watch tHe skies

Last week I got to see one of my coaching clients who I hadn’t seen for some time. Although the initial aim was for us to see each other monthly for a few months, events prevented that from happening. So I hadn’t seen her for 3 months, and had only spend 2 hours with her in total.

She came to see me to help her with her confidence. She was struggling to find her way in her role, and was finding it very stressful. She has also lost confidence in her ability to deliver training which is a key part of her job. We spent a couple of hours exploring her beliefs about herself, her situation and what she wanted her job to be like, and then we parted ways, so I was anxious to catch up and find out how she was getting on.

And yet I couldn’t have expected the progress that she has made - the confidence issue is gone and she is tackling bigger and better challenges with renewed vigour. Her team have commented on the change in recent months and she has altered her behaviour with her staff and is seeing the results of it.

And during our session she explained how our first meeting had been a big turning point. “Whenever I get in to those situations, I just hear your voice in my ear and that gives me the boost that I need”. Wow, it’s hard to describe the feeling with knowing that I’ve helped someone so much. After all, it’s really the reason that I do what I do, and it spurs me on to do it even more.

I just thought I’d share that with you

Happy New Year one and all, I hope that 2008 brings you smiles every day!

I’m not really a resolution kind of person - although the nice thing about the over-indulgence of Christmas is that is can be a useful opportunity to reflect on what you want steady state to be, to get some new perspectives and draw a line in the sand as to the way things are going to be from now on.

For those of you setting yourself new goals for the year, take a moment to imagine how you will know that you have achieved that goal… what will you see, hear and, especially, feel. Take some time to enjoy this experience and you will be encouraging your mind to create new pathways between where you are and where you want to be. It will make the transition easier as you begin to become aware of how much progress you have already made by simply giving yourself a chance at spotting your success.

For me, my resolutions, if they can be called such, are to get my new website online, finish my coaching thesis which is taking longer than I had hoped, and get back in to the exercise routine that slipped in recent months with the change of role and levels of travel. I’m still working on my well-formed outcome for the latter, the others just require me to find opportunities in my schedule to get the remaining donkey work done.

A lot of people I coach come to me for coaching for something specific. For example:

• I want a better job
• I want my business profits to improve
• I want to lose weight
• I want to quit smoking

You get the theme. They want things. It would be fair to say that 99% of people who come to me for coaching have already prescribed the thing that they want.

Prescribed? What do you mean?

Well in my experience… it’s not the car \ job \ woman \ weightloss that people actually want.

They want the feelings that they attach to those things.

That’s right, feelings. (more…)

So the other day I noticed that I had now been running this blog for over 2 years. Which is not only surprising but encouraging. Unbeknownst to me I had managed to sustain a website with regular updates for an extended time without it becoming a chore or absorbing my life. Previously I ran a movie review website for quite some time and it was proving successful, it more than paid for itself, but the demands of keeping the content updated became too much and I ditched it.

However lessons were learnt, and these lessons have been further molded and formed with the study I’ve been doing over the last year, plus a yearning to do more with the coaching skills I continue to discover, than is offered in my everyday job.

Over the weekend I suffered from an unexpected (aren’t they always) bout of sickness that left me with lots of time lying in bed with nothing else to do other than think. Not something I get much time to do nowadays. And rather than being a pain this has given me the opportunity to decide what to do with all of this stuff I can do, and continue to learn. And so the next steps are beginning to take shape. I won’t mention much more at this stage other than it seems to answer the key questions I would ask if I was coaching myself through the thought process (which of course I am). And so I’m busily researching and developing and planning the next steps. And, of course, taking action; for it is action that makes success of belief and direction. That is, if you believe in such nonsense, which I assume you must do if you take the time to read my site.

I’m excitedly looking forward to my new car. It should be here this week. Big and shiny and fast and laden with gadgets, whilst still being quite good carbon footprint-wise, I can’t wait.

This will be my second brand-new car. There is something great about a new car, the smell of it and it being so lovely and clean and knowing that no-one has thrashed the car before you do.

So in preparation I decided to give my current car a bit of a valet at the weekend. You know, get all of the stuff like fire extinguishers out, and hoover it up a bit, so that when I swap keys the recipient gets that new car feel, albeit with a second hand car.

So I spent about an hour hoovering the car out, getting rid of all the parking receipts stuffed in to the pockets, and the assorted ipod accessories from the glove compartment. And when I finished, it felt like a new car, and I have since enjoyed driving it far more, and been in a better mood getting in to a lovely clean car every day. After all, this one is only 3 years old, and is a lovely car, it’s no surprise really.

And it just got me wondering, if I had valeted my old car more often, perhaps I would have gotten that new car feeling I love so much on a more regular basis?

I talk a lot about coaching and coaching techniques on this blog, and yet I’ve never actually talked about being coached. So I thought I would.

I do this on the eve of my last coaching session for my course, which itself is a coaching course, and as this is a “learning by doing” course, it comes with a number of coaching sessions to help me discuss and overcome any obstacles as I’ve encountered new situations and people.

So over the last year I’ve had quite a lot of coaching of one type or another, and when I look back to a year or so ago I can see elements in me then that aren’t there now. A lot of negativity has been cleared out and I am so much clearer on what I want to do with myself, today, tomorrow and in the future. (more…)

So I gave my day training course on Questioning and Listening skills for Coaching and it went very well. I got good feedback from my tutor and the students, who all seemed to take something new away to think about.

