Most of us accept the general premise that we are biased in some way or another, and when presented with clear evidence of our bias manifesting in a specific context I think we should be agreeable to making immediate corrections. I'd like to claim I've been doing this for my entire life (though of course I may be a biased source for such a claim). I believe my first bias correction came when I was ten years old. My baseball coaches told me that I was hitting weak pop-ups because I was swinging up at the ball; this was completely normal because most players have a natural "uppercut" swing, which means the bat traces a smile-shaped arc as it swings through the air. The remedy for my swing sounded to me like a Jedi mind trick - I had to visualize myself swinging down, but not too much, since a slight downward intent cancelled out the natural uppercut motion, and resulted in a level swing; as the great Yogi Berra once said about the sport itself, 90% of the game is half-mental.
In hindsight, I recognize the blessing that I knew exactly how to fix my bias, and I wonder if it's simply a lack of information that hinders many from taking steps to correct their own bias. But before I go down this road, let's consider for a moment how my ten-year old self gathered the information about the swing - it was delivered to me by my coach, who watched me take hundreds of swings. I played various organized sports for nearly two decades so, to me, the idea of a coach delivering important corrections after focused observation is perfectly sensible; my conviction about coaching leaves me wary of potential approximations. Take the role of a life coach, for example: unless this person is observing someone's life for a couple of hours a day, which from my understanding is not the common case, then it seems very unlikely to me that any "life coaching" is possible; the more accurate title in my mind would be something like life adviser, or perhaps life guidance counselor. It's important to me that every time we call someone a coach, we do so carefully, with the knowledge that the person is indeed coaching, but it seems like we've passed a certain point of no return; the standard for calling someone a coach seems to be set at a permanently low bar, almost as if the government had banned using more accurate words like mentor or guide, and we'd all agreed to replace them with coach.
I don't mean to suggest a life coach - or any kind of coach - won't try to make your life better; my point is that someone called coach these days might not spend much time coaching. Some will contend that it's no big deal because it's just semantics, a dispute over a label; I do agree that a label has no inherent meaning, and of course calling someone coach often sounds more distinguished than other titles. But the problem with the label, with any label, is the possibility that people start to associate the label with the activity - what initially identified the activity becomes the word for the activity; we don't use a search engine, we google things. The point of such a transformation is to clarify language, and this is always vital, but there remains potential for things to go wrong as I believe it has done for coaching. I suspect there is a widespread perception that coaching encompasses any activity which is intended to improve performance - advice, instruction, training - because we see coaches doing these things. It's easy enough to stop there and conclude that a coach is anyone who does these things, but that would limit the understanding to the coach's visible responsibilities.
What most people don't see a coach doing is perhaps the single most important skill for good coaching - being observant. I don't think it's possible to be a good coach without being observant. Merely understanding this isn't enough because the reality is that the hardest part is what the lesser performers tend to skip, and being observant is challenging; the picky eater finishes dessert after leaving broccoli on the plate. The end result is an awful lot of awful coaches, in all walks of life, whose mediocrity is a consequence of doing everything but observe, whether out of ignorance or sloth; these coaches do everything well except coach. A good coach is first and foremost an observer; a great coach is an unbiased observer.
The reason I value this skill so highly in my definition of coaching is because observation is the surest way to identify bias, and I feel being unable to identify bias is the single biggest obstacle most people encounter as they attempt to master any skill. I believe we all do our best to remain unbiased but some goals are impossible to achieve without constant vigilance against bias, which is nearly impossible alone. Imagine how difficult it would have been for ten-year-old me to hit a baseball if I'd spent my whole season assuming I had a level swing; this is the situation for most of us doing most things most of the time, completely unaware of how our best but biased intentions undercut our aspirations. It was lucky for me that my coach thought to observe my swing and offer a specific approach for improvement; a coach lacking in observation skills likely wouldn't have been much help because any proposed solution wouldn't have addressed my specific problem. The great coach, leveraging the impossible distance of being someone else, plays an invaluable role by taking a critical first step toward helping someone overcome bias by collecting information through the meticulous observation.
Information on its own is not enough, however, to ensure a change in behavior. My hunch is based on, for the lack of a better expression, the current condition of the world, which boasts endless examples of stakeholders ignoring information about their biased behavior. The USDOJ's investigation into Yale's admissions practices is one such example, which is summarized in this press release that includes the following - "Yale rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit." I haven't looked at any data regarding this investigation so I can only speculate that the underlying numbers demonstrate obvious evidence of discrimination, and that it was merely an academic exercise to prove the charge; these investigations never come down to fractions of percentage points, or start from them. Imagine my reaction, then (it was delight, really) when I read a story covering the investigation that noted "Yale quickly defended its admissions process in its own statement Thursday, calling the Justice Department’s allegations 'baseless.'"
I don't know much, but I know the allegations aren't "baseless". They are based in a society where almost every single teacher I ever met in my life was white, where a remote colleague once walked up to me on his first onsite visit and noted that he only saw one Black person among my thirty colleagues. The allegations are based in a world where people make selection decisions, and often do so in a biased manner, which becomes obvious only in hindsight; the fact that people making these decisions, or at least the ones I know, almost always do their very best to make unbiased choices isn't part of the discussion. I don't make this point flippantly - many of these people I know work outside the scope of their roles to train, study, and practice in order to become better at their craft. They often seek out coaches to help them, and I'm sure the coaches do their best, but I'd say the results speak to a different conclusion about coaching. In this world, in which these allegations are based, we have endless examples of aggregated bias in so many aspects of society despite the tireless individual efforts to become unbiased decision-makers, often with the help of coaches; I've heard practice makes perfect, but the evidence in this context suggests practice doesn't make anyone better, or at least the practice being conducted by a society that seems overrun with so-called coaches.
The role of collecting and distributing information, even in the sense of overseeing a practice session, isn't the entire story of coaching; it's possibly up to 90% of the work, but it's only half the battle. The rest of coaching, or at least the way I see it, is making it possible to use that information within a personalized framework, leveraging an evolving understanding of the individual which is updated through continuous observation. The catch is that such a process exposes those cookie-cutter training programs as being practically useless for a majority of the participants. Coaching is hard work because it doesn't scale; it's far more grueling than looking at a few aggregated numbers and saying "well, we expected to see a few more Asians here, statistically speaking". The coach develops a nuanced understanding of cause and effect, knowing that one effect might be the result of various causes which will differ across many individuals; coaching means understanding each person so that instead of teaching a set of general skills to combat bias, it's instead possible to point out specific examples of biased thinking, behavior, and decision-making that apply to and resonate with the individual. The reason anyone, whether it be an organization or an individual, reacts defensively to most allegations of bias is because bias is one of many possible explanations for a result, yet the allegations lead with the outcome rather than the specific process examples that connect cause and effect, which makes it impossible to get to work on the problem.
If this all makes coaching sound like tough work, well, life's tough, mostly because our biases mean trying our best is rarely enough to ensure good results. The path to a better life, and a better world, isn't to look for some plan, process, or method that promises to make you better with a formula that applies to all - the path is to find out why doing your best isn't good enough so that you can do better. This is the essence of coaching, the process of observing to understand why someone's best isn't good enough for reasons specific to the individual, and the desire to share this understanding; it's about encouraging someone to keep doing their best, and how, because with just a little bit of good coaching anything can become better.
