The CTL Blog
Stages of Coaching: Stage 5 - Growth
Executive Function is the learned ability to plan, steer our attention, organize our thoughts, and coordinate multiple tasks.
Executive Function coaching helps people learn and strengthen these abilities.
Our coaching process follows a pattern of personal transformation. People usually follow this sequence, but they also move back and forth as they encounter new challenges.
Contemplation: the awareness of an urgency to change as well as the need for help in doing so.
Collaboration: identifying a partner in change and creating a plan with actionable steps.
Rehearsal: doing the steps of the plan with feedback and support from a partner in change that focuses on the process as much as the outcome.
Remoralization: the experience of feeling capable and competent again after successfully rehearsing and executing plans.
Growth: working through inevitable setbacks and recognizing that success in one thing leads to new, bigger challenges. Then the process of collaboration, rehearsal, and remoralization repeats.
To better understand these stages, we will introduce you to “Erin”, a composite of many of our clients and a case study of what Executive Function weakness looks like in a young adult. Through her story, you will get a detailed sense of what Executive Function is and how coaching can help.
Erin, like any coaching client, or any person embarking on a course of intentional change, will cycle through Demoralization and Remoralization continuously as she grows. She will even experience new sparks of Contemplation as she becomes more self-aware and is better able to articulate specific ways in which she wants to change. And she will continue to Collaborate with her coach, with her professors, with the textbooks, workbooks and worksheets at her disposal, and with any resource she seeks out. As she continues the Rehearsal of her growing set of skills, Erin will experience repeated cycles of remoralization and demoralization through the long arc of growth. New challenges will always arise, and Erin will get better at recognizing these as temporary states, not getting caught up in either as she becomes a more self-assured and self-motivated learner.
Growth is not really the final phase of a journey; it is a constant in life. In any person who recognizes a desire for change, who asks for help, who experiences successes and setbacks and continues on, growth is happening. We are even growing when we lack awareness or intentionality. So, given the choice, why wouldn’t we ask ourselves the ways in which we’d like to grow? By asking the question, we empower ourselves to take an active role in finding the answer.
So, how would you like to grow? And how can we help?
Stage 5: Growth
How’s your relationship with failure? Asking that question might feel like diving into the deep end of the pool. And what could failure have to do with Growth? As we’ll see in the final part of Erin’s story of change, set-backs and small failures are an inevitable part of change and valuable opportunities to develop.
When we discussed the concept of Rehearsal, we noted the importance of suspending negative judgements and practicing self-acceptance. Maintaining that neutral, accepting mindset is key for staying in the process of working to change. It is not only a way of keeping your focus on the task at hand, but also training yourself to observe, instead of judge, the emotions that inevitably arise as you work. Now, to really understand the process of learning Executive Function skills, we have to spend some time getting into what those negative emotions are, and how people handle them.
When Erin started coaching, she was demoralized. Demoralization is a term that captures the complex mix of negative feelings and negative self-beliefs that occur when someone feels powerless in the face of repeated challenges. A huge part of the coaching process is Remoralization: the feeling of competence and capability. As clients consolidate their early gains and begin to take on bigger challenges, setbacks and failures are inevitable. This context is where the most important growth takes place. Clients often experience a setback as a signal that they are actually still powerless and incompetent. They become demoralized again. And this is where the coach can really help a client. Let’s see how this plays out with Erin.
Erin’s Transition to College
Erin’s week continues strong. She falls into a rhythm with her time tracking and gains momentum. She is using her newfound awareness to get things done. During her check-in, she and her coach identify a free block of time on Friday morning that she can use to tackle her next challenge: brainstorming and organizing ideas for that Creative Writing assignment. They schedule their next check-in for Friday afternoon so that they can review together. Wednesday and Thursday are full of little wins for Erin, and she goes to sleep Thursday night feeling motivated.
Then, disaster strikes: Erin oversleeps. The hard work of the week caught up with her, and she spent her morning hitting snooze, eventually just sleeping through all alarms. When she finally pulls herself out of bed, she forgets to track her time entirely, using all of her focus just to get herself ready for her day. She manages to make her bed, but feels ashamed, like she is letting down her coach and herself. She wonders, Should she try and cheat the log and estimate the time she spent getting ready? Should she just start tracking now? She feels stuck and anxious. It’s in this state that her calendar reminds her it’s time to work on her Creative Writing assignment. Erin jostles herself out of her freeze and finds the open-ended prompt her professor handed out. Erin stares at the description, overwhelmed by the lack of parameters. She gets hit by another wave of fatigue, climbs back into bed, and starts scrolling through TikTok. At some point, she falls asleep again.
