The Coaching Habit for Lichtenbergians

I have mentioned The Coaching Habit: say less, ask more & change the way you lead forever, by Michael Bungay Stanier before, but I’d like to circle back to the book as a whole and recommend it to any Lichtenbergian as a great read for the creative process.

Yes, the book is for managers in the business world, those who supervise teams on projects, and it includes some of the strategies I used as an administrator myself (at GHP) and even as an educator, both at the high school and elementary levels. But more than that, the seven questions in this book are important for every artist to ask themselves as they work, especially if they’re stuck (as I seem to be now).

The book is an easy read, so I recommend you get it for the full experience. I’d like to concentrate on one of the questions, because it actually helped me at least see where the knots were in my entanglement: “What’s the real challenge for you here?”

In the book, Stanier says to use this question after you get your person to talk about how things are going and what’s bothering or blocking them. To me it sounds a lot like a kanban dump: get all the ideas/issues out in the open, then prioritize/strategize.

So as I wrote last Monday’s post about not having any projects pushing at me to be born, I asked myself, “What’s the real challenge for me here?” The answer was, essentially, I’m stuck at the dining room table because my HVAC company has been unable to repair the Daikin minisplit in my attic study for months now, and the seeds of ideas in my head would require dragging down a whole bunch of art supplies and my cinemascope monitor and my keyboard and my mouse and my piano keyboard and…

Just recognizing that my main stumbling block is beyond my control was beneficial. I can let my mind ruminate on the proto-projects, maybe spit out a few notes to the WASTE BOOK, and just in general practice good old Lichtenbergian TASK AVOIDANCE until the HVAC is repaired.

You will notice that I have not adjusted my brain by saying, “Oh well, Dale, just create a new project that won’t require anything but your laptop on the dining room table.” This is not about beating your creative spirit into submission. It is about recognizing what the real challenge is.

So whether the answer to the question for you is “I need a tube of phthalo blue” or “I need certification in XYZ” or “I need to get my ass out to the labyrinth and reseed it,” The Coaching Habit can guide you through the GESTALT process, both for your actual work(s) and your process. Highly recommended.

sidenote: My epiphany was last Monday; last Thursday on the drive down to St Simons Island, my phone rang — it was the HVAC company, who had harangued Daikin into recognizing that their equipment had failed and they needed to replace my unit gratis. The new equipment is on order. Soon I’ll have to fall back on my old excuses of not MAKING THE THING THAT IS NOT.