Tag Archives: counselling

Walk the talk

Leave a reply

Question to ponder: Would you hire a fitness coach that wasn’t physically healthy?

I had an interesting conversation today with a buddy. It was about the dance between personal bias and expectations that isn’t an easy conversation. Reflecting now, the main issue was a question of how important it is that someone helping you is ‘walking the talk’.

Question to ponder: Would you hire a swim coach who can’t swim well, but really knows how to coach?

Where is the line that you personally draw when it involves coaching and advice, when it comes from someone that doesn’t necessarily follow the same advice?

Question to ponder: Would you hire a marriage coach who has been divorced twice and was not in a stable relationship?

I think these are messy questions with no clear line to be drawn. Ultimately it comes down to personal biases. I’d sooner accept a swim coach who has a crappy stroke and doesn’t swim well themselves, before I’d hire an obese fitness coach or a marriage coach with a poor relationship history.

Question to ponder: Would you hire someone to help you quit smoking if they smoked? Would your answer change if they had a 90% succeed rate when most other strategies and coaches max out their success rate at under 50%?

In the end we need to recognize our biases and follow our instincts. Whatever line we draw in one area of our lives might not be the same line we draw in others. It’s not a question of if we have biases, we do. It’s a question of where we draw the line, and are we happy with our biases? Because in the end, if I’m putting time, effort, and/or money into a coach, or counsellor, or taking advice from a friend, I’m the one that needs to feel good about it… given the biases I hold.

Question to ponder: How important is it that the coach, counsellor, or confidant giving you advice walks their own talk?

Lack of Resourcefulness

Working with kids, I sometimes see a pattern where students who struggle would avoid their own struggles by trying to help others. They can’t get their own struggles in order so they try to become the helper and healers of others. It’s easier to be the saviour than the person needing saving. The endorphins from being needed masks the depressed feelings of needing help and feeling helpless.

But when this happens, the kid doing the helping and avoiding their own work that needs to be done is not resourceful enough to actually help the other kid. They are just helpful enough to create a dependency, to build a mutual reliance on each other, with the co-dependent relationship being the only real benefit.

Now you’ve got two kids that both need help, but they look to each other for that help, rather than looking to someone that can really help them. Furthermore they are now both avoiding the work they need to do for themselves.

This is why students having at least one adult on the building that they have a positive relationship with is so important. Because kids don’t always have the resourcefulness to help other kids, and adults need to intervene when students are hindering growth by trying to help each other. But an intervening adult who doesn’t have a good relationship with the kid or both kids can actually embolden the unhealthy relationship between the kids.

This is one of the most challenging things to deal with in a school, when un-resourceful kids are trying to help each other in order to avoid doing the things they need to do to become more resourceful. It’s a cycle that needs to be broken or it can spread to even more kids. In the end, it’s about providing support and helping build resourcefulness rather than allowing un-resourceful kids try to help each other.