Blog : Lessons from clients

***Sometimes the best start to a coaching or therapy journey is when the client begins with the clear statement, “I’m sure you can’t help me, because no one can help me.” Judging by my experience so far, amazing and valuable things can be accomplished from this premise. Why is that? Maybe because I feel challenged? Or does it reflect a hidden ego power of clients, which they can then use to get what they need? In this case, I was really having fun during these sessions and that had a lot to do with this client’s unique strengths.***

The Zoom session showed the torso of an overweight man with a face like an older bulldog. He described himself as gloomy, nothing in life interested him and he enjoyed nothing… except his work. At an age when other businessmen have retired or become lethargic, he had started yet another business. Early in life, he had expanded his father’s and uncles’ business chain until it finally had to be abandoned. Then he took matters into his own hands and built a new business chain, until that too had to come to an end and he couldn’t get a decent pension. Now in the third part of his life, he had chosen a relatively modest role as a real estate developer, which allowed him to live comfortably in his large house.

To his own surprise, he had recently started a relationship with a jovial, cheerful, intelligent and sensitive woman who lived nearby. He had chosen me as a coach because of my university background as a psychologist. My business coaching skills meant little to him, his skills in this area far surpassed mine. I suspect it was his new girlfriend who sent him with another assignment. In his words: he wanted to learn what it is to experience pleasure in life. Not that he could ever learn, he said, that was impossible given his genes and as evidenced by his life, with decades filled with 80-hour work weeks, high stress and little fun. “Matti, you really don’t stand a chance if you want to teach me how to enjoy life.”

His childhood sounded like a godfather story, about a family of low-educated men who didn’t trust outsiders and depended only on each other. The family culture of distrust led to harshness from father to son, or rather, the initial suspicion that his son was not strong enough. This weakness he proved when he went to university and got to know gentle, erudite people with interesting conversations and good manners. This pleasant period in his life lasted until he started running the family business, around the time his father passed away. After the takeover he sometimes fell into a depression, was possibly hard on others, and certainly on himself.

Gradually, the coaching sessions became a feast for him, in which he referred to the books he had read and chose to put me on a pedestal as an erudite wise man. Somehow I enjoyed playing this part, especially because it seemed to give him pleasure. As amateur philosophers we talked about Plato, Homer and ‘the garden of pleasure’, where the philosopher Epicurus invited his acquaintances for pleasant conversations over good food and drink. Sometimes he would get up from his chair to walk over to the huge bookcase behind him and bring a book to show me, with pencil annotations on many of the pages. Although we were much like fellow travelers and peers, I sometimes felt like I was taking on the role of a good father who appreciated him for his soft skills. I was touched by experiencing this together and really started to like him.

He clearly enjoyed the conversations and showed pleasure in them. But this was during coaching and didn’t really generalize to the outside world. How to proceed from here? Before my mind’s eye appeared my father’s father, who died at the age my client was now. My grandfather was poor, not in spirit but in means. There was always a lot of rubbish in the shed behind his farm. He was someone who had a reputation for fixing everything, sometimes with unexpected means, such as items from the shed. What has been the greatest strength or skill in this one-sided life of my coachee so far? This man could really make a business project a success by stripping it down to the essentials, acting honestly and level-headed, and taking a challenging project to its goal through a series of logical steps.

However, this new project ‘Enjoying Life’ was completely unknown territory for him. So together we inventoried the possible pillars under his ultimate goal of experiencing joy in life. For example, we came up with: social activities (friends), spiritual growth, physical health, and so on. We started by naming building blocks for each successive pillar: like joining the golf club, having a beer with people in a pub, repairing the motorbike and touring. He was intrigued by the process, but the concepts fell like loose sand through his fingers. So I gave myself some homework. In preparation for the next sessions I made a detailed assignment for him. With great care I developed an Excel file, with a tab for each pillar of pleasure, a description of a sub-task to be performed, with a relative value for each building block. I even went so far as to use an Excel formula to arrive at a cumulative ‘Pleasure in life’ score. Before the next session, I waited excitedly to see if he had actually started filling out the Excel.

