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Coaching is defined as “helping higher management of a company like managers, CEOs and leaders to play their part in a more effective, balanced and healthy way to be a successful leader”. As a Coaching Foundation of India [CFI] trained CEO Coach I have had the opportunity of working with several business leaders on their developmental journey. The first question they often ask is “How will coaching help me?”. The next question is “Do you think I can be ‘Coached’?
I resist answering the second question, why, I will explain in a bit. But the answer to the first question is quite easy, “If you want to be helped, you will find coaching helpful. But if you think it is a waste of time, it will be a waste of time”. The second question is more nuanced and cannot be answered in the first, what at CFI we call ‘chemistry meeting’. It is only when we start working with a coachee that we can figure out how ‘coachable’ they are. We can form an informal opinion within a few sessions. But the rubber hits the road only after we share the 360 degree feedback we receive about the coachee from his / her peers, subordinates, friends and superiors. The smarter coachees always tell us that they suspected this [feedback] all along but the 360 was very useful. The non-coachable coachees, I am told, tell their coaches that the 360 is all wrong. Folks don’t understand them and so on.
In the book Ruminate – The Sufi Saint on Mastering Life and Business, Hrishikesh Datar makes a passionate plea, using Sufi saint poet Rumi’s words, that the change has to be internal. We cannot ask someone to change us, we need to change from inside.
Hrishikesh Datar is not your usual ‘self development’ book author. For one, he is quite young. He is not a business school professor. Neither is he an MBA. In fact he is a trained lawyer who runs a very successful online legal services firm ‘VakilSearch.com’. Vakilsearch is India’s largest and Asia’s fastest growing legal technology platform. He has been featured as one of the 30 leading entrepreneurs of Asia in the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2017.
Transcending borders
Rumi, as he is known, is a 13th-century Persian poet. Rumi’s influence has transcended national borders and ethnic divisions: Iranians, Afghans, Tajiks, Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Central Asian Muslims, as well as Muslims of the Indian subcontinent have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries [wiki]. Rumi’s poetry is characterised by a deep understanding of the human condition which recognises the grief of loss as well as the ecstatic joy of love.
The author has used Rumi’s words to tell us how we can find happiness in what we do. The book is full of quotes from Rumi (Beautiful days do not come to you. You must walk towards them). The author’s argument is that we are often chasing things without knowing why we are chasing them (When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me and without pain). The author has made this book into a workbook by making us jot down our own thoughts and has called them, very appropriately, Ruminations.
Self limiting beliefs
The book is presented as 16 highly readable chapters, each presenting one aspect of development. Building your cathedral. Fan those flames. The tribal bond. Connectedness. Staying the course. Be water, my friend. You are enough. Who am I.
In coaching parlance one of the common obstacles that we help coachees overcome is what we call ‘Self Limiting Beliefs’. You think you are not capable of performing a particular task: I don’t know how to deliver a keynote address; I am shy in front of seniors; I am not comfortable with numbers. The other common issue we help coachees face is the denial of the obvious: people don’t understand me; I did not mean it that way.
In the book the author has used the words of Rumi and numerous other gurus to throw light on all these issues. The chapter that impressed me the most is the one on ‘Unfolding your own myth’. Some quotable quotes from this chapter are: ‘In silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves’; ‘Anyone who genuinely and consistently with both hands looks for something will find it’; ‘If light is in your heart, you will find your way home’. ‘Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself’.
The book Ruminate is part coaching manual, part philosophy, part stream of consciousness. Read it to elevate your mind to the next level.
Let me end with just one more quote: ‘It’s your road and yours alone. Others may walk in with you, but no one can walk it for you’.
(The reviewer is a CEO Coach and best selling author of 12 books on advertising, brands and branding)
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