Ep #15: The Truth About Staying Neutral

Hi, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills, episode 15.

To really compete in the coaching industry, you have to be great at coaching. That’s why every week, I will be answering your questions, sharing my stories, and offering tips and advice so you can be the best at what you do. Let’s get to work.

Hey, coaches. Okay, so, do you remember a few weeks ago when I was complaining about where I live and how grey it’s been and how gross the weather has been and how I was just feeling tired?

Well, happy to report, especially those of you sending me solutions for grey days – I appreciate you. Thank you. But since I talked about that, it has snowed a lot. Or at least a lot for Indiana. And it has also been really sunny. Which means we have played outside. Last weekend, my kids played outside for like six hours in one day.

That’s amazing. I love just saying, “Nope, please go outside and play.” But they made a snow house with, like, actual bricks, which was really cool, and they made snow people and a snow dog, all of the things.

So, it has been really nice. And I say this all the time, even though I did complain a few weeks ago, I apologize for the complaining, I do really love living somewhere where there are a mix of all four seasons. But sometimes, when it’s just winter and it’s been cold for a while and it’s grey, it just gets a little blah.

But, if it’s going to be cold, I just want to have all of the snow. Because we love to play outside. I love to play outside. More importantly, I love to send my kids outside. And when I say a lot of snow, we get like maybe six inches or so. We don’t get, like, two feet of snow like probably some of you do.

Alright, moving on. Today, I want to talk about something that just keeps coming to my awareness. I keep seeing coaches talking about it. And just the other day, I thought, “Someone should really clear up some confusion in this area.” And then I thought, “Oh, wait, I think that someone is me. I’m the person. I’m the one who teaches the coaches about the things.” So, that’s what we’re going to do.

And I don’t know what the actual name of this podcast is going to be, but the unofficial name is Coaches Aren’t Zombies, and Nether Are Our Clients, okay. Just keep that in the back of your head. I’m going to bring that up a couple more times, I’m sure.

So, today, I want to talk about something called neutral, or being neutral, or finding neutral. And for those of you who are certified through the Life Coach School, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I know that this is also taught in other certifications and other programs.

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, perfect. You’re going to learn something today and it’s probably going to be really useful for you.

So, sometimes, this word, I think, gets – like, there’s some confusion and it can be misunderstood or used incorrectly. And I just want to share the way I define neutral, actually the two ways, and how I see coaches sometimes use it incorrectly or even use it against themselves. Which isn’t nice. Don’t do that.

So, here are the two ways that I know of and the way I think about neutrality when it comes to coaching. And I’ll tell you the definitions and then I’ll break them down and how I use them and how also not to use them.

So, the first way, when we’re talking about something being neutral is that a circumstance or a situation or something out in the world is neutral. And then, we have thoughts about it, which is how we interpret it for ourselves. And then, our thoughts create feelings. Now we have a feeling about this thing that’s in the world and it feels very true.

And as coaches, if you are doing mindset coaching, if you’re examining someone’s thoughts and feelings, sometimes it can be very useful to show a client what, like, here is the circumstance and here is now it’s neutral. But what this doesn’t mean is that we are supposed to feel neutral about it.

So, really, it’s just anything that’s happening in the world, anything that is a fact that can be proven in a court of law that every single person would agree is true, that is a circumstance.

So, we talk about circumstances being neutral because every person in the world is going to have a different thought about the circumstance. It’s not neutral because we should feel neutral or the goal is to feel neutral. It’s neutral because if we polled all of the people and we put that all in a pile and took the average of their thoughts, it would be neutral. It would be, like, this thing doesn’t cause our feelings. Our thoughts cause our feelings.

If your mind is blown right now because you haven’t been to this type of coach certification, don’t worry, I’m going to give some examples. So, I’m going to give first some pretty straight forward examples.

So, let’s look at the weather where I live today. A circumstance that could be proven in a court of law would be, right now at 2pm Eastern time, it is 31 degrees Fahrenheit. That is a fact. Maybe we could find a couple sources where it varies slightly. But we can go outside and just measure the temperature and it’s a fact.

So, the temperature outside on any specific day at any specific time is just provable. It’s also neutral. Which means I have one thought about it and you might have a totally different thought. And everyone listening might have completely different thoughts.