However, when we met again, he stated that he had not completed the assignment. He summarized: “When I saw the Excel, I knew how to achieve the ‘Pleasure in Life’ goal. As an entrepreneur I have always been quick, when I saw how to do it I just applied it. And it works. Every day I get a little better at it and it’s actually not that hard once you get the hang of it. My girlfriend is delighted, although there still seems to be a lot of room for improvement. She will undoubtedly recommend you to her network so that you can increase your income.”

And indeed, as the following sessions showed, he found a good balance between work and leisure. From his perspective, he had achieved his goal in this area. Not wanting to end the pleasantness of the coaching, we did another session, amusing ourselves in the role of amateur philosophers. Not entirely unexpectedly, this turned out to be too narrow a basis for coaching. With pain in our hearts we said goodbye, each in our own way striving for a synergy of commercial success and a pleasant life.

***While writing this post, I was reflecting on my sometimes resurfacing need to be an expert in the client’s problem area. When it comes to AD(H)D, that makes no sense, because I don’t have that expertise. Anyway, I believe that in the end the customer is always the real expert. That was once again proven here by this young man who put me on the right path, so that I could really mean something to him. And thereby improve his sense of control over his own life. It felt good, calm and cheerful to work like this.***

A tense young man sat down in the chair opposite me, his eyes wide, and looked at me intently. He immediately started speaking in a somewhat high-pitched voice, saying that he was mad at himself for blurting “the wrong things” to his friends. And also by not saying what he should have said to them, which upset him because he felt like he was too busy with himself when he was around other people. He was also angry with himself for spending a lot of time in his room without accomplishing anything.

Since he may have been correctly diagnosed with ADHD several years ago, we discussed how that might affect his self-esteem. I tried to comfort him by suggesting that as his brain developed, he would outgrow it. I started to feel a little uncomfortable, why did I want to reassure him and what was the use of that…

As I dug myself deeper into this hole, I asked some questions about when he first behaved like this and continued on how the ever-present squabble between his parents had increased his chances of moving up the AD(H)D dimension. He replied fiercely: “I’m not going to develop if I stay in my room and do nothing”.

When I thought about my attitude, I realized that the night before I had read Gabor Maté’s book on the causes and consequences of AD(H)D. It had set me on the wrong track… I caught myself and asked him, “What do you want to get out of this session?” He wanted to leave this particular session with “a clear plan of action”. A plan for what, I asked? “That was a very good question,” he said, pausing for a moment and searching inside for the answer.

The session had now really begun. As he told me, his first priority was to have enough income to live a normal life without borrowing any more. He needed me as a coach for that. We talked about his current situation, possible alternatives, which alternative to choose, how and when to perform this action. The role he assigned me was to face reality, to make him say what he already knew but wanted to avoid. Sometimes laughing, we began to discover his clever patterns of cognitive distortion and avoidance.

He calculated how much money he needed and how much he could earn. He concluded and summarized: “I have to find a part-time job to pay the costs of daily living. If I reduce my financial worries, my thinking and communication become clear again. And I can find out who I am and what I want with do my life.” As he formed his plan of action, seeing what he had been trying to avoid, his body straightened.

His voice deepened and I now saw a strong and promising young man, who clearly indicated the next steps he wanted to take. At the beginning of the session, I struck up a conversation with a somewhat confused young man with a high-pitched voice, who perhaps considered himself a loser. I now saw another person, a young adult looking me in the eye. When I noticed how straight his back was now, how neatly his short beard was trimmed, we both smiled. He had taken matters into his own hands again.

Excited, I was tempted to return to a more therapeutic approach to get even more results in this session. However, the young man now confidently ended the conversation and said, “You’re making the session too long again.” We both got up and laughed. The sound of a tram reminded us of the outside world. We both looked out the window and saw the busy 19th century Amsterdam street flooded with hurried cyclists.

