Befriending Inherited Beliefs: Coaching Demo with Jerry Colonna
with Jerry Colonna, CEO & Co-Founder of Reboot.io; Executive Coach
Transcript
Edited for readability: filler words removed, names checked. It may still contain errors. The audio is the source of truth.
Jerry Colonna
My first psychoanalyst is a woman named Dr. Sayers. And Dr. Sayers, I worked with her for 30 years. She used to say all the time, there's a right way, there's a wrong way, and there's a way that works. Most coaches get so fixated on the right way or the wrong way, the right way, the wrong way, that they lose consciousness of what's working and what's not working. Methodology is really, really important, but mastery is when you learn to drop the methodology. And my fear is that too many coaching programs skip that part.
Tobi
Have you ever caught yourself worrying whether you are enough? At work, in your role as a coach, or simply financially? This kind of unconscious belief and worry is what Jerry Colonna talks about in his somewhat autobiographic books, Reboot and Reunion. And it's a theme that I could resonate with quite a bit when I was reading them last year. Ironically, Jerry is an extremely successful executive coach with a background in venture capital, who has been on podcasts like the Tim Ferriss Show, and who has been coaching leaders for over two decades. And on today's episode he does a brief session with me. Somewhat surprisingly, we end up talking about to what extent these kinds of beliefs are inherited, and how we, or our clients for that matter, need compassion for our parents and grandparents to overcome them. The coaching demo we have is relatively short, and as usual I try to unpack Jerry's
approach, his coaching methodology, afterwards. And I learned that there is no methodology, no plan, no framework, but a lot of what a psychoanalyst might call the third ear. So whether you're just starting out or you've been coaching for decades already, this one might challenge how you think about methodology, about coaching mastery, and about what it really takes to grow as a human and as a coach. Let's go.
Jerry Colonna
Well, first of all, thanks for having me, it's a delight to meet you. And it's always moving to me to meet people who have been inspired by my books. To speak just about missions: talking to my agent yesterday, I'm working on yet another book proposal, and I said to him, why the hell am I doing this? Why am I going to put myself through this torture? And he said, do you think you have a choice? You don't have a choice, you're a writer.
So it's helpful and encouraging and affirming to hear that you felt moved by my book. Now, to your question. My knee jerk response is something that I've been saying a lot lately, which is that I do see myself, and I see my work, as an expression of what in Buddhism we call the Bodhisattva vow. And the Bodhisattva is someone who has the potential to achieve enlightenment and thus not have to take rebirth, but chooses to take rebirth in order to work for the alleviation of suffering. So that's a highfalutin way of saying that my mission, if you will, is to alleviate suffering. But this morning, as I was journaling and thinking about the call with my agent yesterday: it is by writing this book, the new book that I intend to write, that I will be redeemed, and in my redemption I will redeem others.
This is the why of all that I do, but especially my writing, and this is what I will leave behind. So, yeah, I think like a lot of folks, as I age and become more myself, my mission, if you will, is evolving. Whoever is suffering. I mean, when you're a first responder to suffering, you don't get to choose. Quite honestly, it's one of the challenges I have in terms of managing my calendar, my schedule. Here's a perfect example. A young woman reaches out to me on LinkedIn. She's a lawyer transitioning to becoming a coach, this is relevant even for this podcast. And she writes to me and she has this long note about how important it is for her to be a
coach, and how she has a coach and she's been trained and she's gone through all the mechanisms, and she gets stuck on the how. Well, how do I do this? And she wants to have a 15 minute conversation with me in which I would tell her how I did it. And, leave aside for a moment the projection that's so implicit in that: if I only touch the hem of your garment, I too will know how to be a coach. It doesn't work that way, as much as my ego might like to think that. But I wrote back to her and I said, I will definitely do a call with you, but please understand there is no how that you're going to glean from me that is going to somehow tell you your how. And in Reboot I tell the story of a coach who reached out, wanted to talk about, like, I don't know if I'm a good coach, if I can do this. And we
went for a long walk, not quite a German walk, but close. And I realized that what she was really feeling was the anxiety of not knowing if she was enough, and really wanting someone else to assure her that she was enough. And I suspect that that's a kind of suffering. And so then what I do with my calendar is, I squeeze it in. You know, how long did it take us to find a time to speak? So I found 30 minutes, because 15 minutes isn't going to do anything. And we'll talk in a couple of weeks and I will do what I can to help.
