Earlier this year I got a tattoo across my wrist (pictured above) that says “suffer for your art”. I got it because I wanted to physically remind myself to pursue my passion at all costs.
I’ve always considered myself an artist – even when I was jumping out of airplanes and blowing stuff up, I did so with an artistic soul – what I didn’t know was what kind of artist I wanted to be.
Traditionally when you think of art, you think of some form of drawing or painting or the performing arts like music or acting. I started down the drawing route, but didn’t quite feel I could truly express myself through that medium.
At University, I found I had a penchant for writing, the warrior-poet, I was. Though handy with the pen, I still felt that just some little piece was still missing to call it my art.
And then, yesterday, in the middle of doing a barbell curl, I glanced at the ’suffer for my art’ tattoo, then a rush of insight came. I have been on such a positive high these past two weeks. I realized that the times I have felt like this have all been times when I have been doing work I really love, the essence of which is engaging with people to help them unlock their hidden potential, to live up to the best that is them, that’s when I am on fire.
I realized in that moment of insight that I am a social artist. I’ll tell you what that means in a second. First let me lay down a definition for art. Art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination to produce works of appreciation for their beauty or power.
Now a social artist, as defined by the legendary Jean Houston, is a person who continually works on themselves so as to be humanly skilled to provide consultation, leadership, and guidance changing paradigms and values for their communities and networks. A social artist “is able to see trends and the emergence of new patterns out of apparent chaos.”
I think, from that definition, a coach is a specialized social artist.
I know that there are organizations and special interest groups out there who preach the mechanics of coaching and judge coaches not by the results they achieve, but on how well they check the boxes against a mechanized list of competencies. I’m not knocking the competencies themselves, it’s just the lifelessness in how they are assessed that bothers me.
And nowhere on the list is there a checkbox for “did the client achieve success.” I know one of the coaching principles under these rules is that the coachee is responsible for their own achievement. That’s true, to a point. But I believe a good coach should be actively consumed with the coachee’s success or failure. If the coachee fails, the coach fails. I’m inclined to apply the standard to which Napoleon applied to his generals: “There are no bad troops, only bad generals.” In the case of coaches, there are no bad coachees, only bad coaches.
To me, coaching is more art than science. You can ask all the open non-directive questions you want, but if you don’t possess the artistic intuitive skill of making connections between things that seem unrelated, then you miss the true life-changing beauty of coaching. The work I do as a coach is both beauty and power. It truly is a thing of beauty to see a person have a rush of insight that sets their world on fire and opens their eyes to the unlimited power they possess.
So what is my art? My art is seeing the patterns in the chaos of a person’s life that will unlock the hidden potential of that individual.
What is your art?
Coach Clay
