What is Coaching?

What is Coaching & Behavioural Change Coaching

Professional Coaching is an ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Through the process of coaching, clients deepen their learning, improve their performance, and enhance their quality of life.

In each meeting, the client chooses the focus of conversation, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions. This interaction creates clarity and moves the client into action. Coaching accelerates the client's progress by providing greater focus and awareness of choice. Coaching concentrates on where clients are today and what they are willing to do to get where they want to be tomorrow.

Coaching is a powerful relationship designed to help a person who wants more out of any aspect of life:

1. Clearly define his or her goals and dreams
2. Uncover the obstacles and self-imposed limitations that stand in the way of success
3. Generate actions to start to create the results he or she is seeking

It may be argued that the number one barrier to us achieving success in any endeavour will be ourselves, that the number one predictor of success is being clear on what we really want and why, and that being relentless in the pursuit of turning our goals and dreams into a reality will be the number one cause of achievements manifesting in our lives.

Coaching is about making life easier. It works by helping people get out of their own way to get what they most want: achievement, fulfillment, and a sense of being comfortable in their own skin.

In a typical coaching session a coach will:

1. Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
2. Encourage client self-discovery
3. Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
4. Hold the client as responsible and accountable

What should you look for in a Great Coach?

Having a coach is the first time for many people that the person working with them has NO OTHER AGENDA but to support their client in achieving their goals. For the time that the coach is in front of the client there is no other focus than the achievement of those goals. This is a unique and very special relationship.

A coach is an ‘enabler’. He or she facilitates a person or team moving from where they are now to where they need to be. By empowering and reflecting clients take new decisions and actions.

Great coaches always ask rather than advise; they stimulate, challenge and push-back on the client when necessary. A really good coach takes a ‘Jerry McGuire’ approach, as in ‘show-me-the-money with respect to action rather than words; good intentions don’t change anything. It’s action that creates results hence a powerful coach will facilitate the generation of powerful actions.

Great coaches are far more than great listeners; they listen and interpret with such intensity that meanings are drawn from things that would be otherwise overlooked. A great coach helps their client grow as a professional and as a human being. The ask searching questions that force the client to think more deeply about their issues, and are relentless in their search for effective client driven solutions that help move closer toward the achievement of the goals.

A great coach never judges or condemns but neither will they accept anything less than the best from their client. A great coach makes sure that the goals a client commits to are honest, real and personally crucial; they will help measure what might first appear un-measurable and (with the clients permission) do whatever is necessary to help their client achieve them.

Behavioural Change Coaching explained

While coaching can focus on any aspect of a person's life in assisting personal growth and a number of different approaches to coaching exist, behavioural change coaching or cognitive behavioural approaches emphasize that how we react to events is largely determined by our views of them, not by the events themselves.

Through examining and re- evaluating some of our less helpful views we can develop and try out alternative viewpoints and behaviours that may be more effective in aiding problem-solving. Behavioural change coaching doesn’t provide quick fixes to achieve personal change or ''magic away'' personal difficulties. Instead it emphasizes that sustained effort and commitment are required for a successful outcome to life challenges. Consistency is the real deliverer of sustained change.

The approach does not seek to give people the answers to their problems or difficulties, but through a collaborative process called ‘guided discovery’ (often using guided visualization techniques as well as insightful questioning) it helps them to reach their own conclusions and solutions. Previously, what may have been a ‘mental block’ in relation to tackling a particular difficulty is now transformed into an open or flexible system of identifying a number of problem-solving strategies.

The real aim of the intervention is for the client to become their own behavioural change coach – using and utilizing the processes and techniques that have been used with them during the coaching sessions. The number and length of sessions depends on the person's requirements: for example, ninety-minute fortnightly sessions to tackle an ongoing problem or an intensive three hour session to deal with performance anxiety regarding an imminent public speaking engagement.

Simply put it’s a process based on a collaborative relationship that helps individuals to focus on problem-solving in a structured and systematic way, encouraging individuals to draw from within themselves problem-solving strategies rather than have them handed over by the coach and being guided with techniques and tools to make the best of their natural resources.

What's new in coaching?

Learning from Occupational & Environmental Neurology

The 10 Coaching Commandments

according to Martin

The Intervention Matrix

The following forms part of the ILM accredited Notion’s Leadership Mentoring & Executive Coaching Programme
 

One way of thinking about coaching-style interventions is to use a matrix to map the level of business and personal (emotional) content of the required change.

This will broadly fall into four quartiles:

Quartile 1
High level of Business content and high level of Personal (emotional) content: The outcome matters to both the business and the individual. There is an investment to be made by both the business and the individual in addressing the issue and generating a positive outcome, which will then be of benefit to both.
This is the coaching quartile. It is distinct from other interventions because combined high levels of business and personal content.

Quartile 2
High level of business content but low level of personal (emotional) content: This deals primarily with a desired business outcome. The outcome may be important to the individual but may not be their personal or sole responsibility. Often issues of this mature will be about the reviewing of processes or systems employed in the business. Aspects of this quartile may draw upon a coaching approach however the most likely preferred intervention will be that of a consulting approach, or the provision of training.

Quartile 3
Low levels of both business and personal (emotional) content: This infers that the intervention is either to do with the physical wellbeing of the client or is outside of the work arena completely; hence interventions such ass sports or fitness coaching fall into this area. It should be noted that ‘Life’ coaching (an intervention around a person’s values, beliefs and goals) will have a high degree of personal content and (more often than not) will also be linked to that person’s business or career; hence it falls in quartile 1 rather than here.

Quartile 4
Low business content but high personal (emotional) content: This suggests a more therapeutic style of intervention; hence counselling and other forms of therapy will fall into this area. It should be noted that this does not exclude business issues being a part of the intervention, just that they are lower in content when compared to the personal issues. Typically work related stress might fall into this area.

Notes for coaches
It is important for a coach to be aware of the matrix in order to be able to guide a client toward the most appropriate intervention. For example an employee put forward for corporate coaching who is in a situation where their role needs a complete review and they have been suffering from work related stress that led to long periods of absenteeism, may actually not be the ideal candidate for coaching.

It is as much the responsibility of the coach to ensure that the client is appropriate as the client to be sure they can work with the coach. If an alternative form of intervention would be more appropriate then the coach must be able to articulate and explain why and what that alternative intervention might be.

Directed Thought

Probably the most fundemental change in thinking you'll ever experience

Download and excerpt from 'The Truth' by Martin Goodyer