So, my thought is, like, “This is great, what a nice day.” And you might think, “Gross, that’s terrible. Why would you live there?” Or, you know, the 100,00 thoughts in between those two things.

Here’s another silly example. In my house, we have lots of thoughts and opinions about pickles. So, I have a very strong opinion about pickles, that they are, in fact, possibly the devil. But it turns out, pickles are neutral because my family, everybody has different thoughts.

One of my daughters agrees with me. My husband thinks that pickles are pretty much the best thing ever. My other daughter kind of agrees with him. And I’m sure, people tend to be pretty opinionated usually about pickles. But I could probably come poll all of you, each one of you, I could take a poll and everybody would have different thoughts.

I mean, I think it’s disgusting and clearly that is a fact. Obviously, I kid. But that’s a pretty non-triggering example, even if you dislike pickles as much as I do.

But when you think of something more controversial, this is where it gets a little foggy to people. So, let’s just start with money. So, let’s just say – I’m totally making up a number here, but let’s say I told you the exact amount of money in my savings account. And I said I have $100,000 today, this date, my savings account, the balance is exactly $100,000. Again, this is made up.

But any amount of money is totally neutral. How we know this is because every one of you listening probably had a very different thought when I said that number. Some of you might think, “That’s all? That’s not very much.” Some of you might think, “What? My entire life would be different if I had that much money.” Some of you might be somewhere in between those two things.

But understanding that something is neutral, again, it doesn’t mean we are supposed to feel neutral about it. It’s just giving ourselves that awareness of, “Oh, it turns out my thought isn’t true.” It might be true for me. And I might not want to change it. I have no desire, zero, to change my thoughts about pickles, ever. Just zero.

So, I would never hire a coach to help me think or feel differently about pickles. First of all, that’s silly. But I love using these silly examples because then you can think, how does this apply overall to the bigger thing?

So, I’ll give you another example. Here’s an example that might be closer to home for some of you. So, a few years ago, my grandmother died. And she was amazing. And we were very close. And so, for me, my thought about that, about my specific grandmother, not all of the grandmothers by my specific grandmother, because we were close, my thought was, “This is so sad.”

And I can talk about it now because it was a while ago and it doesn’t feel, like, I’m not in it in the moment. But in the moment, I felt so sad. I had lots of emotions about it. and I didn’t want to feel any differently. But for you guys, think about this. Think about you hearing me say that. You might think, “It’s really sad,” because maybe you’ve had that experience in your life, or maybe you’re like, “Oh, but I love Lindsay and I don’t want her to feel sad.”

So, you might have the thought, “Oh, that’s really sad.” But unless you knew her or were close with her, you don’t probably actually feel sad or feel sadness in your body. It’s probably more like, “Yes, humans die, this is a thing that happens. What a bummer of Lindsay.”

Or maybe you do feel sadness, but it’s because you’re thinking of a very specific memory of your own. Like, I said words that triggered a memory, and now you’re not having thoughts about my grandmother; you’re having thoughts about whatever your memory is, whatever your circumstance is.

We could poll, again, everyone in the world and everyone would have a different thought about the circumstance, which means it’s neutral. It does not mean that we should want to feel differently.

So, it’s just so important. I would never coach myself or get coaching out of, for example, that feeling of sadness. When my grandmother died, I would never think, “I’m not supposed to feel sad. I should get coaching on this.”

Now, let’s say it’s like five years later and I’m in debilitating sadness, maybe then I would. Maybe then it’s like, “Okay, I can still be sad about this memory, but I want to learn to think and feel differently right now so that I can move on and live my life.”

So, what I want to reiterate on this is we only coach our clients on things that they want different results around, that they want to think or feel differently about. We do not coach our clients that everything in the world is neutral or that they should feel neutral about it, or that they should think or feel differently about something just because we think or feel differently about it.

And this comes back to we are not in the business of turning people into non-feeling zombies. It’s just not how it works.

The only reason we would ever even show a client that something is neutral is to show them that there are other optional thoughts and feelings if they want them, if they choose them, to move them in the direction of a result that they want.