Tobi
Nice, thanks for sharing. I'll get back to that suffering in a bit. But maybe, as a means of introducing you a bit more, can you talk about, in your life as a coach nowadays, who's a typical client of yours, and what do you usually help them with?
Jerry Colonna
Well, I would say that the predominant profile of my client base, and I have about 40 individual clients, you see this, that problem that I was mentioning before, most of them are leaders in some capacity: CEOs, or investors, managing partners, that kind of thing. A few are individuals in transition. For the most part those are the people that I work with on a regular basis, and I do two sessions a month. Sometimes I'm taking emergency phone calls, like I was in Barcelona last week and I had to do a couple of emergency phone calls from clients. Sometimes it's just a text or an email. Recall for a moment that about 12 years ago I co-founded a coaching company called Reboot, and we have about 10 coaches. And so a lot of times we'll work in collaboration, and we do some cultural transformation work and all. But we work under the rubric of executive coaching, if you will, even though
the distinction between executive and life coaching is a little pedantic and silly. But that's okay.
Tobi
Yeah, especially.
Yeah, and I guess for many of these clients it's also hard to differentiate work and life.
Jerry Colonna
You know the material. It's, I want to be a better leader, I can't sleep at night. Or, I want to be a better leader, and why do I want to fire everybody who works for me? Or, I want to be a better leader, and why do I feel so incompetent all the time? You know the material. Whether there are a hundred thousand employees or five employees, the material's the same. The context is vastly different and the tactics are different, but it's essentially the same.
Tobi
And what you shared earlier about this lady who reached out to you about wanting to be a coach, but underneath possibly worrying, is she enough, that seems to be a recurring theme in your books, in your work, and it's also what really resonated with me. Can you talk a bit about how this theme of being enough, and overcoming to a large extent possibly this quest, has shaped or has evolved throughout your life?
Jerry Colonna
Well, the first thing I'll actually comment upon is the fact that it even resonated with you, and that it's something that you've seen with, I'm imagining, the listeners of this podcast, or even your own clients. So let's just do a little math. Let's imagine, mathematically speaking, statistically speaking, that this is the predominant theme in all of your encounters, and so much so that you feel it. What can we extrapolate from that?
Well, the first thing we can extrapolate is that this is a human condition problem. I published Reboot in 2019, and it's been incredibly well received. I've had an extraordinary number of people be moved by the book. But the phenomenon that really most moved me, and I wrote about this in Reunion, my second book, the phenomenon is best exemplified by a conversation I had with a young woman named Joy, who is a barrister in Ireland. She came to a book reading and she was the only black person in the entire room. And she sat in the front row and she kept nodding and nodding and nodding as I talked about things. And in this particular instance I talked about the phenomenon of early parentification, how common that is among leaders, where, as
children, we are forced into a leadership role, often within our family experience. And I can see the little wry smile on you. So we're talking about this and she comes up to me and she says, yeah, that happened to me. My father died when I was, I think she said 13. And I said, oh, I'm so sorry. And then she said, yeah, he was killed on Robben Island. Now, Robben Island is the prison where Nelson Mandela was held. And then she went on to say, yeah, he was beaten to death by the South African police. He was a freedom fighter from Zimbabwe, he'd been caught on the border and beaten to death. And then she said, as she grew up she immigrated to Ireland, and again, as I said, became a barrister. And she said an incredible phrase. She looked at me and she said, your story is my story. What's phenomenal about that is, I grew up in Brooklyn. I did not grow up in Zimbabwe.
