Take My Pain Away: How we often give away our personal accountability

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon at Euston and we were minding our own business travelling to some client work in Manchester. So who should we bump into on the same train, Marcus, a professional friend and client of ours. After completing some work we shared a brief conversation with him that was very insightful.

Marcus is an experienced Health Practitioner who moved out of practice and into management a few years ago. As we got talking about his motivations to leave practice he described how over time, there was a trend in his mind of clients literally ‘giving you their pain’ and asking you to deal with it. As he cupped his hands to gesture the ‘giving the pain to someone else to deal with’, the point was crystal clear. You can’t really help, heal or support someone that doesn’t want to improve the situation for themselves; they will simply fall back into the same or similar position, or worst still, grow a dependency on you. In our work, whether it’s coaching, consulting or skills and capability development, we see the same trend.

An article by Steve Bernard