The Preparation Paradox

An interesting conversation with one of the coaches I supervise, in which we discussed the Preparation Paradox.

We both recognise that preparation is essential if we are to be the best coaches we can be. (Sure, we are both good enough to busk it and leave the coachee satisfied with the session, but that doesn't meet the standards we aspire to).

Gary Player

So preparation is essential; and yet the session frequently goes in a completely different direction from whatever we have prepared for. And so it should, if we are being client-led, which is an approach we both favour. 

Because of course we can't tell in what state the client will turn up, or what will be the most important issue to explore, in advance of the session. And that applies even when we may have agreed with the client in advance (at a previous session, or in other preparatory conversation) what we'll focus on this time around.  Because Stuff Happens, as Barry Oshry rightly points out in Seeing Systems.  And sometimes the stuff that happens raises issues that are both more important and more urgent than our best-laid plans had foreseen.

Nonetheless, we both know from experience, that the better we are prepared the better we are able to respond creatively, intuitively and appropriately to whatever arises - as long as we aren't attached to our plans.

Louis Pasteur

Of course, this is not a new discovery. Gary Player famously said: The harder I practise, the luckier I get; and in the same spirit (and some time before), Louis Pasteur observed that Fortune favours the prepared mind. 

So I offer this as a reminder, rather than a dazzling new insight; because, going back even further in our bank of popular quotations (a good few centuries before Christ), we learn from Ecclesiastes that There is nothing new under the sun.

However, the end of the year seems a good time to reflect on what we already know - and also a good time to wish all my friends, clients, colleagues and contacts a Happy Christmas, a restful and restorative break, and all good wishes for the New Year.

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Images from Wikipedia, Creative Commons Licence.  Unfortunately there are no extant pho
tos of the author of Ecclesiastes...