I am an old, straight, cisgender white guy from Brooklyn. Our stories could not be more different. And yet the thing that moved me most about the experience of having written Reboot, and I did not anticipate this, was how many people would find resonance in the stories that I tell. That was a long way back to what you were saying before, this phenomenon. There's a subsection in one of the chapters of Reboot and the subtitle is, I am enough just as I am. I am enough, just as I am. Now, the reason I wrote that, hint hint, is because I struggle with that. The reason I wrote that is because I worry about that even to this day. I'm 62 years old and I still fucking worry about it. Okay? I'll get off a call with a client and I'll go, ah, did I break them? Did I screw them up? Was
I there for them? Was I the first responder to suffering that I yearn to be? All that stuff. So I think that this is a core wound, especially for we in the West. I think this is a phenomenon that exists. I won't go into the socioeconomic reasons why I think this is so, but I think that there's this disturbance in our psyche, our collective psyche, that worries about whether or not we are enough. And it goes beyond imposter syndrome. It's this core sense, when we care so much about the world, of, am I a good enough husband? Am I a good enough parent? Am I the man that my parents thought I was going to be? Am I the man that is capable of overcoming what my parents thought I was going to be? All of these phenomena add up to this universality of the experience.
Tobi
Yeah. I think it would be really interesting to explore these themes maybe in a small demo, in a way. So I could share a bit how this resonated with me. You talk a lot about your parents, and then also about financial stability, in a way, as a theme that sort of shaped your drive.
Jerry Colonna
Yeah, I mean, that's it for me. The fear of not having enough money is really rooted in a fear of not having enough safety. And money, even to this day, is a proxy for feeling safe. So occasionally I will freak out that I've spent too much money, and then I have to sort of bring myself back and realize, oh, I'm not feeling safe. And then I have to examine what's making me feel unsafe, and then, all of a sudden, magically, I have enough money. Anyway, that was the root of my story.
Tobi
Yeah. And I think for me, I've been financially safe all my life, I would have to say. But I think for my father this really was his theme, making sure that the family is financially safe. This was the focus of his life, and driven, I would say, a lot by fear, and by looking at what is wrong and what is not there. He used to work in a bank, basically checking the credit worthiness of other people. So his focus in his life was also kind of finding other people's mistakes or errors, what could possibly go wrong, looking at risks.
Jerry Colonna
What could possibly undermine their credit and therefore their fiscal safety. That's the positive framing. Thank you. Well,
Tobi
And yeah, I think that
Jerry Colonna
a kind of obsessive picking apart of people.
Tobi
I would say so, yeah. And then he would always say, why don't you go into public service and become a civil servant, where you have maximum job security, and these sorts of things. And I followed that path to the extent that I went into engineering studies, became an energy engineer, on paper at least,
Jerry Colonna
Did you go,
Tobi
but then, good enough, I would say.
Jerry Colonna
Keep going.
Tobi
And then, while I was at that good school, he was diagnosed with, yeah, sort of bipolar psychosis. And this is also where, until nowadays, my passion for mental health comes from, to some extent. So that went on for 10 years, and this journey eventually ended in his suicide, actually.
Jerry Colonna
Well, we need to pause and just, that's a big statement. I can feel the suffering inside of that, including his, but also that of his family. What was his first name? May you rest in peace.
Tobi
Yeah, and this is just for context, in a way. Where your work resonated with me was this: while we were going through this, we started metaFox, next to, coming out of the engineering studies. I stayed in the energy sector for a while, but then basically went down the psychology publishing road, in a way,
and was always trying to explain to him, like, look, this is how we make an impact, this is also how we're becoming more and more stable as a company. And I think he had a hard time getting that. He was still worrying, are we safe financially? And, how is it in terms of health insurance if you're self-employed? These kinds of questions, that's what he would ask a lot.
Jerry Colonna
Yeah. Did you read Reunion, my second book?
Tobi
For the most part.