***As a coaching psychologist, I am sometimes paid to coach an employee on sick leave. This post describes a session where I had also invited a HR representative of the employer. I witnessed a tense conversation between her and my coachee, reflecting a conflict of interest. At first I tried to stay in the shadows, to just observe. After thinking about it for a while, I supported my coachee.***

Even though it was the middle of the day, there was little light in the large back room. It had a cozy atmosphere, quiet, with dark wood on the floor and lower part of the walls. My coachee sat in the middle of the leather couch, her feet barely touching the floor. She had the pleasant round face of a woman of color who may have been extroverted and cheerful, but didn’t show it now. We both looked through the sliding doors of the front room and saw the sunlight and a patch of blue sky in the tall windows overlooking the canal. ‘I don’t like the sun’, she said, ‘but you already know that, don’t you?’.

Maybe I was like her because mostly I prefer to be in the background, in the shadows you might say. She looked me in the eye and thanked me for sticking up for her two months ago. She referred to a three-person session, also in this room, in which a representative from her employer participated. Who also paid me as a coaching psychologist for a burnout recovery treatment for my coachee. The challenge was that everyone in the room knew my coachee probably didn’t want to go back to her job and the company didn’t really want her back either. However, it was not easy to be honest about this.

There was a conflict of interest between employer and employee about the duration of the sick leave. When would my coachee feel healthy enough to terminate the employment contract? The representative said she had my coachee’s best interests at heart. My coachee said she was doing better, but boldly added that she needed more time to recover. And not necessarily to return to her old job, although she did not rule that out (for strategic reasons). I sat back and observed how the experienced representative tried to influence my coachee.

My coachee dropped her shoulders and turned her feet inwards. I watched and remembered her stories about how her stubborn mother used to treat her. How she stopped the quiet, obedient 10-year-old girl from choosing a life path that suited her nature. Meanwhile, her employer’s representative pushed for an earlier termination date. She said it was in my coachee’s best interest to move on with her life. When I kept my mouth shut at that moment, my face started to glow. As I waited a little longer, I felt like I was holding on to a branch with both hands, knowing I had to let go and drop myself into what was beginning to look like a battlefield. When I landed in my role as a pro, I interrupted and took charge. Both looked at me as I restored balance by siding with the weaker person at the time, my coachee.

My coachee showed her strong adult side again and the three-way conversation returned to the informative and polite exchange it usually is. Somehow this event turned out to be a turning point, in the weeks that followed my coachee started to stand up for herself more. She remembered the lessons she had once learned from her cheerful father. Her dormant ability to connect with her intuition began to show itself again in our sessions. And step by step she regained hope for her future and said goodbye to her old and now useless survival strategies.

During the sessions I sometimes engaged in self-mockery as a role model for accepting my own limitations. At those moments she really started to laugh, almost rolled off the couch onto the floor and looked at me with big, bright eyes. Then she really showed the life energy, daring and fun side of herself, perhaps comparable to her adored extroverted father.

Weeks later I thought of the last words of her written review, perhaps her new mantra, inspired by her memory of her father. “I have more confidence to blaze my own path instead of walking the path of others or walking the path other people think is safer.” I pictured her sitting on the couch in my practice, happy, enjoying herself, looking through the high window at the sunlight glistening on the canal and the merry tourists passing by.

***In this post, I reflect on how my fear of being too culturally different from this client initially played tricks on me. In the first two sessions I wandered through unpromising territory, looking for possible childhood trauma. Thoughtfully, I then chose a different direction. Our transition from a therapeutic to a pragmatic coaching approach proved fruitful. It still felt like therapy to my client, though, as you’ll see.***

The young man in the seat next to me pretended to feel very relaxed. It was his first therapy session. He moved to the Netherlands with his mother when he was three years old. His father was soon to follow, but never arrived. They talked on the phone sometimes, but less and less.

