Everything I Really Need to Know About Self-Improvement I Learned From My Writer's Group

Why "here's what I would have done" is the least useful feedback you'll ever get — and what to ask for instead.

I love stories. It's one of the reasons I'm drawn to narrative coaching over other forms of coaching.

When I was a kid, I would stay up reading into the wee hours of the morning. I still remember Michael Crichton's Sphere. I bought it one afternoon after school, started reading it after dinner, probably around seven, and finished it at 5:30 the next morning, just in time to get ready for an early-morning class I had before high school started.

I was exhausted. It was an exhilarating read, even with the somewhat confusing ending.

That love of stories carried through the next decade, and I wanted to write my own. I joined writers groups. I went to workshops, attending two or three a year for about a decade. I got pretty good at short fiction, and ultimately had more than a dozen short stories published in professional magazines.

Some of the lessons I learned figuring out how to write quality fiction apply directly to the coaching work I do now.

And I think they apply to any skill where results are judged by someone else's reaction.

"Good luck!"

Some of the best advice I ever heard about learning to write came from playwright David Mamet. I'm paraphrasing, but he essentially tells wannabe playwrights that the only way to really learn to write a play is to write something, get it in front of an audience, and learn from the audience's reaction. Mamet then essentially says, "Good luck!"

I think he's absolutely right.

It's also enormously time-consuming. There's the effort of getting something written. The effort of getting it staged. The effort of learning to read audience reactions correctly. The effort of making the "right" corrections. Etc., etc., etc.

And all of that is needed just to learn how to take the next few steps forward. Then you start over with the next play.

In fiction, the author submits a story to an editor and can learn from editorial feedback (if and when it comes). When an author is published, they can learn from the readers. But the more common practice is a writer's group, where everyone submits their work regularly and the group responds.

The day the writers group stopped working

In the early days of learning to write, my writers group was a good thing. It kept me committed. It kept me motivated. And — this is the key — since almost all of us were new to writing, nobody carried the baggage that comes after years of practicing the craft.

At some point, the group changed. To me, the moment was very noticeable. It was when the intent of the feedback from the group members became this:

"Let me tell you what I would have done."

That's when the writers group stopped having much impact on my development. Because at that point, I was hearing how another writer would solve a problem. And that doesn't help me — I have my own voice, my own style, my own themes, my own genre.

Advice from a writer with a different voice, a different style, different themes, and a different genre isn't just unhelpful, it can be detrimental. It pulls me away from writing publishable fiction that's mine and turns it into theirs.

I see the same thing happening in many coach training programs. It's standard practice to split into breakout triads — a coach, a client, and an observer — and give feedback afterward.

Once the skills are learned and confidence in using them starts to grow, a lot of the feedback coming out of those triads is, in essence, the same thing I heard in my writers group: "If I were the coach, here's what I would have done."

Once you've reached a certain point in your development — once the toolbox is open in front of you and you're starting to use the tools in your own way — I just don't think those opinions are useful anymore.

So what is?

The ICF has its new Mentor Coach Specialization (MCS) program. I know a few who are already certified, and they're definitely people I'd take advice from. But, even with mentoring available, I still prefer to participate in triads and coaching exchanges regularly as a method of self improvement in my coaching practice.

I've learned how to use them in a way that works for me.

The three reader grunts

In his book Character and Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card teaches what, in his Writers' Boot Camp, he called the "three reader grunts," or the involuntary negative reactions a reader has that will pull them out of a story.

They boil down to:

• "Oh yeah?" (I just don't believe that would happen).
• "So what?" (I don't care).
• "Huh?" (I don't understand what's going on).

Here's the point: the kind of feedback that actually helps you improve as a writer is learning how a typical reader responds to what you put in front of them — where they fall out of the story, not how another writer would rewrite it. Once I know the places in my story that trigger "reader grunts," I can fix them in a way that remains true to my voice, style, genre, and themes.

I worked on this deliberately with my writers group. I had to train them to be normal readers again instead of writers who happen to read. I had to break them of the habit of "here's how I'd fix this" and get them reporting their honest reactions as readers instead.

I think the same retraining is one of the most valuable things a developing coach can do. And it applies to all three seats of the training triad.

