Hi friends!
I hope you’ve been doing well. I know I haven’t released a new solo episode in quite some time.
There’s a good reason for it. Very sadly, over the summer my father-in-law in Greece passed away unexpectedly and there have been a large number of things to figure out.
Without sharing too much, I will just say that it’s complicated. And if you have been putting off talking to your aging parents about the future, now is the time to change that.
Many people find it deeply uncomfortable to think or talk about their own mortality. Death can be so taboo. Parents are sometimes superstitious and believe it’s inviting bad luck. They might also feel like they’re burdening others by sharing their concerns and worries.
But if you can, start some conversations with your parents. Find out where they keep their passwords. Ask about their wills. And if they don’t have one, help them create even a simple one ASAP.
If they own property, get all of the info about their locations, value, and copies of the deeds.
Ask your parents if they have an advanced directive and about their ideal funeral and burial plans.
If you have siblings or others who are dependent on your parents, figure out a plan to make sure their needs are met as well.
Despite the discomfort that these conversations may incur, the more clarity you get as a family before anything dire happens, the better for everyone.
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Okay, so the title of today’s episode—“The One Thing that Guarantees Failure”—is a bit of an exaggeration. But let me tell you where it comes from.
Earlier in the year, I gave a five-step formula for success when it comes to achieving writing goals—or really any major long-term goal. If you haven’t listened to it, I strongly encourage you to go back to Episode 109.
I’m really proud of that episode. It was a culmination of everything I’ve learned through writing and publishing two sole-authored books plus my work as a developmental editor with—at this point—hundreds of scholarly book authors.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about success and what goes into reaching lofty, challenging goals. I mean, I’m trained as a life coach where everything is about possibility!
But I realized recently that I haven’t put nearly the same amount of thought into what causes people to fail.
This dawned on me when I was listening to a podcast interview with John Cena. Yes, I mean that John Cena. The professional wrestler-turned-A-list actor. Doesn’t it feel like he’s everywhere now? He seems to be replacing The Rock, but anyway.
I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of his, his acting feels really rigid to me. But he appeared on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast and I thought it would be an interesting listen.
And it was very entertaining! But more than that, he said something about success and failure that really stuck with me.
Essentially, he does not have a recipe for success, per se. But he believes there are four things that—when done together—will guarantee failure in your career and in your life.
So of course, my ears perked up when he said that.
These four things are: being unreliable, being unprofessional, being uninvested, and being uncoachable.
I think that the first three are pretty obvious. If you are irresponsible, overly casual and/or uncommitted to something, you will most certainly not achieve huge success.
But that last point about being uncoachable really stuck with me. It made me reflect on the few situations I’ve had where things did not work out with certain clients and to consider what they might have in common.
And I realized that being “coachable” might be the most important soft skill of all. It’s also something that academia does a very bad job of teaching people.
So today I will define this term and talk about how becoming more coachable invariably improves our professional and personal lives.
What is Coaching?
So before I get into what I see as the main features of coachability, I want to first talk about what coaching actually is. And also, how it differs from things like counseling or therapy.
The way I always explain it is that coaching is all about helping people achieve future goals that are in line with their own core values, needs and priorities.
The starting premise of coaching is that we are all already whole, resourceful and wise.
Ultimately, each individual already has their own solutions deep within them and the coach’s job is to help them connect with their own inner knowledge.
This means helping people delve under many layers of socialization and things like negative stereotypes and self-judgments to get at those answers.
Through coaching, people can address issues like self-doubt, anxiety, perfectionism, procrastination, and self-sabotage.
Not by rejecting these things but by seeing them as habituated responses that naturally arose to defend oneself from the harshness of the world. That harshness could be found in someone’s childhood home, their high school, neighborhood and/or academia.
What I truly love the most about coaching is the idea that there’s nothing about a person that needs to be fixed.
It’s not a deficiency-oriented perspective. Instead, when we’re feeling stuck it’s about slowing down and tuning in to our own wisdom to find a path forward.
Unlike therapy, there’s not a huge focus on the past. But the major distinction, I’d say, is the idea that the goal of coaching is aligning with yourself, not fixing yourself.
The Three Main Features of Coachability
So now let me turn to what coachability means and why it’s such an important, undertaught skill in the academy.
But first, a little bit about my own background in coaching. I was certified by the International Coaching Federation back in 2019. Since then, I’ve done more than 1200 hours of one-on-one coaching plus facilitated many coaching groups and workshops.
I’ve also hired a ton of my own coaches, including a dating coach, two business coaches, and many life coaches.
Therefore, you’d think I would have figured out what makes someone coachable but I really hadn’t until now!
And among the hundreds of academics I’ve coached, there have been exactly three clients with whom things did not work out.
Meaning that the coaching relationship failed and our sessions were cut short. Two occurred after an extensive amount of time working together—with one of them it had been around a year-and-a-half—while one decided to stop working together after only two sessions.