Jerry Colonna
So, you know that I unpacked why my father was as he was, and, very briefly, he discovered on his wedding day to my mother, because his mother was so angry with him, discovered that he'd been adopted. She stood at the back of the church during the ceremony and screamed, calling my mother a prostitute. And then screamed, you're not my son, you are adopted. And that set me on a path to try to understand my father's drinking, his depression. And the quick story is that when he was 18 months old he was given up for adoption. His birth mother was a 20-year-old hotel maid, an immigrant from Ireland. And as part of writing the book I went to Ireland, where she is buried, and I went to her grave site. That story comes to mind because there may be something in there for you, to really understand the roots of your father's fears, which might have manifested in the bipolarity. It's easy to think of the bipolarity as the
root cause of his emotional state, but you could flip it. So bear with me. Do you know what year your father was born?
Tobi
1957.
Jerry Colonna
Okay. What was Germany like in 1957? Still recovering from the war?
Tobi
Yeah. And at the same time, growing, rebuilding rapidly.
Jerry Colonna
What happened to his parents?
Tobi
They grew up in a very small village, with sort of a farm and also the local village pub.
Jerry Colonna
So you think that they were always safe?
Tobi
For sure, no. His father was in the war.
Jerry Colonna
Okay, so just hold on to that thought. Your father was born into an environment where the lack of safety was a predominant theme. So of course he was fearful. And, as for many people, get a civil service job, get a job that has a lot of stability with it. It was a really important theme for him, because even though the economic boom had begun by 1957, the memories of the loss are still in the collective unconscious. Does that make sense?
Tobi
Yeah. And looking at this on a meta level, what you are suggesting is that me trying to have empathy for the situation of my father and his father would help.
Jerry Colonna
Right. So that you can have empathy for yourself. Because the part of you that worries about whether or not you are enough may have been fueled by a father who looked at all the things that you did and implicitly said, that's not enough, you need to do this. And so you could fight him, or you could understand him, so that you don't have to worry about being enough ever again. Because you are, as you are, enough. Kind of a radical thought, huh?
Tobi
Yeah, wild idea. And how do I make that thought stick, or get that to a sort of subconscious level? Because, having trained as a coach and all of this, this seems kind of obvious, having empathy, having self-compassion,
Jerry Colonna
Right.
Tobi
though I think, whenever days are full and shit hits the fan and it's hard to get away from the laptop in the evening, that's the moment when I don't remember.
Jerry Colonna
Let me reflect back what you just said. When I'm under duress, when I'm stressed, I regress to these belief systems. Now I'll use coaching language: I regress to these belief systems that have shaped me. You'll be able to relate to this language. You're familiar with what a subroutine is, right, in computer programming? So think of this belief system, I am not enough, as a subroutine that you inherited. And you asked a really important question, and I'm going to respond to it both as a coach in this moment, kind of working with you, but also as a bit of a mentor coach for the people who are listening. One of the phenomena that I don't like about modern coaching is that when we unpack, using what I refer to as radical self-inquiry, when we unpack the answers to the question, how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want, my infamous question, the natural impulse is to slap our forehead and say, what an idiot I am. The natural impulse is actually to provoke guilt. And your client will go through the exact same thing. So they have this big epiphany moment: oh, my fear of
not being enough is rooted in the experience that my grandparents had, to be simplistic about it. So they have this big epiphany, and you're starting down the path. So I had this cognitive awareness. Big deal. Cognitive awareness does not create transformation. So there are two steps that you have to do, and there are two steps that your clients have to do, to actually make that transformation that they're seeking. Because you were starting to ask, how do I do this when I'm under duress, when I'm stressed, when that old belief system comes back. So there's a two step process, to put it simplistically. The first step is to recognize the benefit. And this is really confusing for people. Imagine for a moment that grandma and grandpa, your father's parents, were a bit afraid. They had their life. They probably inherited the farm, or they
certainly inherited the vocation, so farming goes back multiple generations. They probably lived in a beautiful location. They had a simple life, the kind of life that we in an urbanized environment yearn for. And yet the war, and not just World War Two, I mean, go back to World War One, go back to the 1920s, go back to the poverty. So they grew up in an environment where they thought they had things, but there was some anxiety. So that anxiety about being enough, about being safe, about being able to be loved and to feel like you belong, all that's stirred up. And so they raise a son, and I bet you they sent that son to a good school. Maybe not the best,
Tobi
Yeah.
Jerry Colonna
but they got that son an education. Because what did they want for that son? Do you have children?
