Say what the Thing is

Years ago, at a party for somebody’s book, I met a woman called Fenella Rouse. We hit it off, and a while later she told me she was training as a coach, and asked whether she could practise on me.

I said yes because I liked her. I thought coaching sounded flaky, possibly ridiculous. I thought I was doing her a favour.

One afternoon, with about five minutes of the session left, Fenella asked if I had ever thought about writing a novel.

I said yes. In fact I had almost finished one.

It was the first time I had said that out loud to anybody in years.

In an ordinary conversation that would have been the end of it. She would have asked what it was about, and I would have changed the subject, because that is what I did with that particular piece of information.

Instead she said: “Would you like to finish it?”

“Yes,” I said, and surprised myself.

“How long will it take?”

I thought about it. About a month, I said.

I finished it in a month.

What actually happened

Nothing happened in that room. Nobody gave me a technique. Nobody held me to a deadline, or checked up on me, or sent me a worksheet.

What happened was that somebody gave me the chance to say what I really wanted, and then took my answers seriously – seriously enough to ask a second question.

It did not have to be Fenella. It could have been anybody. But how often, in ordinary life, does anybody give us that chance?

Most people I know have a Thing. A book, a business, a show, a move, a qualification, a change. Something they have not quite said out loud – not to other people, and sometimes not to themselves either. We get shy about it. We pretend the Thing does not matter.

Say what the Thing is.
Say it to someone else.
If you don’t, it may never happen.

An earlier version of this post is still here, from 2015: How to stop blocking yourself.

This is the first of a short series about what I have learned from being coached, from coaching other people, and from teaching and running groups ever since.

Next time, I will tell you about the first person I ever coached, who was eating chips in a pub in Hatton Garden and had fifteen minutes before his girlfriend arrived.

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I run a small weekly group online for people with a serious creative project. It’s called The Wednesday Group.