Avoiding Collusion in Coaching

Is it important that your career coach UK based? Well, that depends on your preferences and needs. What I find interesting about one mentoring relationship that I have is that as a mentee, I am diametrically opposed to my mentor. We do not share our gender or age, our country of origins could not be further apart, our culture and politics dramatically. In fact, the only real common thread we share is the desire to enable people to be the best that they can be. And, this includes each other.

Working with this amazing individual gives me such a lot of insight. Working with this diametrically opposed individual gives me even more than I would get working with someone similar. Working with this individual gives me a multitude of different perspectives that I would never even catch a glimpse of if I were working with someone from ‘my tribe’.

There are also dangers inherent in working with someone too similar: The risk of collusion (however unconscious, especially when its unconscious!) is high. The risks of assumptions run even higher as both Coach and Coachee neglect to question whether the person sitting before us, who looks like us and talks like us, actually does think and feel like us?

There are always new ways to look at things. As a county I believe we are richer for the cosmopolitan nature of the inhabitants here, the exchange of new ideas and of foods and of materials leads to a whole new interwoven richness that no culture could generate on its own. I believe that the coaching relationship too can benefit from the richness of two very diverse inputs. Put these polarities in the crucible and a whole new set of possibilities might be emergent.

But that takes trust. It takes a risk. It takes courage. It takes being brave enough to step out of your comfort zone and to be open to doing something new. And, after all, is that not why you’re considering coaching in the first place? To break the insanity of the loop of doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome? Maybe this is the way. A multitude of digital platforms can support your decision to do this differently. communication across time and space is now possible so use it.