Coaching through a pandemic: 4 months after…

Just two weeks before the lockdown Germany, I flew back from New York to Berlin. On my way home, there were a couple of fellow passengers in masks, and it felt like an unnecessary wariness.

I landed in Berlin, had a couple of face-to-face coaching sessions with my beloved clients, and on March 13th, after I saw the progression mainly of the mood of the people around me, I put myself into a self-imposed lockdown.

As someone with extreme empathy, I couldn’t be around people. It was draining my internal battery. People were scared, people were cautious. I felt as if I am in Soviet Russia when everyone could be a spy. In this case, infected.

To understand how Coronavirus affected my business, you need to understand first what my business is.
If you look at coaching as a business, my supply is the state I am in. My energy is my resource for my work.

To be there for my clients, I needed to be there for me first. As a coach, my role is of a neutral observer, clear mirror, and nonjudgemental, curios witness. If I am not resourceful and am not present, I am not providing my client with the “product” that I am proud of.

So my problem wasn’t the virus itself but the fear that I could feel all around me.

As the first step, I decided to take care of myself. And it became of a full-time task. First emotionally and then financially.

If you talk with a client from a place of need — you are not serving them. Neither you are helping yourself as a coach. So I did what my clients needed to do. I made sure I have an extended run rate to allow myself to say No to a client when I need to.

Then I asked myself (and in parallel, my colleagues) a question — what does it mean to be a coach in this pandemic world? How did our role change? What is needed now? How can we be of help?

No matter in a pandemic world or not, a coach needs to be quite adaptive to the client and their situation. And here, I needed to be incredibly adaptive. Even with clients with whom I worked for over a year, I didn’t know which state they will appear in the next sessions. What thoughts, feelings, and emotions they are bringing with them. This time taught me to be extremely diverse in my coaching. Not assuming anything and really being in the moment with a client.

Also, a lot of my coaching switched from being strategic and longterm to being very tactical and quick. My clients needed to act right away, yet maintain the quality of their decisions and leadership.

Everything around these leaders has changed. Some started questioning their own identity “what value do I bring to the table in this situation?”.
Some needed to switch to being fully remote, and they were not prepared, and some needed to deliver hard messages to their teams. It was hard for everyone.

When it comes to new clients, first, there was silence.
Companies started laying off people, CEOs, and VCs, who hadn’t experienced coaching before the pandemic, were hard to convince coaching is something that could help them overcome the challenges they were going through.
There was a risk to sound like I am trying to use their pain to sell something they don’t need.

After the silence, came a wave of clients who wanted a quick fix.
My responsibility as a coach is also to warn such clients that there will be no quick fix. And you only can do it if you don’t fear for your own business. So my strategy of securing myself first proved to be correct.

Only by the end of May life started to seem normal. And seeming normal is the new challenge not only for my clients but also for me. No former norms work anymore; systems felt apart. Small pixels are changing. Yet on the positive side, I start seeing through myself and my client cases that the reality (at least for the startup community) is better than the fear is painting it to be.

We landed somewhere, yet we are all not sure — where?