Tobi
One son.
Jerry Colonna
Okay. What do you want for your son? Absolutely the best, right? You want that son to feel loved, to feel safe, to feel like he belongs. So they probably put, I don't know, I'm going to have some fun, they put Lederhosen on him and he goes off to school. Maybe not in 1957, maybe he's not Bavarian. So he goes off to school and he does his best, and they say, study hard and you'll have a good life. And he studies hard, and he doesn't dream big. He doesn't want to create the next great startup company, he just wants to have a good life, settle down, be able to pay his bills. And so he takes a boring-as-shit job because he wants to be safe. So we look at all this. Look at the benefit. You know what the benefit is? You. All that
anxiety, from grandparents to father, resulted in a son who got a great engineering degree, who's got the privilege and the capacity to say, I actually want something more out of my life, there's something more there. In fact, he has the privilege of making sure that, as a father, he's going to give his son all of the love. All of the love. He's not going to be hypercritical, he's not going to find fault every five minutes in order to keep him safe. He's going to love the crap out of that kid. That's the benefit. That's the good that came out of all of that negative. So the first thing we have to do, when we're trying to transform it, is to appreciate what that subroutine has done for us. Oh my goodness, that subroutine got us out of whatever circumstance we were in, so that we can then be in this
circumstance. That's thing one. All right, now pause. Thing two: only repetition creates transformation. It's not cognitive awareness. Cognitive awareness is a necessary condition for transformation, you have to understand what was going on, but it's only an overly rational mind that thinks cognitive awareness will do it. Oh, I know smoking's not good for me, therefore I won't smoke. It doesn't work that way. So when you catch yourself, the same thing, I'm stressed, I'm worried about this, or when I catch myself worrying about money, I get really, really curious. What is it that I'm really worried about? Oh, I'm worried about whether or not my kids love me. I have an 11 week old granddaughter, my first grandchild. I worry
about whether or not I'm going to have enough of a relationship with her so that I can be the granddad that I'd like to be. And my default mode is to worry about money. So I investigate with curiosity, I send myself a whole bunch of love, and then I let it go. So that's the process. Any resonance with you?
Tobi
Yeah. So it starts with this empathy towards your heritage, in a way, which goes towards self-compassion. And then I think what you did there is sort of craft out this narrative which, I mean, yeah, you had some simplifications in there, but I think the broad strokes and this theme of seeking safety were really on point.
And by sort of embodying this narrative, and repeating it, I would get that towards my subconscious, in a way.
Jerry Colonna
And look, I'm mindful of the fact that this is a podcast targeted at coaches. So let's imagine you doing that with your own clients, whether it's you, Tobi, or even somebody who's listening. Think of the clients who feel stuck in the same patterns over and over again. The psychologist Carl Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you'll call it fate. We, and our clients, repeat patterns because they give us a benefit. And until you make the benefit conscious, and realize you can get that benefit in other ways than repeating the pattern: oh, I need to
feel safe. Well, if I take a look at my life, and if I do a financial analysis, it turns out that I am safe, I'm okay. Hey, now I can let it go. That's the work that we do as coaches. Look, can I say a word or two about coaching generally? I get frustrated because most coaching programs don't get to the root of the issues. They get so fixated on methodologies and patterns that, when the coach feels stuckness, what's going on is they're feeling the stuckness of their client attaching, like Velcro, to the stuckness that lives within them. And then what do we do? We're trained to double down on the pattern that we were taught in the coaching program, implicitly sending the message, you're not doing it right, you're not doing the methodology right. Oh, for God's sake, that's not the way human beings transform.