Another calendar notification wakes Erin up: ten minutes until her coaching check in. Erin panics! How long did she sleep? She realizes that she didn’t get any work done at all so she considers emailing her coach to tell her that she’s sick and has to miss their check in. But it’s so close to the scheduled time that she decides to log on and get it over with. Erin’s coach immediately picks up on her low mood, asking what’s wrong. Feeling too exhausted to lie, Erin tells her coach about her disastrous morning, bracing for the worst.
To her surprise, her coach just nods, and says compassionately, “It sounds like you had a tough morning. What do you usually do when you’re so run down?” Erin thinks. “Well, I mostly sleep. And my mom usually makes me soup.” “Okay, so it sounds like you spent your morning giving your body the rest it needs. Let’s keep this meeting short so that you can get back to resting.” “You’re not mad?” Erin’s coach smiles. “Of course not. You’re exhausted. You’ve done a lot of hard things this week. There’s always going to be times where you have to slow down.” “But I didn’t track any of my time. I got stuck on TikTok instead of my assignment.” Erin’s coach tells her that these things happen, and are to be expected. She explains why it’s important not to think of a disruption like this as a failure. “You’re just learning more about how you work so you really can’t get it wrong. Today you learned it’s much harder for you to focus when you feel exhausted.”
Erin brings up how bad she felt for not tracking her time that morning. In response, Erin’s coach reiterates that the most important part of the initial time audit is tracking the time without judging how it’s being spent, and so if Erin spends an hour scrolling, it’s better to log the hour than to pretend she didn’t. Erin’s coach encourages her to be gentle with herself about her social media time today, but highlights this as an opportunity to plan for the obstacle of social media distraction in the future. So they agree that one quick and practical strategy would be to set automatic time limits on her social media use to one hour per day. This adjustment is an example of adding friction - a technique that strategically adds obstacles so that an action is harder to achieve.
Erin’s coach then asks her if there’s anything else she wants to talk about before she lets her go back to resting. Erin admits that she still has no clue where to even begin with her writing assignment; because it is so open-ended, she is scared about making a wrong choice. “You told me that I can’t get it wrong. I mean… that sounds nice. But even if I can’t get it wrong, it still feels like I’m getting it wrong. You know?” “What does getting it wrong feel like, for you?” “Bad.”
Erin’s coach pulls up a Feelings Wheel and shows it to Erin in order to give her more specific emotional words to pick from. Erin realizes that when she says ‘bad’, what she means is ‘stressed’, and even more accurately, ‘out of control’. “So what are some things that help you feel in control?” Erin’s coach has her get a piece of paper and write down whatever comes to mind: making my bed, scrolling through my phone, watching Netflix, washing my face, moving my body, making a to-do list, tidying my space. Her coach takes this list and has her ask herself after each item: When I do this task, do I still feel out of control when it’s done? Working down the list, Erin realizes that though she thinks that scrolling through her phone is something she is in control of, it’s actually something that distracts her from her uncomfortable emotion. Her coach explains that what Erin is doing is labeling her feelings more thoughtfully and accurately. She is practicing a skill called meta-cognition, or awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes.
Erin and her coach decide that she’ll begin scaffolding her assignment by creating an outline. If she feels overwhelmed, she’ll set a timer for five minutes, and will outline without judgment for just five minutes. Erin’s coach also suggests that when she continues to track her time, she writes down how she’s feeling during the task so she can build her meta-cognitive awareness. This can eventually empower her to choose to spend her time in ways that support her desired emotional state and goals.
Erin’s story asks the question: why do we set goals in the first place? Erin wants to improve her Creative Writing grade, but why? In high school, writing creatively was something that made Erin feel creative, expansive and accomplished. Improving her Creative Writing grade is perhaps incidental to Erin’s true desire to spend more time feeling creative, expansive and accomplished, and less time feeling stressed, anxious, and out of control. This is what Erin means when she tells herself ‘I want to be a writer.’ Before college, Erin had never encountered any difficulty accessing her positive feelings through the process of writing. But the difficulty that Erin is facing now is an inevitable part of the process of growth and change.
Working with a coach is helping Erin develop a toolkit for independent study, certainly, but the most important skills she is learning are about her relationships to time and to her more difficult, complex “negative” emotions. Demoralization and hard feelings are just pieces of information meant to guide her away from what isn’t working, just as remoralization teaches her about what supports her. That’s what Erin’s coach means when she says: you can’t get it wrong.