Dancing in the Moment

A well respected coach once described coaching as ‘dancing in the moment’ with the client. After my, in all honesty, initial raised eyebrow I thought more about what he meant and of course he’s 100% right. As a coach we work with the client in a fluid motion, following their agenda, reacting to their tone, words, expression and body language, pacing & guiding them, in a state of continuous movement. The whole point of coaching is movement or momentum, asking the right questions that will ignite a new way of thinking for the client, in order to lead to new outcomes.

I watched the dynamic of my own little family and like a lot of young families, I realised that we are all dancing in the moment with each other. My husband described it to a tee. When one is down the other is up. We’re a team, one goes through a tough time and the other takes up the slack, knowing that the support will be repaid over and over again. It’s the loveliest thing to realise and it’s something that has come with time. From the initial honeymoon period when you think you could never love more than you do right now, to the huge lifestyle change that comes with having children, and the realisation through all the exhaustion and groundhog-day-ness that can come with parenting smallies, you are a rock solid team and you have each other’s back.

My daughter cried about 14 times this morning before I finally managed to whoosh her out the door to crèche. She loves crèche by the way. My emotions went from, “poor little thing must have gotten out of bed on the wrong side” (we’re very similar!), to irritation “ok enough, stop crying, get dressed”, to satisfaction “on this random occasion I worked out the right balance of comforting v toughness, to move her on from the grumpy mood”. A small win. And this on a day when my husband had worked through most of the night and so I was in theory flying solo. Only I wasn’t when I thought about it. Kate was having a tough morning, Husband was working above and beyond pushing hard to support us and our many crazy dreams, and I was the one in the middle balancing the two. Our little trio were in effect, dancing in the moment. Some days we dance like professionals and some days we’ve two left feet, but we always do our best, whatever our best may look like that day. For me that’s what being a family is all about, and whatever arrangement you have in your own family, isn’t that the whole point?