When to fire me
A lot of service providers have an onboarding process. Not many of them use that process to tell you when to fire them. But after watching The Shrink Next Door and reading about the true story behind it, I decided that it’s essential to my ethical practice.
The Shrink Next Door is the story of Isaac Herschkopf’s thirty-year career of exploiting his clients to such a degree that he even ended up taking over client Marty Markowitz’s house. Finally, Markowitz had a wake-up call, freed himself from Herschkopf’s spell, and reported him to the health department in 2012. Seven years passed without an investigation. In 2019, two things happened, and I don’t know which happened first, but I have my suspicions: a journalist found the story and made a podcast about it, and the department finally started investigating. Two more years passed before Herschkopf’s license was finally revoked in 2021.
I don’t know what happened in that department, but I know that what was going through my mind as I watched the show was “I wish Markowitz had read the codes of ethics that I just read.” I had just been researching ethical standards in the helping professions in order to inform my coaching policies, so I knew which behaviors were red flags for a psychiatrist, setting the relationship up to become harmful even if the harm wasn’t immediately apparent. But that was new for me; although I’ve seen a variety of therapists, I don’t recall ever being given one’s code of ethics to read. I started to realize that clients can only report violations that they realize are violations, and if that doesn’t come from reading the code, well, it probably comes from getting hurt badly enough to think “this can’t be right.”
So I decided to write a sort of client bill of rights to educate my clients about what behavior to expect from me. That way, I figured, they would know what rights to assert and, if that didn’t work (say, I was in a personal crisis that clouded my judgment), they could fire me rather than stick around to get hurt.
Feeling alright over “being right”
As I worked on this “client bill of rights,” I realized that it was too long and wordy for clients to really absorb it and remember it throughout the course of coaching. I also found it hard to write things down in precise enough a way that clients could tell the difference between me being flexible in a healthy way and me violating important boundaries. After all, that’s why lawyers have such a valuable skillset. But I realized that I didn’t need to write a legalistic code of ethics. I could write a page, not to tell people when to blame me, but to tell people when to bring an issue to my attention, or quit coaching. By shifting the focus from proof of wrongdoing to simply whether or not things are going well for the client, the question could become much simpler for the client to answer.
I kept a description of behaviors to look for, but I kept them simple. And I added a section called Embodied Ethics, where I advise clients to check in with their bodies about what it feels like to have an ethical coaching relationship—one that’s both supportive and empowering. I ask them to give me feedback if they see me stray from my stated behaviors, but also if they lose that feeling of support and freedom. A bureaucracy can’t revoke someone’s license because their client isn’t feeling very free today. But a client can quit coaching over it, and quite frankly, if they’ve tried to address the problem with their coach, and they still don’t feel free to be themselves in coaching, then I think they should!
Feelings, as they say, aren’t facts. For instance, it’s possible that the client’s feeling is coming from their relationship with their boss or their partner, and just spilling over into the coaching relationship, no matter how well the coach behaves. But at the end of the day, if they can’t be honest with their coach, then it’s not safe. I would so much rather lose a client than let an iffy situation escalate into a harmful one.
More likely, clients will bring up ways they feel not-quite-right, we’ll discuss it, and we’ll repair the relationship. It’s common to fear conflict and avoid it for so long that a successful repair becomes really difficult. But as the book Right Use of Power reminded me, repairing relationships often leaves them stronger than they were before. So conflict isn’t something to be terrified of. It’s a normal part of human interaction that doesn’t have to signal the decline or end of a relationship. By encouraging clients to come to me at the slightest hint of trouble rather than only when they’re sure I’ve done something wrong, I hope to be able to learn more about them, customize my approach, and compassionately repair our relationship.
I love that this focus on impact rather than intent frees me up to point clients towards what really matters, and to be on the same team with them in wanting safe and effective coaching. Here’s the page on ethical standards that I ended up writing. Let me know what you think!
Honesty over deference
As a coach, I don’t institutionalize people. I don’t call the cops on them. I don’t tell them they need medication. All I do is offer them suggestions for how to relate to their inner worlds. Everything I give is optional; the client’s judgment supersedes my own because they see their psyches directly and I only see them indirectly.
This means I need a lot less power than most of us are used to giving to people in helping professions. You may be used to teachers telling you when you can use the bathroom, religious leaders telling you what to feel guilty for, therapists disapproving of your romantic relationship, or psychiatrists telling you that they know reality better than you do. I can’t say I think all of that authority is justified, but it’s at least a topic worthy of debate. I’m in a simpler situation; I just don’t need those kinds of authority.
In fact, thanks to parts work, I need even less authority than some coaches. I don’t need to hear all the details of clients’ lives, because my coaching is focused on their thoughts and feelings in the current moment. And I don’t need to use carrots and sticks to motivate clients or hold them accountable. If a client doesn’t do their “homework,” I don’t want them to push through it or fear telling me—I want them to join me in being curious about what stopped them, because that’s our next topic.
So another part of creating a safe and effective coaching environment, it turns out, is less about teaching clients to keep an eye on me, and more about teaching them not to be as deferential to me as they might assume they should be. Many of my clients have experience with therapists but not coaches, so they may bring that template to our relationship without even thinking about it. So I gave my ethical standards page a companion: a page on how to work with me. I’m hoping to shift clients out of the mindset that I’m an authority figure and into the mindset that we’re partners with complementary areas of expertise: mine is in guiding people to relate effectively to their thoughts and feelings, and theirs is in their thoughts and feelings. Their honest communication isn’t “being uncoachable”—it’s the input I need to do my job!
Here’s the page I wrote on how clients can approach coaching. I hope these pages help clients shift into a more egalitarian relationship with me than they might normally have taken, and at the same time, to hold me to my responsibilities as coach. And if all else fails, remember: you hired me, and you can fire me!