The client's seat

Once you have the toolbox and you're starting to develop your own style, one of the most beneficial things you can do is be coached — and not from the point of view of someone who also has coach training, but from the point of view of a real client.

What kinds of questions actually got me to go deeper? What questions surprised me? What actually got me thinking in new ways? What questions didn't land for me? Where did I have resistance to what was being asked? If the coach picked up on my resistance, what did they do to work with it or around it?

Learning to be a good client — to accurately capture and share what was going on in me while I was being coached — is one of the things that helped me unlock my own personal style. It's the coaching equivalent of learning to read as a reader again.

The observer's seat

There's a lot of learning available in the observer's chair, too. But not through the "here's what I would have done" thought pattern that seems to come naturally once we reach a certain skill level.

Let's face it: "Here's what I'd have done," is a pattern that, at its heart, is a form of arrogance.

The alternative is grounded in an attitude of humility:

I'm not the coach in this triad, so what did this coach notice that led them to ask that question? Did I see it, too? Did I see it the same way? What observations did they share? What didn't they see? And how did the client respond to what was shared and asked? When did the client respond in ways that I wouldn't have expected?

Watching what another coach actually does and thinking deeply about why they coached the way they did (rather than scripting what I would have done instead) turns out to be a really good way to develop coaching skills.

The coach's seat

And then there's the seat where you're the one coaching. Two practices have served me well here.

The first practice: if you're able to record the session, go back and watch it. Read the transcript. At each question, look for the other things that were available in the conversation. What were the threads I didn't see because I was caught up in the one that emerged, or because of a blind spot I've learned I have that I'm trying to overcome?

When I do this, I look at the questions I asked and try to brainstorm the other questions I might have asked instead, had I paid attention to something else in the client's story.

This is especially useful if the client in the practice session can report on what did and didn't work for them — the "client grunts," if you will, — that pulled them out of the flow of the conversation or the things that helped them look deeper inside for their own answers.

The second practice is a Specific Intentional Practice, or a SIP. Pick one skill from your coaching toolbox and hone it by over-emphasizing it throughout the conversation. Because a triad is a practice session with other coaches, not a client session, you can tell the group what you're working on and ask for feedback on exactly that skill and how you used it.

One SIP might be the minimal intervention: the smallest question you can ask that carries the conversation forward. It might be offering an observation before every question. It might be shifting what your observations point at: what you notice in the client, or what's going on in you while you listen. It might be holding an attitude of playfulness, even in a serious discussion. These are just ideas; there are all kinds of ways to build a SIP.

As my grandpa used to say, "If you're going to do something, do it up real good." That's the key to a SIP. Over-emphasize the skill so thoroughly that doing it feels really unnatural. After the SIP practice is over, back off on the skill. It will stay in your back pocket, but be a little easier and a little more natural to use than before.

The skill that brings "Good Luck"

Mamet was right: the only way to learn is to do the thing, get it in front of an audience, and learn from the reaction. Rinse. Repeat.

That's true of plays, short stories, coaching… I'll even argue it's true of almost anything where your success relies on how others perceive it.

But "the audience" matters. Past a certain point in your development, your peers and sometimes even your mentors will drift toward telling you what they would have done. That feedback made sense when you were learning your toolbox. It stops working the day you start developing a voice or a style of your own. Try to look past the advice and look for the "grunt" that made them offer that advice in the first place.

Turning from prescription to responsive observation and from arrogance to humility are skills in themselves and they're available in any field where you're trying to get better at something that has your fingerprints on it. Your version of the writers group might be a peer group, a leadership team, a mentor, or even your family.

Whoever it is, the question is the same: are they telling you what they would have done, or are they showing you the effect your work has where it really matters?

Real self-improvement is all about learning how to effectively wield your tools in a way that both delivers better results for your audience and lets you bring more of yourself to the work.

After I learned the basics of the writer's craft, I got good at fiction when I stopped caring about what another writer would do and started asking, "What happened in my reader?"

I became the coach I now am by making the same turn: away from other people's solutions, toward what was actually happening in the client, in what I observed, and in me.

Just remember, If you're going to do it, do it up real good.

(Thanks, Grandpa!)