This probably goes without saying, but all involved some amount of negative feelings on their part.
Everyone was working on a scholarly monograph, and originally came to me because they were having a hard time with writing.
Notably, no one was unreliable. They showed up to meetings and on time. In fact, these were all tenure-track or tenured faculty members who had achieved quite a lot in their careers.
However, they were all ultimately uncoachable.
Based on these unfortunate situations, I have come up with a list of what I consider to be the three main qualities of coachability.
Let me tell you what they are.
#1: A growth mindset
The first quality is a growth mindset and openness. It means using failure as an opportunity to grow and learn and not as a reason to shut down.
It means being flexible and willing to change direction as well as experiment with new ways of doing things.
You may have listened to my interview with Dr. Jen Heemstra about academic leadership. She shared a story of how in her first job, she had fulfilled all the requirements of tenure but her department voted against her.
Rather than hiding in the corner and taking this as evidence that she wasn’t cut out for academia, she used this low point as a life lesson to create a career in line with her integrity. Not to just hit milestones. That’s what I mean.
In pop culture, I hear a lot of talk about the importance of developing a growth mindset, especially in regards to teaching young kids to be less rigid in their thinking and behavior.
But adults really need this skill as well!
It’s interesting because even though I always considered myself to be a self-aware person who values growth and change, I had a fixed mindset for many years.
I wasn’t even aware that I subscribed to a huge number of what coaches call “limiting beliefs” about myself and what was possible for my life. And these beliefs piled up the longer I was in academia.
I had a fixed mindset about money, about professional opportunities, about relationships, and about my future in general.
This didn’t really change until I started working with a dating coach when I was 39 and she overtly challenged a range of deeply-held assumptions that were holding me back from the life I wanted.
One of the things I believed at the time was that men were intimidated by a high-achieving woman with a PhD, and this was why I couldn’t find anyone. I wielded that one like a shield.
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy because the more I believed it, the truer it seemed. In my head, if this was true, then why would I even try?
My coach basically told me I was being ridiculous and quite exclusionary to be lumping ALL men into the same category. She showed me how this belief was something I used to keep me from committing to the process of finding someone.
And of course, logically, it was ludicrous because I was living in Cambridge, MA and surrounded by men with higher degrees who obviously value education and intelligence.
But this belief allowed me to give up after each small disappointment instead of learning from the experience and applying that as knowledge moving forward.
My coach encouraged me—and by encouraged, I mean, forced me—to meet as many people as possible and to put as little pressure on these meetings as possible. To think about it just as information gathering rather than looking for the “one.”
We treated it like a scientific process. After each date, I had to reflect on it and fill out a self-evaluation form that we talked about later.
This was really hard for me because I had to go way outside of my comfort zone as an introvert. And I had to go on a lot of boring or weird dates that I would have avoided at any other time in my life.
But you know what? I also had some really nice conversations with interesting people I wouldn’t have otherwise met.
And ultimately, the consistency and commitment paid off and I met my amazing life partner six months later. It felt like a long six months, but in the grand scheme of my life it wasn’t at all.
So what does having a growth mindset mean when it comes to writing?
Basically, you are willing to question and chang your own limiting beliefs about yourself and your writing. You treat feedback as an opportunity to learn and grow as an author and a person.
You’re also open to trying new strategies or a new schedule. You’re willing to experiment, see what happens, and then course correct from there without being so overtly focused on the outcome.
#2: Not taking feedback personally!
So this gets into the second aspect of coachability, which really overlaps with the first one. This is: not taking feedback personally.
I honestly think this is the most important one of all. Because when you conflate your research, ideas, and publications with your own value and self-worth, I can guarantee that bad things will ensue.
Every round of feedback that is not 100% praise can feel like a personal attack. Or constructive comments can be construed as having malicious intent.
I’ve talked before about a colleague I used to work with who gave me the silent treatment after I provided feedback on one of their book chapters.
This person conflated their research with their identity. Their insecurity manifested as a mixture of arrogance and deep anxiety. Which, let’s be honest, is no fun to be around.
But this is what happens when you don’t create a separation between work and personal identity. You are far more likely to become defensive and close yourself off because your nervous system is in fight or flight.
In that state, it’s impossible to hear anything good or supportive.
I’ve also noticed that when people get defensive, they don’t have gratitude for the effort the other party has put into trying to help them. When for most academics, reading other people’s work is unpaid labor!
So when someone takes the time to give comments, even if the comments weren’t what you hoped for, recognize the effort they put into them. (Unless they are clearly AI-generated, in which case I give you permission to get really mad.)
I’m not saying to stop caring about your work. But, you can care without making your self-worth dependent on the outcome.
So if you know you tend to get defensive when receiving feedback, no problem. It’s a human reaction. BUT you don’t need to act from that place.
