the Coaching Studio – Season 1 | episode 3 – Guest Patrick Williams, Ph.D., MCC, BCC

So it is my great delight to introduce Master certified Coach, board-certified coach Dr. Patrick Williams. He is one of the early pioneers of coaching. Patrick has often been called and the ambassador of life coaching. He is a licensed, or he has been a licensed psychologist since 1980, began executive coaching in 1990 with Hewlett Packard, IBM, Kodak, amongst other companies, along the front range of Colorado in the Wild, Wild West, A former psychologist since 1980, Life in Leadership coach since the ’90s, founding member of ICF and former ICF Board member, past president of ACTO, and in 2018 was honored in the inaugural ICF Circle of Distinction. And he is the author of seven books and one um and a new online course called Conscious Living Mastery.

He is the founder of the Institute of Life Coach Training since 1998 and he is one of the first of the 12 schools recognized by ICF in accreditation. His book Getting Naked: On Being Emotionally Transparent at The Right Time, The Right Place, and with The Right Person is actually one of my favorites. It is how I actually came to know Dr. Patrick Williams. And I’m going to read a quick excerpt from a review. It’s time to get naked. You have a very short time on earth. And the question then becomes, what do we do with the time that we are given? Intimacy and transparency are fundamental to your ability to show up bravely with humility and ultimately transform your experience of life. These are just some of the messages I needed to remind myself of, once again, as I disrobe and get to know myself at the next most profound level. And that review was given after you published your book by Mua.

So, Patrick, I am so excited to invite you to the Coaching Studio. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

What got me into coaching? Well as a psychologist, I was actually trained, my degrees are in humanistic and transpersonal psychology, so all that stuff my daughter calls, woo woo boogitti boogitti, you know, east-west stuff. Um, consciousness, psychedelics, meditation, mindful, well wasn’t called mindfulness then?. There was no such word um altered states of consciousness from various ways. What would help the human potential movement that came out of the late sixties, early seventies? That’s when I started getting my graduate program. So I was not influenced by Freud except to say no-no, no, I don’t want, I don’t want what Freud has. Um, So the people like Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, Roberto Assagioli. The early friends of Freud who broke away. They actually influenced today’s coaching modality. Um, Alfred Adler even talked about coaching and I mean coaching as a word.

So I think what got me into it when I became a clinical psychologist, kind of a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Uh, I really was already coaching. I didn’t want to see people as diagnostic categories. I didn’t want to see them as broken, I wanted to see them as Carl Rogers said you know unconditional positive regard which kind of fits into ICF’s modem today of people are whole, resourceful, and creative. So I think it was a natural step and then I started doing executive coaching with the companies that you mentioned in my introduction as part of my psychology practice. Then I heard in 1995 about the first conference in Houston that Thomas Leonard was doing and I felt, I kind of felt like the Celestine Prophecy. I feel like I was called, I heard it mentioned three times that week in a magazine, in Newsweek, on T. V. So I went and there was 187 of us there, many of whom are still in coaching today, and it’s just like it seemed to be my tribe. Uh, It I could see around the corner of what was coming. We’ll talk more about this. But that’s how I ended up specializing in training therapist types to add coaching to their business. That was my niche.

Oh my God. Well, When I, so I ended up going to coach university as a course in training because there was only three or four back then in 1996. It just showed that there was a way to impact people to become more of who they want to be, could be, other than psychotherapy and spiritual guidance. And I mean, there were no coaches to go-to for most people if you needed help with some thinking, you went to a therapist and they usually give you a diagnosis which made you a medical concern, but you know, kind of stupid. But I am just the man, this is going to democratize the availability for people to get a partner to help design their future, not get over their past. That’s the way I put it.

Now some people need to get over their past. I’m not downplaying that some people have severe trauma and they’ve got things that are that need to be brought to the healing surface and then go on living your new life. But I could see around the corner, I could see that this was going to be big, I didn’t know it be as big as it is today, but it impacted me when I wrote my first book in 2000 and started my institute which primarily targeted graduate degree professionals in the helping professions. Oh my God, I spoke all around the world, at ICF conferences, psychology conferences, and that opened my eyes because I had not been to Europe until age 50, and the first ICF conference in Grindelwald, Switzerland, um first international conference, I went, oh my God, this is so fun, so impactful. That’s what I knew I was on the right train at that point.

Well, I have a motto that I’ve recited for years that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with someone else. I mean, we’re not meant to be alone, we’re relationship creatures. So even in a business and by the way, you may know that this wasn’t true of therapists. If a new therapist moved to town, we locked our doors and shuttered our windows and we didn’t want to tell them about how we got our clients.

