When you’re the one offering advice, it feels really good in the moment. You’ve done something useful. You’ve spared someone some pain. And yet, in telling them what to do instead of accompanying them on the struggle and helping them figure out how to do it themselves, you have just taken away a bit of their power, a bit of their self-esteem and a bit of the confidence and wisdom they would have gained had accompanied them through that tunnel of pain towards the other side.

Just as some people use practices like mindfulness as an avoidance tactic from feeling their own painful feelings or facing uncomfortable realities - a strategy often called “spiritual bypassing”, coaches and facilitators may use our conscious belief that we are acting on a mission to ‘bettering the human condition’/ ‘transforming leadership’/ ‘uplifting organisational cultures’ as a guise to avoid facing the dark little corners of ourselves, where all those aspects of us that we are not too proud of tend to lurk - our fear, our arrogance, our smallness.

We might call this strategy ‘WTT (walking-the-talk) bypassing’ - which essentially means that we keep ourselves too busy helping (or believing we are helping) others to walk their talk to notice that we’re not actually doing it ourselves.

Over the years, I’ve had my share of facilitating learning programs for reluctant groups of employees, who were there not because they had chosen the learning but because somebody else in their organisation had thought they needed it. After witnessing all flavors of resistance and studying in-depth the lived process of psychological growth, I have come to believe that choice to participate and readiness for learning are absolutely fundamental to the impact of any learning program. Without one or both of them, learning initiatives are bound to be at best ‘momentary fun’ and at worst a painful obligation - a chore for all involved. Without these two conditions, I don’t believe meaningful change can happen.

One piece of advice has been echoing through the halls of self-help, personal and leadership development: "Be Yourself!” or “Be Authentic!” I’ve long found that notion problematic. What does ‘authentic’ even mean? Is this notion assuming the existence of a singular, fixed, ‘genuine’ self? But what if the self is not a static 'one thing,' but a vibrant, dynamic, 'many things'? What if our identities are not monolithic, but multifaceted? Rather than being confined to one 'true self,' might we be a kaleidoscope of selves that emerge, change, and adapt in response to different situations, relationships, and life stages?

We have hardly begun talking about how painful the process of vertical development is. And we’ve barely explored what to do with that pain - how to befriend it, make it more bearable, create emotional space within us so we can create more mental space and, in turn, more freedom to deal with the challenges in our lives in new ways.

I am sure every facilitator knows the sense of joy at the end of a long day of training, when participants leave the room with a smile on their faces, expressing gratitude for an uplifting experience, or perhaps proudly carry a list of actions for change they had co-created in some hours of intense conversations, reflections and engaging activities. There is a sense of exhaustion one feels when that room is finally empty and, with it, the hope that the change will stick. But does it?

My fifteen years of practice have shown me that it rarely does.

If stages of development can be likened to the octaves on a piano - each subsequent stage allowing an individual to ‘see more’ of themselves and the world and ‘play’ a more complex ‘melody’ - you might say that with each of these octaves there will be different ‘notes’ - themes or lines - of development which a coach can become attuned to and utilise in their work with the clients. Some clients are simply better at accessing certain ‘notes’ over others - all within the same ‘octave’ of development.