Coaching in analogies #24: The smoke alarm
The client was rounding the corner on an insight. She needed to be more visible to the members of a particular team under her command. To learn more about their day-to-day, yes, and to show that upper management was a group of actual human beings as well. While on the precipice of this a-ha moment, my client was mid-sentence, and…
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
As my teen daughter would say, “What the literal heck?”
It was the smoke alarm in my home office, taking an opportunity to interrupt my client and terrify my dog. I quickly excused myself. Verified that my house was not in fact on fire. Removed the offending cylinder from the ceiling and placed it outside. Then invited the client to continue.
This happened once more the next day, during a different session with a different client. I got annoyed, then I got curious. It’s a 2-year-old smoke detector with a 10-year battery in it. None of its neighboring alarms had gone off. I looked at the instructions, blew a little potential dust out of the openings and put it back on the ceiling. Hasn’t happened since.
And then I realized there’s probably a lesson here, for my clients and for me.
Suppose there’s an interruption in your usual thinking. It’s loud, and persistent, and you’re annoyed. If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t usually get annoyed, you’ll probably find yourself annoyed by the annoyance. Yet this is probably a signal that something’s up.
What is it that’s causing you to stick on this particular conversation, or issue, or colleague? Why won’t the annoyance in your head let up?
Maybe something’s seriously wrong here, and you’re receiving an early warning signal. But if it isn’t a house fire, you could be in the midst of conditions that are causing your warning system to trigger too easily. Showing up for work tired, stressed or hungry could be the dust in the air that sets off the alarm.
During the first interrupted coaching session, my first impulse wasn’t the right one. It would take just a few seconds to smash the smoke detector with a hammer, ending the offensive beeping and allowing my client to continue her story. But then I’d be unprotected in the event of an actual fire.
Instead, the solution was to get curious.
Coaching prompts:
What does your early-warning system feel like in your body? When do you first notice it?
How do you tell the difference between a real crisis and a false alarm?
Image: Tumi-1983, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