I was also pleased that I got a chance to put in to practice many of the techniques I’ve learnt in the last couple of years, and that, considering I hadn’t done this before, I was pretty relaxed and wasn’t fazed by any questions. Thankfully I do know the subject quite well and I was careful to only cover subjects that I am knowledgable about. And where I was making suggestions about possibilities (such as whether coaching can truly elicit triple loop learning) I made sure that people understood the limitations of my own experience and presented it as an idea rather than fact.

One of the things I learnt from the session was that putting out a radical new idea to the group at the start of the session really opens people up. I started off with the “map is not the territory” concept, which is pretty mindblowing to those that haven’t come across it, and then opened up a discussion on the impact of this on two-way conversations. Heads were still spinning by lunchtime, and it’s my generalisation that as a result, some of the more awkward students were very participative.

So all in all a successful start (and probably end) to my training career. I was pleased to learn as much from training as being trained. I’m just glad it’s over and I can get on with the coaching again!

Next week I am running my first ever training on coaching-type skills. As part of my coaching diploma I have written and I am co-presenting a one day training on questioning and listening skills for coaching.

Even so, I do feel like a fraud.

Sure, I’ve read a lot of books on the subject and I am a practitioner of all of the skills and concepts that I’m presenting, yet at the same time I am no expert. I am still in the “conscious competence” stage for most of the coaching skills I am training.

Sure, I understand that being able to communicate these skills to others, running exercises to help other people’s learning, is going to help me learn, yet I can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s not right for me to be training them.

In many areas I’m becoming very skilled. For example, at the core of coaching is the ability to spot limiting beliefs and be able to help the client step outside of their “map” and see new choices, unconstrained by assumptions that are holding problems in place. In general conversation these jump out at me as if illuminated by neon lights. Which is great, it’s taken me quite a few months to become attentive enough to get to this stage. Unfortunately knowing where to go from that point often leaves me lost for words, wondering which of the many coaching techniques I should apply. That isn’t to say I don’t take the client somewhere, I still get very good feedback about my coaching skills, it’s just for me personally it is affecting my confidence in coaching “awkward” clients and, of course, my ability to demonstrate that which I am going to explain.

Of course this skill will become unconscious in time, I already find this very easy when dealing with “business” problems, it’s translating or generalising that skill in to client situations and being confident to pace and lead the client to a better place that I have to work on.

Some might say I’m being self-critical, I say reflective, and that’s exactly what I created this blog for! If anyone fancies coaching me on this situation, feel free!

…it’s WHO you know so often seems to ring true… Opportunities seem to present themselves always through contacts and discussions, and yet with so many adages, it’s not entirely true, is it? I mean you still have to know stuff.

And one of the most useful “stuffs” to know is what you want.

Having a goal in mind should be the prerequisite for any activity. After all it’s a lot easier to measure success when you have a success criteria in mind at the outset. And yet it is easy to bimble through life without any specific outcomes in mind.

So once you know what you want, it is then useful to know who can help you get there, so that “who you know” is only valuable after “what you want”.

Then it is useful to start to build up a network of contacts that can help you get there. Contacts that can:

• Make you feel good
• Mentor you and challenge you
• Give you direct and honest feedback
• Accept you as you are and support you emotionally
• Make things happen
• Raise your profile
• Provide you with valuable information and resources
• Open doors to new networks in your field of interest

I’ve attached a little word document (Build your network) you can use to fill this out if you are interested.

This will give you a good view of the strength of your network for reaching your outcome. And remember, networks are two way… the more networks you belong to for other people, the stronger your own network will be!

I ran a workshop last week with some managers who were trying to come to terms with what needs to change to grow the business in the next 5 years. During the first hour or so I heard a lot of the following.

• We can’t do that because…
• That’s a nice approach, but we are a different kind of company because…
• Common sense tells me…

These are all evidence of change-resistant paradigms, they are language patterns I often hear in coaching situations. They’re not necessarily wrong, it’s just if you look at ideas through “why I can’t” glasses, then you’ll get all the reasons for why you can’t, filtering out all of the reasons why you can.

See, in this case the managers’ mindset was one of resistance to change, and this was reflected in their language and attitude. After an hour or so I’d heard enough and I called the session to a halt and asked them to consider the ideas with the following questions.

• How can we make this work?
• How are we similar to that company?
• Common sense told Roger Bannister that the 4 minute mile wasn’t possible, yet within a year of him breaking the barrier, 12 other people ran sub-4 minute miles. Common sense is non-sense!

This reframed the workshop in to one of possibilities and opportunities, of what if’s and how’s instead of why can’t and stay the same. Consequently the workshop became very productive and the mood and level of teamworking improved greatly.

And this reminded me of a story I read about how NASA met JFK’s public announcement of putting a man on the moon within the decade. The story goes that when they looked at what was needed to succeed, the technology necessary was an estimated 30 years away on current roadmaps, so they split the development teams in to the pessimists (why I can’t) and optimists (how can I). The pessimists identified all of the risks and reasons why they couldn’t put a man on the moon, and NASA gave all of these reasons to the optimists, who systematically developed ways that they could solve those problems.

The result, as they say, is history, and the moral, if there is one, is that why I can’t can be a useful question to ask but only if followed by how I can… as NASA proved, we are capable of far more than we think we are, and barring a few simple laws of the universe which may be disproven in time, our ability to achieve is limited only by our self-limiting beliefs and our imagination.

And that was true for the workshop. With that new frame in mind, the group came together in a way I hadn’t seen before. Trust between the team grew before my eyes and the workshop became an open and honest session that made such progress that the Director rang me that evening to say how surprised and delighted he was in what they all came away with.

All that through a simple reframe. I wonder how this approach could help you today?