Okay, so now I want to talk about the second kind of neutral. This is the kind that we talk about, like, how we want to feel when we’re coaching our clients. And I think the most important thing we can do as coaches is be more concerned with our clients’ thoughts and our clients’ feelings than our own in the moment.

So, the best way to do this is to be in a state of neutrality and be genuinely curious while you’re coaching, leaving your own opinions out of it. That’s what neutral means, is just finding a state of neutral in a way that means you can hear your clients and you can be curious about what they’re saying instead of having your own thoughts about it.

So, depending on what kind of coach you are, you might, in a small part, or even a large part of your coaching, it might be strategy – don’t worry, there’s a whole episode coming soon on strategy versus mindset. And you might have opinions when it comes to strategy or when it comes to what your clients do. And that’s a little different.

But when you’re coaching their mind, when you are being curious and asking them questions, you just want to stay in genuine curiosity about them and what they’re thinking and feeling and why. Where this goes wrong for some of you, I think, what I’ve noticed in my experience is that coaches come to me thinking, to be a good coach, they have to feel neutral about everything.

No. It is literally not possible. Again, repeat after me – this is the last time I’ll say it – we aren’t turning our clients into zombies and we are not becoming zombies. The goal is to not be emotionless. It is to just be aware of our thoughts and our feelings.

So, when I think about feeling neutral while I’m coaching, I recognize – which I think is part of what makes my coaching very powerful – is I recognize that I still have a human brain, and of course I have opinions about most things really. Sometimes really strong opinions.

But to effectively coach my client, what I would ask myself is, “Am I able to set my opinion aside and just listen and just hear them and just question and be curious about them?”

Sometimes, I used to do this thing where I would literally envision unzipping my head – okay, so maybe we are zombies. Is that a weird thing to say? I just realized that’s pretty funny.

I would literally envision just unzipping my head, taking out all of my opinions and all my thoughts, putting them in a box and setting them aside on my desk until I finish coaching. And then after, I just get to pick them back up because I still have a human brain, I still have thoughts and opinions.

And if I’m not able to do this – I think is something that makes someone a really great coach – is to be able to admit that maybe there are certain topics that you just can’t coach on. So, I’ll just give you an example from my coaching practice.

In the very beginning when I was coaching, I did have to tell a client that I couldn’t coach her on something. And this was a few years ago. And I had a client who just opened up to me about some experiences she was having in her marriage. And I had a really very, very strong opinion about what she should do. And it was the exact opposite of the result that she wanted and the actions that she wanted to take.

So, I listened to her and I still loved her through it. I didn’t judge her. But I just saw, like, my thoughts, my opinions, the voice in my head was way too loud to be able to set that aside and effectively coach her from a neutral place. So, I referred her to an amazing marriage coach that I knew and I coached her still on all the other things, just not on that. I said, like, “You need someone who this is their area. Let me refer you to my friend. She’s incredible.” It was the best for both of us.

Another example is, this happens on occasion, is I have coaches who come to me, they want to work with me – I don’t do this work anymore. But they wanted to work with me in a one-on-one capacity to grow their business. And I had someone come to me and she was just dead set on sending people random DMs.

And for me, that’s just a hard no. So, I just helped her find a different coach. I just sent her on her way. And we talked about it and I didn’t judge her. But I could just hear my thoughts of like, “Nope, I don’t believe this is how – this isn’t the way I like to teach my clients to build a business and I just don’t want to coach her on this.”

So, I think it can be really powerful, like yes. In my mastermind, I actually say, like, I’ll teach you to coach any client on anything. But I guess the caveat to that is I also show you that no matter what, you still have a human brain and the more aware of it you can be, the better coach you’re going to be.

So, to wrap this up, I hope this was super-helpful. Please just get so curious, if anything about this was triggering for you or you disagree or maybe you’ve never even heard these concepts before, perfect. Just get so curious. Think about the word neutral and please, only use it with yourself and your clients when it is useful.

We don’t use it against ourselves. We are coaches, not zombies. I love you guys and I will talk to you next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mastering Coaching Skills. If you want to learn more about my work, come visit me at lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. That’s Lindsay with an A, D-O-T-Z-L-A-F.com. See you next week.