I found a young man eating chips

Transcript

Recently I shared something about a question that got a novel out of me. I liked what happened so much that I decided to learn how to do it myself. So I trained for five weekends in London with CTI – Californian originally, although we did it here. This was, I think, in 2013.

What surprised me was how much of the training I already had. After all, I’d been a journalist for nearly 20 years, and a journalist’s job is to ask a question and then actually listen to the answer.

But questions have a different function in coaching. In journalism, you ask questions to surface material to share with everybody else, somewhere else, a bit later. In coaching, it’s confidential. So the answers are mostly for the person who gives them voice.

At the end of the first day of the training, we were told to bring someone along, or to have someone we could get in touch with that same evening, so we could practise our coaching skills. I had forgotten to ask anyone. So I went out into Hatton Garden to find a volunteer.

It was early evening, dark and cold. As a journalist, I’m not afraid of walking up to strangers and asking them things, but almost nobody would give me the time of day. So I went into a pub and looked for anybody sitting on their own. I found a young man eating chips with a pint of beer. He was 19, he said. He’d done a bit of work as a builder, and he told me his girlfriend would be joining him in 15 minutes.

I asked whether he’d mind if I sat down. I said I was training to be a coach, and I’d like to coach him for ten minutes – and that if his girlfriend arrived early, I’d just go. He can’t possibly have known what I was talking about, but he was very polite, and he moved along the sofa to make room for me. His name was Dean.

I’m not going to tell you what we talked about. I can’t remember after all this time anyway, but I wouldn’t tell you if I did.

Afterwards, because the training required me to come back with one, I asked him for a testimonial. “Sure,” he said. And this is what he said:

“You do need somebody to…” He started, stopped, and started again. “You need that little push to open up to someone. Talking to you has made me see the light in my life. You made me think, and I feel like loads of weight has been lifted off my shoulders.”

I think about that evening occasionally. What stays with me is not that I must have been a towering genius, but how little it took. Just ten minutes with a stranger who had no stake in the outcome. I couldn’t help him with anything practical, I was going to get up and leave when his girlfriend walked in, and we would never see each other again.

That was the whole mechanism. Somebody asks, somebody else gets to say the thing out loud, and something shifts.

Since then I’ve had a lot of conversations like that. I’ve had hundreds of clients, and I long ago stopped counting the hours I’ve spent with them. But I have never had a better demonstration of what the thing actually is than that 19-year-old with his plate of chips, who gave me ten minutes because he was too polite to say no.

The original version of this story, which I think I posted in 2013, is still up on my website. I’ll put a link to it on the episode page, along with a way to get in touch if anything occurs to you.

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I run a small weekly online group for people with a serious creative project. It’s called the Wednesday Group. Check my website to see whether it’s running, or when it’s next running, if you’re hearing this some time from now.

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Thank you for listening.