He was now 22 years old and wore a black hoodie that covered most of his face. His eyes stared at a spot in the curtain that covered the wall in front of him. His jeans were deliberately ripped, his sneakers unbuttoned. Same age as my daughters, so potentially familiar territory for me, so why was I a little scared? I guess I was afraid that my ability to connect and empathize with him would be insufficient. Somehow I managed to make myself feel that his view of the world would be very different from mine.

He patiently explained why he contacted me. ‘I don’t have or show any feelings, my girlfriend said when she broke up. She’s wrong. I have them, I just can’t talk about them.’ For a while we explored what was holding him back, maybe he was angry or sad because his father had abandoned him, maybe he didn’t want to be overwhelmed by feelings?

We spent one or two sessions investigating this, mostly to no avail. He was open and candid about the consequences of ignoring his feelings when he was down, namely buying something expensive (I never asked what) or traveling to another city and getting a tattoo on a whim. He relaxed a bit in his chair and said, “Wow, I never thought I’d go into therapy, that’s very unusual in my circles.” But to be honest, not much progress was made from my perspective. I wondered if he would benefit more from a coaching approach than from therapy… Why delve deeper into his problems when a skills-based approach could hold promise?

I thought about what he said at the beginning, “I can’t talk about feelings,” and asked him what words he had to describe feelings. Well, when everything was in order, he felt ‘chill’. And when things went bad for him, he felt ‘not chill’. He had no other words to describe his feelings at the time. I remember being very surprised, used to the way my daughters talk about many different kinds of feelings.

After the session, I searched the internet for coaching tools to use in the next session. I found a set of so-called therapeutic playing cards with words for (connected) feelings on them, a tool developed for teenagers by a Belgian colleague. They were a bit expensive but I ordered them anyway. The next session I was afraid he would find them childish, so I put them on an adjacent table. Fortunately, he noticed them and asked some questions about them.

Over the next three sessions, he learned to talk about his feelings using the playing cards he moved around the table while talking. His vocabulary grew rapidly and our conversations changed. Unexpectedly for me, he began to show the true depth of his feelings. Admittedly, I was ashamed that I was so surprised at his self-knowledge. I remember the thought came to me “life is good”, probably caused by feeling more connected to him now. It occurred to him that his mother couldn’t talk about feelings either, maybe he would teach her.

At the end of the fifth session, Friday at 6 pm, he thanked me. He’d learned what he’d come for, and during the week he mostly felt “chill,” he said with a smile. We evaluated the sessions so far, also for me to learn what worked in my approach and what didn’t. Then we said goodbye and he went down the stairs alone. Due to the approaching weekend, the front door of the practice was already locked. He came back to get me and together we went downstairs with the keys. He was already talking on the phone about an appointment for drinks with friends. His last comment on the phone, as he waved at me, still rings melodiously in my ears: “Yo bro, I just got out of therapy, I’m cured”.

Like a skinny bird, she sat hunched over in the leatherette Ikea chair, beaming despair as if asking me not to hurt her. But how could I, I struggled hard not to be too protective and find the right professional approach. She told me about her history of eating disorders. Slowly, in successive sessions, she revealed more about herself, telling me about the sexual abuse she had endured as a young teenager. I felt overwhelmed and considered referring her to a knowledgeable colleague. However, she immediately trusted me as a professional because of, as she said, my calmness, openness and warmth. And even if she didn’t say it, I also think through a certain lightness of my approach, sometimes enjoying a laugh or joke.

Her choice of words intrigued me. As she spoke, I heard a talented psychology student with an interest in sociology. With depth, analytical skills, a passion for the profession and a wide vocabulary (slightly larger than mine because we spoke German, which is not my native language). What could we do? Because I felt trusted by her, I decided to take a leap of faith. I let her be my teacher. Relying on her growth potential and my ability to help her reflect on her feelings. This is where the adventure began.

Each session I let her set her own goals, determine what she wanted to work on. She felt valued as an individual as I worked to build her confidence in her intellectual abilities and perhaps more relevantly, the fact that she was worth listening to. Because she was almost the same age as my daughters, I felt extra for her if she sometimes succumbed in everyday life to the idea that her only skill was in sexual acts. She visibly struggled with this deep-seated negative self-image and feared the men she met would notice. And as it may happen, she was sometimes subtly guided in this direction by strangers. In some summer sessions, she wore clothes that showed a lot of her skin. Intuitively, I decide never to talk about it and only pay attention to her reflections, ambition and growing self-knowledge.

