With 10 minutes left to go, the leaders of the organisation approached me and dictated how a 20 people workshop would go: they had a completely different format than mine and expected me to execute it. What I did't know at the time, but later came to understand, is that the leaders had been receiving bad feedback from previous workshops facilitated by other people, and couldn't afford another failure. They needed a success.
I invested several days planning the workshop until I felt comfortable. I was calm and confident that it would work.
I felt frustrated and angry. I wanted to go home. I felt that an injustice had been done and that my effort was not recognized.
During that year, I had been receiving coaching from my highly esteemed Lore E. König based on Bruce D. Schneider's Energy Leadership.
Thanks to Energy Leadership, I realised that I was behaving like a victim and that this behavior was not going to contribute to anything positive, neither for the organisation I wanted to serve nor for myself. I decided first to accept the proposed changes and adapt the whole plan, and then I proposed to enrich the leaders' proposal by including some suggestions that were accepted. In a very short time we all adapted the workshop to fit better to the client's needs. In the end, we managed to have two very productive days and I learned a lot.
If I hadn't had the ability to tame my ego when this story happened, I would have missed the opportunity to allow myself to focus on the customer, serve them and build something together. It's obvious, and sometimes ego prevents us from keeping it in mind: as a coach the important thing is to focus on the customer, not on one self.