Coaching or Consulting

I was so excited! For a long time, I wanted to learn how to fish for trout. My generous wife surprised me with an outing with our three adult sons to fish for trout on Lake Taneycomo. This was going to be AWESOME!

We paired up - my older two sons and a guide in one boat and my youngest son and I in the other. A guide for each boat to teach us.  This was going to be AWESOME! I could barely wait to get out there! We grabbed our equipment and got in the boats and out onto the water, it was beautiful. An early sunny morning and a light fog over the water because of the cold temperatures. 

We stopped in a place the guide said the fish would sure to be biting. Connor and I grabbed our poles and asked what we should do to rig them. The guide took them, rigged them, and handed them back to us. What did you rig them with we asked? “This is what the trout are biting on,” he said.

So, contemplating what the “this” was we threw our lines in the water. Our guide took our poles one by one and then re-tossed them in the spot “where they should be” and handed them back to us. Sure enough, a trout got on Connor’s line but after a quick struggle, it was lost. I had a similar experience.

We had our lines re-rigged (is this the right word?) and our guide got the lines back in the water. This time when we had a bite, he took the pole out of my hands and landed the fish.

And so, it went our experience was going from AWESOME to okay. The guide (and sort of we) caught about ten fish in the 2-hour time we were out there. Connor and I more or less sat and held poles until there was some action. We came back and another professional cleaned the fish.

I’d like to go trout fishing again. I can’t. I don’t know how. 

Honestly, I never even ate the trout. Didn’t want to. 

This story is a metaphor for me on coaching versus consulting. I wanted to learn how to do something I really wanted to do - not have something I wanted to do to be done for me. The end for me was learning how to fish - way more important than catching fish. (I wanted that for my sons too.). I would have loved to be out there for 2 hours catching one fish learning how to do it for myself.  

Coaching is like that…helping someone discover what they want and begin to experience how to get there.

Have you ever had an experience like this? What was it? What did you sense when it was happening or after? How about the opposite - an experience where you were allowed to discover something?  When were you coached well? How was it more satisfying?