pros and cons list, but actually gets people to think it through and talk it through more deeply and to think about the consequences of changes they’re going to make and actually give them time to come to terms with what they would be giving up.

Small Steps: breaking things down into smaller actions can be good in terms of taking that hard change, but maybe making it simpler, maybe experimenting with things, trying things out. All of these will help to make hard change less overwhelming.

Mindset: Reframing thoughts around potential failures or setbacks. Having a contingency plan. Helping coachees to understand that setbacks are an opportunity for learning and growth. Understanding that can make a big difference in garnering the energy to push forward and to make progress.

The Transformational Approach

Where we differ in our training is that we will look at coaching approaches that will address the psychological and emotional barriers that prevent people making hard change. Something like the Gestalt approach really gets people to get in touch with who they are and to become more of who they are, which then makes the hard change easier. Things like cognitive behavioural coaching, where we’ve got that twin track approach, maybe the easy change in the behavioural element, but then looking at the cognitive, the limiting beliefs, and addressing those. And some positive psychology will help with mindset.

If you’re looking at hard change, transformational coaching is probably the place you want to be looking for your coaching because the coach is going to help you identify what’s getting in your way. So that  if you get stuck in making those changes, they can explore with you, what are those emotional and psychological barriers that are preventing this change from happening?

Change is often complex. And it’s important to meet our coachees where they are, whether it’s easy or hard. We all have the potential to create meaningful shifts in our life. And there is something about transformational coaching that facilitates that change, that shift in people that makes the hard change easier.

Find out more about our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma  and get in touch if you have any questions about either.