Oh, I have to follow these five steps, and if I follow these five steps all of a sudden I'm going to have transformation. That's not what happens. We have to use the experience that the coach is having to be able to be of service to the client, to understand what's at the root of the experience. I have a former client who wrote to me recently, he's been what I call coach shopping. He's back in the market looking for a coach and he's talked to five different people. By the way, he's also on his third therapist. And the subject line in the email thread is, stuck. And I said to him last night in an email, this is your issue, dude. I've been with you for seven years, this is the issue. And you keep looking to a new coach who's going to somehow get you out. This is not going to be solved by coaches changing methodology. Oh, maybe we should do IFS, internal family systems. Maybe we should
do, and I don't mean to dis internal family systems, I'm a big fan of it. But, you're an engineer. When you're working to solve a problem, you can't solve the problems around the problem, you have to solve the core problem. After you solve that, then you change the infrastructure around the problem. It's the same thing in coaching.
Tobi
Yeah. And I can relate to what you say about coaches looking for the right methodology and trying to follow the right cooking recipe. That's also how I trained as a coach. One of my first educations was in NLP, where it's all about modeling: what do other people do? So you really try to break it down into recipes, and then you hope that you sort of diagnose the issue correctly and then pick the right cooking recipe to work out, as a coach.
Jerry Colonna
And then when it doesn't work, how do you feel about yourself as a coach?
Tobi
I'm worrying, and that's exactly the point I was getting to. I'm worrying that I'm not enough, which is doubly problematic. If my client also comes to me because they think they're not enough, then it's two people being stuck, worried that they are not doing their job right.
Jerry Colonna
This carousel of everybody not being enough. Okay, so let's talk about methodology for a second. Methodology is really, really important, but mastery is when you learn to drop the methodology. And my fear is that too many coaching programs skip that part. Now, maybe it takes decades of coaching. I'm entering my third decade as a coach. So maybe it takes 30 years to get to the point where, like, last week I was in Barcelona working with a bunch of
coaches, and we were talking about some of the folks that they work with. And I had met this fellow and I had made an observation about this fellow, and one of the other coaches asked me, how did you know that? And I had to pause and go deep within myself: how did I know that? Because at this point I don't always track the method I'm using. I have to actually go back and reconstruct it, because it's so intuitive. But if I can give you language that might be very helpful for you and every other coach out there, this is something, if you remember from Reboot: my first psychoanalyst is a woman named Dr. Sayers. And Dr. Sayers, I worked with her for 30 years. God rest her soul, she passed in 2018, just before I published Reboot, I dedicated the book partially to her. She used to say all the time, there's a right way, there's a wrong way,
and there's a way that works. Most coaches get so fixated on the right way or the wrong way, the right way, the wrong way, that they lose consciousness of what's working and what's not working. The only thing that matters is what works.
Tobi
I'm wondering how that evolved for you. When you go into a coaching conversation today, and also looking at what you did earlier in our small demo: it's surprising how little I talked, and yet you picked, I would say, the core themes, this theme of safety, and then worked out that narrative. And then I guess we could have gone further, or you said, okay, it would be now up to me to repeat that, to anchor that, to really embody this narrative, so that I also remember, in my not so strong moments, the fact that I'm enough.
Jerry Colonna
Would it be useful if I reconstructed what was happening for me in that?
Tobi
Yes, that would be great.
Jerry Colonna
Okay, so there was a moment that I recall. And again, I'm doing what I did last week that I just referenced, where I have to, it was just so intuitive, that's why it just slipped right in. I was coaching you, suddenly I was coaching you. The jumping off point, if I remember correctly, was you resonating with the phrase, I'm not enough, or, more importantly, I am enough just as I am. I then told the story about Joy, and, your story is my story, and the universality of it. And at some point we slipped into you telling me about your father. I don't remember if I asked you about your father or not, but at some point dad entered the conversation and you gave me the story of his bipolarity, his struggle,
his suicide. And in that moment of the suicide, I felt empathy for him. I felt empathy for you as well. And what was happening for me, a psychoanalyst would say, I started to feel what's called countertransference. I wasn't your father, that's transference. We had dropped whatever projection you might have carried coming into this conversation: oh, it's the great coach Jerry, I have to be really good in this conversation. That's projection. And we moved into a really powerful field of transference, where I was feeling empathy for your father. And I can't recall if you told me before or after you told me about his mental illness and his suicide, but you talked about the job, about checking the credit. And I don't even know if you remember this, but you made this point about checking other people's
work. And in that moment I empathetically remembered my father, who was a proofreader, who would often mark up my term papers with red ink about all the mistakes that I made. And I had a very conflicted set of feelings around that experience. So in the moment I'm feeling my father as I'm listening very deeply with you. And so I'm experiencing what a psychoanalyst in the 1930s named Theodor Reik would call the third ear. I'm listening with something deep inside of me, but I've not dropped you, I stayed with you in that moment. And it was the, I called him, not your words, mine, so that's my projection into it, hypercritical, your dad. And if I remember correctly, you actually kind of got
tight as you were talking about that experience of him. And in that moment I started to wonder, why would dad be the way he was? And then I asked about what year he was born, what were the conditions under which he was born. You see what I mean?
