#188 - Observations from coaching people
Plus a life update and an offer for you
📢Here’s a life update about me and an offer for you📢
Over more than a decade in corporate life, I built and led teams across diverse backgrounds and career stages. Along the way, I found myself drawn to mentoring and guiding others.
After COVID, I started training individuals and small startups to make better decisions. I found myself enjoying the experience. I doubled down. I ran a closed-group decision-making community for several months, ran a weekly newsletter (this one!), and took on long-term mentoring engagements.
During this time, I saw that the benefits of professional development without personal growth felt short-lived to many. I could give my clients a fish every time they came to me but wouldn’t it be wonderful, I wondered, if they could learn how to fish.
As I spent time listening to people, occasionally asking them questions that made them think, I found that no transformation is as long-lasting as when people tell themselves what to do through a deeper self-awareness. Naturally, I became a student of coaching.
As of August 2024, I’m no longer just the strategy guy at my company. I’ve quit my corporate job and taken the plunge to be a full-time decision-making trainer and coach. After formally training to be a coach over the last several months, I’m excited to extend my invitation:
I am offering free 1:1 discovery conversations to see if coaching is something you might find useful.
These one-hour sessions are open to anyone who is looking for clarity in career or life, looking to uncover inner resistance to their stated goals, or struggling to focus on what matters most to them.
Whether you're at a crossroads, navigating a tough transition, or looking for ways to align your goals with what really drives you, I’m here to help you fulfill your potential.
While there are many coaches out there, my offer is simple: let’s have a conversation and see if my approach echoes with you. If you're curious to explore the possibilities, send a message to satyajit@satyajitrout.com. I’d love to connect with you!
On to ten reflections from my sessions as a coach in August. These are not all observations about others, though many started off like that. As I thought about my conversations, I simultaneously had the experience of taking a peek inside myself.
I. Being in a groove and being in a rut
The difference between being in a groove and being in a rut is our inability to examine our assumptions.
II. A sucker for hard challenges
In the absence of a compelling vision for ourselves, we accept random challenges, the harder the better, to test ourselves against. These challenges are not designed by us. They're thrust upon us.
We find a way to convince ourselves that the fact that the challenge is random and isn't set by us makes it all the more worth taking up. It's our big eff you to the world. "I beat you at your game. Is that all you've got?"
Smart people suffer from this the worst. Throw at them any arbitrary challenge and they will take it on their ego.
It can become an addiction. The crazier the challenge thrown at them, the more they're willing to let it define them.
Just because something is demanding doesn't make it worth pursuing. What makes anything worth our attention is the meaning it gives us. It comes from the answer to the question "Does it get me closer to where I want to go?"
Once you can come up with answers to it, the better the challenge, the less the struggle and the more the fun.
III. The courage to walk away…
The courage to walk away from what everyone else seems to be chasing is rooted in the curiosity to walk toward what you find energizing.
IV. Understanding failure
Treat failure as an event.
But see the cause of failure as a problem with the underlying structure of things.
The first allows you to move past failure emotionally. The second helps you spot the patterns in your behavior that cause you to fail.
In my experience, it is easier to get help from friends and colleagues to deal with failure.
For the second, you can either take professional help (coach, therapist) or do the work yourself. It is harder because you've to first be ready to accept the truth that you're contributing to your own misery.
V. Cynics and idealists are brothers from the same mother
Every cynic is a retired idealist.
You start off at work thinking everyone shares the same vision and pushes in the same direction. You of course find that to not be the case. You realize you have to persuade and understand others to get things done. You feel let down. You wonder what is wrong with everyone.
You had ideals about the world. The world fell short of your ideals. You are now bitter.
Imagine if you did your thing without being attached to any high ideals. You see reality for what it is, without continuously comparing it with what it should be. You see that people have both potential and limitations.
Do this much and you will accept that some doctors do malpractice, some social workers swindle public funds, and sometimes friends won't return your calls.
You will also get that each of them is capable of the opposite too. Now you are ready to learn to work with all kinds.
Don't confuse your ideals with your expectations.
PS: The provenance for this thought is not any coaching session but this New Yorker piece.
VI. What truly is unchangeable?
For all of us, a gap exists between our current reality and our vision for how our lives must be.
For all of us this gap creates a constant tension.
How to close this gap?
Many of us see our vision as flexible and reality as unchangeable INSTEAD of seeing our reality as changeable and vision as enduring. No wonder then in times of difficulty, we lower our vision and leave reality as is.
Only some release this tension by pushing their reality closer to their vision. These people see their vision as immovable and their reality as flexible.
The rest lessen the tension by pulling their visions closer. They see their vision as changeable and their current reality as inevitable.
Everybody tries to escape tension in their lives—the question is how do you do it?
VII. Confusion experience with manifestation
Most people, if you ask them what they want, will share a specific manifestation of their vision. They may say, I want to wake up early.
Ask them what experience they want to have as an early riser and they may describe feeling productive. Ask them how else could they get the same feeling and they will start to think…
“maybe I can stop watching Netflix with lunch because I tend to not stop in the middle of an episode”
“maybe I will not check my email before going to bed because it stresses me out”
Then they may realize that any of these things are much more doable for them than all the things they have tried and failed—meditation app, set an alarm, early dinner—to get up early.
Don't go by what people say they want. That's often a proxy.
Ask them for the experience they want. That's the true reality they want.
And by the way, some desired manifestations are too common:
I want to retire at 40.
I want to travel the world.
I want to live on a farm.
There's a unique experience hiding behind each of them.
VIII. Accepting is not resigning
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” - psychologist Carl Rogers
It may seem like once we're okay with who we are we would lose the motivation to change. It may lead to a “I'm like this only” mindset.
But accepting is not reconciling ourselves to an unchangeable internal reality.
Accepting is seeing that parts within us may not be in congruence with each other and letting the will to change spring from that acknowledgment of reality.
Accepting is not resigning. It is acknowledging.
IX. Hey, social media. You killed my hobby!
Everyone seems to be an expert today in the online world. Where have all the amateurs and hobbyists gone?
Modern society values accomplishments more than experiences. Accomplishments are objective and indubitable. Experiences are subjective and questionable.
The undermining of the value of the experience as a hard currency of success should have killed the amateur and the hobbyist. And it has, for dilettantes masquerade as experts to grab attention. They sprout bytes for the purpose of showing off their wisdom.
By doing so, they undervalue experience themselves. They consign the joys of learning something new and seeing oneself grow to the graveyard.
X. Rediscovering the joys of connection
What does it mean for us to take human connection for granted?
The default has switched from being disconnected by distance and time to being connected across distance and time.
The desire to be connected is fleeting—just grab the coordinates and voila! you have an always-on connection—and the desire to stay connected is stale. The feeling of being connected is not as valuable anymore, which in turn is because we have taken being connected for granted.
We need to lose something precious to appreciate its possession.
We need to disconnect to appreciate the joys of connection.
PS: Many of these I have posted as Notes over the last month. There are more where these came from, if you’re interested.