Power Tool: Can vs. Want

A Coaching Power Tool Created by Anda Bog
(Executive Coach, ROMANIA)

Context

We leave in an era where everything is possible, or so it is said around us through all channels. Adds suggest that we can have gorgeous hair buying a 5 USD shampoo, motivational speakers give us a one sentence formula to change our lives for the better, banks offer easy money to make our dreams come true and the list continues. Nevertheless, I think they are t6elling the truth, but not the whole truth….. The missing part is what each individual has do on their own to get there…..

Taking it as a given premise, we might have difficulties in understanding why there are some things that do not happen the way we imagine them, and unless they lack any sense of reality, we are totally entitled to pose this question.

Our first impulse in answering it is to identify the external influencers. Plenty of them, from all areas of social professional or political spectra. After looking at them and even quantifying their interference with our path, we observe being helpless about acting in a certain way that might be helpful. Hence, we are again left to ourselves….. back to square one.

Sometimes it is useful to look at the “externals” and come up with ideas about what we can do, but essentially we can simply take this introspection exercise from the very beginning, externals will be taken into account only based on their relevance along the process….

There are many ways to conduct an introspection exercise. A simplified version is look at the two components mentioned in a title and start from any of them and check preparedness of the second one:

Example:

I WANT to loose 5 kilos, CAN I?

The efforts in the coaching conversation will be to discover the facilitators towards the “CAN” part, not that difficult as long as the WANT is there and real!

I CAN run a marathon, do I WANT to?

The ability of doing something triggers the questions about reasons why somebody should do it. The coaching sessions tackling the WANT dimension should explore the motivation, satisfaction and development opportunities for the coachee.

CAN & WANT in a coaching conversation

This tool can be equally a starting point in a coaching conversation or it can simply pop up when the opportunity arises. It allows the coach to ask powerful questions so that the client moves onwards towards his goal. It functions well for clear cut objectives which can be measured in a tangible manner.

The real challenge in a coaching conversation is when the client is not clear whether they CAN or WANT a certain thing. But then again, since they brought the issue into discussion one could assume that they either WANT or they have to approach it. In both cases, the CAN has to be explored in order to move things onwards.

This power tool has a wide applicability and may be used in any direction, starting form WANT or starting form CAN. Either way the client has a chance to clarify and find real motivation inside themselves.

Both terms are assertive and positive, they trigger action and build on the certainty that the objective is there and attainable. I do believe that cases where coachees bring up a subject which they eventually discover that they neither can or want to continue with are extremely rare, and once more we should go back to the “classical” power tools to validate them.

CAN and WANT go exceptionally well together, if both are there, and the coachee is aware of them, from the very beginning. In this case the role of the coach is limited to checking progress. If both of them are waiting to be discover in coachee’s mind, this is an dream job for a coach and a great outcome for the client at the end of the coaching sessions!