And I talked about my own journey with my father. Your discussion of your father brought my father to my consciousness. Which then, rather than backing away, which I believe most coach training programs train out of the person, don't think about your own experience, they don't say that explicitly but they train it that way implicitly, because they don't know how to handle what is called countertransference. They don't know how to teach the coach to work with that which has arisen inside of us in service of the client.
So let me just pause. And, by the way, that all happened and I was conscious of it, but not
Tobi
You didn't have a plan in mind.
Jerry Colonna
I did not have a plan in mind. I just did what I do naturally. It was like riding a bike, it's muscle memory. So I did a little bit of coaching, and now what we've done is kind of unpack what was actually happening in that moment. Questions about that?
Tobi
Yeah, because that evolved now very organically, and I think it takes a lot of trust in your own capabilities, that you will get to this point and you will feel this. It reminds me of another guest that I had, Todd from the UK, who is doing what he calls energy work, which seemed to be very similar, as in him listening inside himself and mirroring back.
Jerry Colonna
Yeah, yeah.
Tobi
But I guess, when you entered the conversation, or when we said, okay, let's do a small coaching demo, this was not your plan? Or was it?
Jerry Colonna
It was not my plan. If you remember, I think you offered to send me questions in advance, and I said, no. I don't even remember what I said, but I don't even read them. Because, and I think you're right, I trust the magic. I trust that magic will happen. When I plan, whether it's in a coaching session or a speaking engagement or a podcast appearance, what happens then is no magic. It becomes rote, it becomes routine. It's like you can pull the string behind me and just like a talking doll I just speak. And quite frankly, that's boring as shit for me, and I don't think it's particularly helpful for people.
Tobi
And how, over the last 20 years, did you get to that point? Because I guess it wasn't always that way. So when you started out, building this trust that the magic will happen, what was it that you had in mind? Any double diamond shaped framework or whatever, when you enter a conversation?
Jerry Colonna
So, what you're asking, you're noting that I don't have a plan, that I stay fully present. And then you asked, did I have a plan to get to a point where I didn't need a plan? The answer is, what do you think?
Tobi
Well, I guess earlier you said coaching schools all train you in methodology, and at some point you have to overcome
Jerry Colonna
That's
Tobi
the methodology,
Jerry Colonna
That's right.
Tobi
but what happens before that point? That's what I'm wondering.
Jerry Colonna
So the piece that you're really looking for is not, what was the plan, or did I have a plan. The piece that you're looking for is, at what point and in what way did I start to examine what was actually happening in the coaching session for me? Because that's how it happened. And if you go back, you probably know this about me, I journal every day. I've been journaling every day since I was 13. If you go back 20, 25 years, a lot of the journaling entries are about the coaching experience that I was going through, as a client or as a coach.
