Taking the time to design your alliances is the key to designing the life you want, the way you want it.
Designing an Alliance is a Co-Active Coaching term for setting up the ‘rules of engagement’ between you and your client. You discuss logistics (confidentiality, payment, terminology) and, more importantly, dive into the semantics of what you and your client need from each other to ensure the coaching relationship can reach its full potential and the desired outcomes are achieved.
As I’ve worked through my coaching courses I’ve found; similar to coaching itself, a lot of my deepest ‘a-ha’ moments have occurred outside the actual courses. Internal conversations with myself and external conversations with others have helped circulate the ideas I’ve been exposed to and guide me in finding a home for them within my own coaching practice and life.
“Designing an alliance is the key to designing your life the way you want it.”
What sparked this recent revelation for me was a seemingly unrelated conversation with my wife. I was struggling in a certain area of my life and as we spent time trying to brainstorm ways in which I could improve, she suggested I start by following a rule:
“No laptops in the bedroom.”
Fair enough.
A few days later we had a separate discussion more relevant to our relationship and we put another rule in place:
“Joking around with each other is fun, but we don’t joke around about things that have emotion tied to them.”
Perfect. Makes sense.
Rules are cool, I guess, but what have we really done here? Perhaps without realizing and certainly without naming it, we’ve started designing our very own alliance – our rules of engagement. Fortunately, for the sake of our marriage, this started a long time before these particular rules came into effect however being able to definitively name and bring awareness to what we are doing has given the process a lot of power. What else can we design?
While a well-designed marriage is incredibly important and a top priority for us, it’s really just a piece of a bigger picture. A well-designed life.
How can we take this idea and apply it to work, other relationships and, most importantly, the relationship we have with ourselves?
How do we want to be treated? How will we treat others? How do we approach the training of a new employee or the relationship with a new boss? What do we expect from ourselves in certain situations and what will we accept from ourselves in others?
While each answer to these questions is undoubtedly different, the approach to all of them is unequivocally the same.
Taking the time to design your alliances is the key to designing the life you want, the way you want it.
