Can You Coach Yourself?

What does coaching yourself actually involve?

Coaching yourself means running a coaching conversation on paper or out loud, with you in both chairs. It is different from worrying about a problem, because it follows a structure, ends with an action and gets reviewed later.

A simple weekly routine is enough for most leaders. Thirty to forty minutes, at the same time each week, protected like any other meeting.

1. 01

   Pick one situation

   Choose a single, current situation that is costing you energy, not a general theme like "confidence".

2. 02

   Describe it as a camera would

   Write what happened, who said what and what you did, before you write what you think it means.

3. 03

   Ask what you want instead

   Name the outcome you would like next time, in terms of your own behaviour rather than someone else's.

4. 04

   Choose one experiment

   Decide on one small, specific thing to try in the next seven days, and when you will try it.

5. 05

   Review before you start again

   Next week, begin with what happened when you tried it. The review is where the learning is.

Which questions work best when you coach yourself?

Open questions that start with "what" work better than "why", which tends to produce justifications. A familiar structure helps too. The GROW model, popularised by Sir John Whitmore, moves from Goal to Reality to Options to Will, and it translates well to self-coaching.

• ✦What exactly do I want to be different, and how would someone else notice?
• ✦What is actually happening now, separate from the story I am telling about it?
• ✦What am I assuming about the other person that I have not checked?
• ✦What would I advise a respected colleague to do in my position?
• ✦What have I been avoiding, and what is that avoidance protecting?
• ✦What is the smallest step I will take this week?

Where does self-coaching fall short?

Self-coaching falls short wherever the problem is part of how you see. The Johari window, developed by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, names this directly: some things about you are visible to others but not to you. No amount of private reflection reaches that quadrant.

The other limits are practical. You can steer yourself towards comfortable questions without noticing. You can let the review slip when work gets busy. And you can talk yourself out of an experiment the moment it feels awkward, because nobody is there to ask what happened.

• ✦Blind spots: behaviour others see that you do not.
• ✦Familiar framing: the same mind that built the pattern is asking the questions.
• ✦Accountability: commitments made to yourself are the easiest to drop.
• ✦Challenge: it is rare to push back on yourself as hard as a skilled coach would.

What does self-coaching look like for a real leadership problem?

Imagine a newly promoted procurement manager who feels steamrolled in supplier negotiations. Coaching herself, she writes down the last negotiation exactly as it happened and notices that she concedes in the first ten minutes, every time. Her experiment is to state her position and then stay silent for a full breath before responding.

That works, and it is a genuine gain from self-coaching. What she does not see is why she concedes: a belief that disagreement damages relationships, learned long before this job. That belief also shows up with her own manager and her team. It took an outside question to make that link visible, which is the point where a coach adds something self-reflection cannot.

When is it time to work with a coach instead?

It is time to bring in a coach when you have reflected honestly, tried changes and the same pattern keeps returning. That is usually a sign the issue lives in an assumption or trigger you cannot see from the inside.

• ✦For structured prompts between sessions, use the reflection questions for leaders.
• ✦When a thinking habit keeps getting in your way, mindset coaching works on the pattern underneath it, in person in Manama or online.