If there was kind of a scarcity phenomenon back in the day, um, coaching, not so much, people in the early days, and I think it continues today. They’ll share, if you want a short, 20-minute call with somebody about what they’re doing, they’re happy to share, they’re happy to engage with you. And then if, if they’ve got a program you like or you want to hire them as a coach, that may happen. I mean, I don’t want to be busy all week long with people calling me for tips on moving into coaching, but somebody will, appears your brain with the people, you know the local chapter of the ICF. If you’re in Europe, maybe it’s the EMCC.

Um, so I think that the long answer that I’m giving to a short question is collaboration is not giving for uh a reciprocal arrangement. It’s just giving. Sorry, that’s a spam call. Um, it’s just being of service. No, I mean it’s like I said, we, we sell the invisible, we sell our relationship and our sacred space that we create or inspiring space. I don’t mean to use the word sacred lightly. Yeah, so I guess that’s what I’m riffing on there a bit.

Yeah, yeah. And I really, I, I am reminded there’s a quote that’s like if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. And I just know in my own business, having partnerships with other coaches, having partnerships with other people to do elements that aren’t my favorite part of running a business has also been absolutely imperative to my capacity to do the things I really love to do and show up fully in the, in the coaching, or in the leading of a program or whatever it is that I happened to be doing.

So I think there’s also that piece too which really kind of brings us to this new competency in the ICF Competencies of Embodies a Coaching Mindset and how we take care of ourselves and have that sort of equilibrium within ourselves to show up fully for these partnerships, whether it’s a thought partnership or, you know, well in a conversational partnership of a coaching conversation, right, how do you take care of yourself so that you can embody this mindset?

Well, I love that these competencies were redone to include that, and some things about being of the coach and being, you know, I mean way back in the day when one of my first coaches was Cheryl Richardson who wrote Take Time for Your Life, you know, and uh Laura Berman Fortgang, I mean these are back in the early days, I mean I I sat between them at the first ICF conference and I remember standing up with tears in my eyes saying I’m not a psychologist, I’m now a coach because it was a breakthrough for me. But the taking care of, Cheryl called it Extreme Self Care, which has become a term is paramount. If we’re not taking care of ourselves, we’re not going to be able to be fully present with our clients. Now that doesn’t mean we have to have a perfect life, crap happens, life happens to us. But before you go in your office, whether it’s live on zoom or by phone, what do you do to leave that outside and be fully present for that momentary call, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever it is.

And then I also am aware that my mindset as a coach, means I live, I live a lifestyle that is focusing on my best life. I mean, so what I eat, how I exercise, what I do now, I’m no fanatic and I don’t go to the gym. I hate gyms. I’m glad they’re closed now. Um, but I take care of myself and I think we have to, in many ways, we don’t have to be perfect, but we have to be having a life well lived with continual learning about us that doesn’t get in the way of the coaching with our clients. I guess that’s what I mean, the old adage is we teach what we need to learn, and we coach where we have learned or something. I mean we’re, I’m no perfect human being, but when I’m coaching somebody, I’m not telling them how to live their life, I want to be a model for the kind of thinking and um visioning that might be of assistance to them.

But that’s something that I think coaches need to hear also, which is, and I do something very similar, um, which is to say to people in are contracting and in our agreement setting, possibly every session, depending on the person. If I say something that doesn’t land well. I want you to bring it back to me and I’ll just tell people, look, I’m not a mind reader. I mean, I can guess pretty well when somebody’s annoyed with me, but I’m not a mind reader, so I won’t know why you’re annoyed with me, absolutely.

So it’s just so much easier like I’m totally open to you being annoyed with me and bring it into the conversation because often that’s the rub they’re having with other people anyway. Right? And so it’s an opportunity to have a safe way to work through a disagreement with somebody, which I think is brilliant. And it also puts all the pressure off of me or you or the other coaches out there to have to show up perfectly as perfect human beings. Because that whole idea of if I have to worry that much about how I’m showing up with you, I may be walking on eggshells and not as much of service to you in my robust curiosity. Right?

Yeah. And what is the Maserati? And, and is it even a Maserati that they want to drive like that? Maybe our presupposition right?

You know it’s so interesting, um this came up in a conversation just yesterday. Around this idea of what does it take to become a masterful coach? I don’t mean like an MCC coach like that’s great if that’s your drive or just what you choose. But like this, this movement into coaching from other modalities and, and one of them, and I’m really again curious about your thoughts on this, one of the things that I’ve been noticing in my own self like I was thinking back and reflecting back home when I moved from being a therapist to being a coach. I felt like I was, I had a level of expertise in my field, right? Like I knew what I was doing, I could hold the space, the therapeutic space easily. I had a huge toolbox of skills around how to create safety and I’m very trauma-informed because that was my focus was trauma and um complex dissociative disorders and things like that. And then I moved into coaching and I had to really start over again with the beginner’s mindset. And to let go of that expertise and that is an uncomfortable shift. But the other thing that showed up as you were talking is that that need to kind of unravel the stuff that we think we’re experts on and sort of let that go so that we can show up as a real human being with another human being.