Over the months, I noticed a certain lightness in her appearance and she began to make concrete plans for an academic career. I have an academic background myself and her plan sounded very believable. She wanted to postpone her parallel dreams of becoming a therapist, for which she still felt too vulnerable. With her newfound confidence, she began a relationship with a man a few years older than her, which initially made her very happy. Unfortunately, partly because of him, she fell back into older patterns and the relationship became one-sided to her disadvantage. She broke up with him. And at her request, I referred her to a colleague for what she called deeper work to get to the root of her problem.

She ended our therapeutic relationship on a positive note, grateful for what it had brought her. She told me, as she later also wrote in her review of our journey, that the memories of our conversations would guide and sustain her in life. And me, what have I learned? I had learned to sit back, trust and rely on her, as a young person with the potential to offer something of great value to the world in general and vulnerable girls or young women in particular.

The slender man who chose me as his coach had a calm self-confidence, a little reserved perhaps, but friendly and attentive. At a young age, he already knew how to enjoy a career and how to grow his business. His religious upbringing had prepared him to know his own mind and how he wanted to be with other people. He stood his ground in conversations with me and always took responsibility for his own life and words. In a way, he seemed always in charge of our sessions.

On the fourth session, I accidentally forgot the keys to my practice. He was the first client that day, which forced me to turn back in the rain and I got there soaked. He was already sitting in his chair in my practice. I started drying my hair with a towel. Someone had let him in, he said, it didn’t matter that he had to wait for me. In the sessions before that, I had reluctantly convinced myself that in his mid-twenties he already had the strength to accept himself as he was. As my hair dried and more and more showers hit the windows overlooking the canal from the first floor of the 17th century house, I asked myself: “Why do I feel uncomfortable with my realisation, that he needs so little help?”. Then it sunk in.

He had just one reason to visit me, which was to come to terms with a certain period in his childhood. When he was 12-13 he went to high school where he was bullied. Deep down, he already felt sure of his own ability and worth, supported by his warm, intelligent, and religious family. At school, his peers noticed that he was different from them, maybe they noticed that he somehow judged them as if he were putting himself above them. Ah, I realized, sometimes I felt a little smaller in the room when he was with me and I found that interesting. Understandably, some classmates were not happy with his attitude. They teased him, sometimes harassed him. At some point, he returned to his gym locker room and found that they had peed in his shoes. All he could do was try to avoid them and hide in his own mind. As an adult, in some situations the 13-year-old in him was triggered and still determined his view of the world: “I am not safe, run, you will never be one of them, escape in your own mind”.

He told me that this fear was recently rekindled when his new girlfriend mixed with other people or, in extremis, took dancing lessons with extroverted dancers. I never saw him belittle himself when he was with me, probably because I wasn’t threatening to him and the 13-year-old boy inside. But now I saw it. He and I discussed this and I explained how we could address this in the next session. My suggestion was to use a visualization technique to help him reconnect with his 13-year-old self.

So he did, with his eyes closed, he visualized a forest where he could meet and talk to the 13-year-old. In a soft voice I led him, and after a while they walked away together in this imaginary forest, holding hands. A mountain appeared and they climbed it together. When they reached the top of the mountain, some lakes could be seen in the depths. He talked about how he and the 13-year-old were now one, fused. What a beautiful view he said. After a few minutes he opened his eyes. I had the strong illusion that for the first time he was really looking me in the eye, completely relaxed in his chair. “This is what I came for,” he said, “it’s very valuable. Thank you. No further session is needed.” For a few seconds I felt insecure, almost humiliated for fear of being suddenly left alone. I imagined with open eyes his view of the lakes from the mountaintop and relaxed. “Everything is possible from here,” he said.