It’s all about the process

“Just tell me what to do”

That’s something I’m often asked when coaching clients.

Just telling my clients what to do would be the easy thing to do.  They pay me, I tell them what to do.  It reduces my workload and involvement significantly and off they go.  They’re happy, my bank balance is happy, I get a lot of time back. Everyone’s a winner, right?

Well, no, everyone isn’t a winner.

If I just tell my clients what to do, I haven’t empowered them at all.  I’ve just given them a process or a checklist to follow.  That’s great if all they want is to become an automated version of me, but they don’t learn anything from that other than how to follow a process.

Now let me be clear, in MBTI I’m an ENFP, almost as far away from a process-driven individual as it’s possible to be.  I question EVERY single process or checklist and I know I drive my ISTJ colleagues crazy by my inability to follow a simple process without question.  I’m outcome-driven.

But to me, blindly following a process doesn’t teach me anything, and it’s this belief that drives the way I coach.

When you find out the answers for yourself, when you learn by doing, the process that results from that stays within your neural pathways accompanied by the understanding that goes with it.

When you simply follow a process because you’ve been handed it, all you’re doing is building flat-pack furniture – using the quickest easiest route to get the result you want so you can carry on living your life without a further thought.

That’s fine if you don’t want things to change or you’re not interest in how you get results, and let’s face it, no-one wants to spend more time than they need to in building flat-pack furniture, it’s a means to an end and serves its purpose.

But if you want to create lasting change, and that’s why my clients come to me, a pre-ordained process or checklist isn’t going to give you that.

Lasting change comes from the questioning, the learning and the understanding.  Sometimes, that results in a process that you can rinse and repeat, and if that’s what works, fantastic, but even that process needs to be reviewed regularly because a process is only as good as the time in which it was written.

Life, technology, emotions and experiences evolve and if we’re trying to run our life at 40/50/60 years old with a process we created when were 20 or 30, we’re going to come unstuck. Just like the flat-pack furniture that was built to suit our student accommodation, it might still be just about holding up but I suspect it’s not quite up to the job anymore.

To get the outcome and results you’re seeking when you work with me, the questioning, learning and understanding are the most important parts of what we do. Only after going through that can you create the process that works for you.

Every transformation is a process, but not every process leads to transformation. Some processes simply keep you stuck with the same results time and time again.

As Henry Ford said, “Do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got”.

Maybe now it’s time to review your processes for creating your Blockbuster Life.