You can put the feedback away for awhile. When you’re ready, you can ask yourself: if I didn’t make these comments mean anything about ME, what useful information could I extract from them?
Or, you could have someone else read the comments and help you decipher what’s constructive and helpful.
That’s where coachability lies.
I’ll give you an example of the same situation I faced with two clients around the same time that ended very differently.
They had both given me chapters to read that didn’t yet have a real framework, argument, or logical organization. That is completely fine. A lot of chapters start out that way.
My feedback was that they each needed to pause writing and go back to outlining. Or, my suspicion was, they were working without an outline so they needed to create one.
Sometimes, writing more does not help you clarify main points but, in fact, does the opposite.
So what happened? Well, one client took what can only be interpreted as extreme offense. They emailed me later to say that suggesting they pause writing to gather their thoughts in an outline meant I wasn’t supportive of their scholarship or of them as a scholar.
To say I was surprised was an understatement. But essentially, they made my feedback mean something hugely detrimental about themselves.
They made it completely personal, whereas my advice didn’t have anything to do with them as a person. It’s something I would suggest to anyone in that situation based on my depth of experience with book writing.
This happened during our second session, and this individual decided we were not a good fit at that point.
I agreed that we weren’t a good fit, primarily because I cannot be held responsible for someone else’s emotions.
The fixedness of their mindset meant they wouldn’t be able to truly progress on their book because they couldn’t receive basic feedback.
Meanwhile, my other client did not take my suggestion personally–and, I don’t think most people would. Instead, they put their trust in the process and were open to trying something new.
It took a lot of hard work, but after slowing down to articulate their primary questions and main point, their chapter is now in good shape.
#3: Follow Through
And this brings us to the third aspect of coachability, which is follow through. This means that you actually produce some results in line with the feedback or coaching you receive.
Now, I don’t expect people to agree with everything I suggest for them to do. And there’s no reason for you to just capitulate to all the feedback you receive either.
Anyone who’s gotten reviews back about a journal article knows that you often receive totally conflicting suggestions. Then it’s up to you to decide which direction to go in, as long as you can justify why.
You’re an expert in what you do and you should absolutely disagree when it doesn’t make sense.
But coachability means that you are willing to consider it and follow through on the things that are useful.
That said, I do expect my clients to take my comments about bigger issues that are causing real problems and make noticeable shifts in their next draft.
For example, if a piece of writing lacks a clear argument, we will come up with one together during our meeting. Obviously, I will expect that argument to appear in the next draft and be used to structure the chapter.
Or it could be more grammatical issues. Like it really irks me when people consistently overuse certain sentence structures in their writing.
One of them is the “not only, …but also” conjunction. Everybody uses it, of course. But when I see some form of it in every paragraph of a 30-page paper, that’s not good.
You’re leaving the point of the sentence to the very end, which is making your reader do more work.
The other one, which I’ve talked about before, is when people list many items in a row in a sentence. Obviously, it’s necessary to do this on occasion. But some authors, if they’re not careful, will have two or even three sentences in a row with long lists. It’s like their default mode of writing.
Take, for example, if my website described my work in the following way: “Leslie Wang is a writing coach, career coach, developmental editor, and publishing strategist. She helps authors write with more ease, joy, and satisfaction. Her podcast features interviews with coaches, editors, and authors.”
That’s all true, but it’s so boring! There are so many better ways to engage readers than using lists. Okay, rant over.
Summing Everything Up
I’ve talked about the three main qualities of coachability:
1. The first is having a growth mindset. This means openness to doing new things and using failure or setbacks as an opportunity to grow and do better. You can simultaneously be an expert and a learner.
2. The second is not taking feedback personally. This means having a clear separation between yourself as a three-dimensional person and your work. You are not the same as your ideas or your publications; you are so much more. When you don’t take feedback personally, you can recognize the effort others have put into trying to help you and to move forward rather than shutting down and giving up.
3. And the third is follow-through. This means hearing feedback and doing something with it. Again, part of being an expert is discerning which comments you want to implement and which don’t make sense within the context of what you’re trying to do.
All of this thinking about coachability made me realize something. When coaching relationships have fallen apart, it seems like each person believed that something was wrong with them and were hoping that coaching would fix them.
My feedback on their writing just confirmed their existing negative self-image. And this is when therapy, rather than coaching, is likely needed.
So if you are considering writing coaching, first reflect on your ability to handle feedback and how open you really are to doing things differently.
The more you can detach your identity from your work and the more playfully you approach your writing, the more likely you are to achieve the very biggest of goals.
Or at least not fail miserably!
I’ll talk to you next time.
**If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to also check out:
Ep. 69 – The Most Important Mindset Shift You Can Make
Ep. 53 – Five Ways to Avoid Taking Negative Feedback Personally