As a coach, right: what is happening? And you spoke about the other guest who comes to the same conclusion through a different doorway. They're coming through an intuitive healing kind of energy work experience. I'm coming through, and using the language of psychoanalysis, because I have been in psychoanalysis for 40 years. I continue to see my analyst, a different one, twice a week. Yeah, you just raised your eyebrows, because here's the
piece that too many coaches fail to do: supervision. We get trained and then we're out into the world. Hello. The potential for malpractice is enormous. I've got the methodology, what do I need to talk to somebody about my coaching for? Because this is a spiritual vocation. This is not just another job. If you treat it as just another job, get out of the field, because you're going to damage people. So have multiple levels of supervision. Months ago I walked into my analyst's office to talk about this strange transferential relationship I have with a client who very much feels like, I mean, first of all, everybody projects onto me that I'm their father. I'm a good father for so many people, right? And I have to work with that. I can disappoint clients if I
don't, if I'm not minutely paying attention to them, all of a sudden it's like, oh my God, dad has dropped me, kind of thing. So I have to be very aware of all of that that's going on, and I will bring a lot of that into my conversation. So the short answer to your question is, it evolved over time. It was my use of my therapist first, and then a conscientious effort to enter into this world of supervision. At Reboot we do peer supervision. We have 10 coaches and we work in what we call pods, and people bring client cases into the conversations and we talk about them. And then Reboot also offers a program called Reboot Supervision. I don't want to be in the training business, first of all, as a business person it's a shitty business, and more importantly it takes me away from client work, and I don't want that. But supervision is kind of interesting.
Supervision is, how can you, as a trained coach, be better?
Tobi
As a coach, but also as a human.
Jerry Colonna
That's right. That's exactly right. We use the work to do our work, to complete the process of becoming the human being that we were born to be, so that we can be in Bodhisattva-like service to our fellow human beings, through the magical lens of being a coach. It is such a gift to be a coach. We have an ethical, moral responsibility to continue to grow as a coach, to listen to podcasts like yours.
Tobi
So if I'm now the Jerry from 25 years ago, I'm a coach who started out, who still sticks very much to their methodology and their frameworks, what would you tell me to get on this path of trusting the process?
Jerry Colonna
There's a right way, there's a wrong way, and there's a way that works. At the end of your sessions, journal. Ask yourself, what worked? Pay attention to what feelings came up for you. When I take my notes, I have an old fashioned clipboard, and when I take notes, on the left hand side of the page I write what the client says, and on the right hand side of the page I write what I'm feeling.
Tobi
After the session you're doing that?
Jerry Colonna
During the session. And so what I'm doing is, I often visualize myself as having two eyes: one eye is on the client and one eye is turned inward.
What is happening? What is happening inside of me? Am I feeling tight? Can I breathe? Am I feeling anxious? I remember the moment when this was really, really important for me. When I first started coaching, I used to have to sit in meditation after every single session, because I was feeling it all so much. I would even smudge, using a sage stick,
to get rid of the energy. And I started noticing that with certain clients I would end the session and I was, like, severely anxious. Like, what the fuck? I was fine this morning, now I'm anxious. And Dr. Sayers used to say to me, well, what do you think's happening? You're listening to people all day long who are anxious. What are you doing with that anxiety? Think of it as a free floating experience that just, boop, lands on you. Boy, they feel better, now you've got the anxiety. So it's not, the thing I would say is, it's the work around the coaching that turns you into a more masterful coach. It's not the work in the session, per se, it's the work you do to support yourself as a coach that really makes the difference. Otherwise you're just going to be one of these executive slash life coaches who
struggles to get clients, and maybe your average retention is eight months, 12 months, people come in, they move on. And that's not why you went through this process of becoming a coach. That's not why, when God tapped you on the shoulder and said, sorry, you thought you were going to be an engineer, you're going to be a coach. That's not why. You did this to make a difference in people's lives. It's one of the most important callings out there.
Tobi
Thank you.
Jerry Colonna
You are welcome.
Tobi
That's it for today. If you want to learn more about Jerry's work, and also his own approach to overcoming those beliefs, check out his book Reboot, or Reunion, which is the one about all these inheritance themes. Or, of course, go to reboot.io. All these links are in the show notes. In two weeks we'll continue our conversation and look a bit at how Jerry translates this wisdom into his own leadership bootcamps, and how he helps leaders to master the art of growing up. If today resonated with you, share this episode with a fellow coach or a friend. And of course, if you have any feedback, drop me an email at tobias@metafox.eu. I'm Tobi, co-founder of metaFox coaching tools, and I'll see you in the next episode here in two weeks. All the best on your own journey towards becoming an impactful coach. Cheers.