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There’s Value in Just Feeling Heard
Working with family members who have complex relationships with each other is nothing new to me.
My specialty is working with enterprising families, which is the term that my field has come up with to describe not only family businesses, but also families that have attained a certain level of wealth, usually as a result of having owned a business somewhere in their past.
We looked at some of this a few weeks back, in Difficult Family Conversations and the Gift of Facilitation where we examined the benefit of having a neutral outside resource to help ensure that important conversations are safe and productive.
This week I want to slide over about 90 degrees and talk about this from another angle, and that’s family members having someone to speak with about whatever their concerns are, some sort of “confidant”.
As a coach who also works in many one-on-one situations with members of such families, I’m quite familiar with the value of that as well, along with the challenges of playing that role.
Confidential => Confide
As usual I like to share how these posts come about in my mind, and this one followed a somewhat circuitous route, which isn’t unusual.
It started at a family meeting I was facilitating, where one of the G2 members asked me if the one-on-one calls I was having with them were “confidential”.
I hadn’t been asked that question in quite that way before, and in retrospect, I wasn’t happy with the way I responded.
Upon reflection, it became clear that there’s only one right answer, and that’s an unequivocal “Yes, of course!”
Somehow the idea of something being “confidential” felt like a very high standard, which it is, but I needed a simpler way to think about it, which I’m now sharing here.
Much like back in 2016 with Putting the Consent into Consensus (Part 1) and (Part 2), it took some thinking about root words that are at the core of longer words to give me the clarity I was searching for.
When you examine “confidential”, you can see the word “confide”, which now jumps out at me, but it didn’t before.
Had I been asked “Can I confide in you?”, I know my answer would have been quick, positive, and reassuring.
Confide => Confidant
When it comes to blog subjects, I like to expand upon wordplay, and that’s how we get to “confidant”.
If you want to confide in someone, you need to have a confidant.
So whereas I was initially just going to write about the confidential nature of this work, we’re now venturing into the value of having a confidant, and the challenges of being one.
These days there are even phone apps powered by artificial intelligence that do a lot of this in the absence of a human version.
Of course I believe that a human confidant is the best kind, but that doesn’t mean that any old human will play the role well.
There’s a certain amount of baseline empathy required to play the role, as well as an ability to listen to people without judgement.
The Ability to “Be With” Someone
Lately I’ve been sharing a number of nuggets in this blog that I have used when speaking with people for years, so allow me to throw another log on that fire.
When I did my coach training (with CTI) over a decade ago, one of our course leaders noted that in his view, 80% of coaching comes down to two basic things.
The first of those I mentioned above, and that’s listening without judgement.
The second one is the “ability to be with”, to which I added the word “someone” in my sub-head, because it feels more complete that way.
I also speak a lot about the difference between “doing” and “being”, and the idea of knowing how to “be with” underscores that quite well.
Using a Coach as your Confidant
Regular readers know that I have been working with a coach for over a decade, which is something any good coach will do.
Working with my own coach makes it easier for me to convince people to hire me as a coach; because I eat my own cooking, so to speak.
A coach becomes a confidant, and a good coach/client relationship will get better over time.
As the client gets more and more comfortable confiding in their coach, everything improves.
