Coaching
Coaching and the Benefits of Having a Coach
As an active and credentialed member of the ICF-International Coach Federation I adhere to their strict Code of Ethics and coaching definition:
"Professional Coaching is a professional partnership between a qualified coach and an individual or team that supports the achievement of extraordinary results, based on goals set by the individual or team. Through the process of coaching, individuals focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce their personally relevant results.
The individual or team chooses the focus of conversation, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions as well as concepts and principles which can assist in generating possibilities and identifying actions. Through the coaching process the clarity that is needed to support the most effective actions is achieved. Coaching accelerates the individual's or team's progress by providing greater focus and awareness of possibilities leading to more effective choices. Coaching concentrates on where individuals are now and what they are willing to do to get where they want to be in the future. ICF member coaches recognize that results are a matter of the individual's or team's intentions, choices and actions, supported by the coach's efforts and application of coaching skills, approaches and methods."
I am happy to quote the ICF further when informing you about benefits, process and success measurements:
What are the benefits of coaching?
Individuals and companies who engage in a coaching relationship can expect to
- experience fresh perspectives on personal challenges and opportunities,
- enhanced thinking and decision making skills,
- enhanced interpersonal effectiveness, and
- increased confidence in carrying out their chosen work and life roles.
Consistent with a commitment to enhancing their personal effectiveness, they can also expect to see appreciable results in the areas of productivity, personal satisfaction with life and work, and the achievement of personally relevant goals.
How can you determine if coaching is right for you?
To determine if you could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you would expect to accomplish in coaching. When someone has a fairly clear idea of the desired outcome, a coaching partnership can be a useful tool for developing a strategy for how to achieve that outcome with greater ease.
Since coaching is a partnership, also ask yourself if you find it valuable to collaborate, to have another viewpoint and to be asked to consider new perspectives. Also, ask yourself if you are ready to devote the time and the energy to making real changes in your work or life. If the answer to these questions is yes, then coaching may be a beneficial way for you to grow and develop. This is the time when you should call me and arrange for your complimentary coaching session!
What does the coaching process look like?
I begin coaching with a personal interview (by teleconference call) to assess the potential client's current opportunities and challenges, define the scope of the relationship, identify priorities for action, and establish specific desired outcomes.
Subsequent coaching sessions may be conducted in person or over the telephone, with each session lasting a previously established length of time.
Between scheduled coaching sessions, I may ask the individual to complete specific actions that support the achievement of personally prioritized goals. I may provide additional resources in the form of relevant articles, checklists, assessments, or models, to support the individual's thinking and actions. The duration of the coaching relationship varies depending on the client's personal needs and preferences.
My Coaching incorporates an appreciative approach. The appreciative approach is grounded in what's working, what's wanted, and what's needed to get there. Using an appreciative approach, I model constructive communication skills and methods the client or the client team can utilize to enhance personal communication effectiveness. The appreciative approach incorporates discovery-based inquiry, proactive (as opposed to reactive) ways of managing personal opportunities and challenges, constructive framing of observations and feedback in order to elicit the most positive responses from others, and envisioning success as contrasted with focusing on problems. The appreciative approach is simple to understand and employ, but its effects in harnessing possibility thinking and goal-oriented action can be profound.
How long does coaching take?
The length of a coaching partnership varies depending on the client's or client team's needs and preferences. For certain types of focused coaching, 3 to 6 months of working together may work. For other types of coaching, clients may find it beneficial to work with me for a longer period. Factors that may impact the length of time include: the types of goals, the ways clients like to work, the frequency of coaching meetings, and financial resources available to support coaching.
Within the partnership, what does the coach do? The client?
My role as a coach is to provide objective assessment and observations that foster the client's enhanced self-awareness and awareness of others, practice astute listening in order to garner a full understanding of the client's circumstances, be a sounding board in support of possibility thinking and thoughtful planning and decision making, champion opportunities and potential, encourage stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations, foster the shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives, challenge blind spots in order to illuminate new possibilities, and support the creation of alternative scenarios.
The role of the client is to create the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals, utilize assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others, envision personal and/or organizational success, assume full responsibility for personal decisions and actions, utilize the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives, take courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations, engage big picture thinking and problem solving skills, and utilize the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by me to engage effective forward actions.
What does coaching ask of an individual? To be successful, coaching asks certain things of the individual, all of which begin with intention:
- Focus - on one's self, the tough questions, the hard truths--and one's success
- Observation - the behaviors and communications of others
- Listening - to one's intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks
- Self discipline - to challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and to develop new ones which serve one's goals in a superior way
- Style - leveraging personal strengths and overcoming limitations in order to develop a winning style
- Decisive actions - however uncomfortable, and in spite of personal insecurities, in order to reach for the extraordinary
- Compassion - for one's self as he or she experiments with new behaviors, experiences setbacks - and for others as they do the same
- Humor - committing to not take one's self so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation
- Personal control - maintaining composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity
- Courage - to reach for more than before, to shift out of being fear based in to being in abundance as a core strategy for success, to engage in continual self examination, to overcome internal and external obstacles
How can the success of the coaching process be measured?
Measurement may be thought of in two distinct ways. First, there are the external indicators of performance: measures which can be seen and measured in the client's environment. Second, there are internal indicators of success: measures which are inherent within the client being coached and can be measured by the client. Ideally, both external and internal metrics are incorporated.
Examples of external measures include achievement of coaching goals established at the outset of the coaching relationship, increased income/revenue, obtaining a promotion, performance feedback which is obtained from a sample of the client's constituents (e.g., direct reports, colleagues, customers, boss, the manager him/herself), personal and/or business performance data (e.g., productivity, efficiency measures). The external measures selected should ideally be things the client is already measuring and are things the client has some ability to directly influence.
Examples of internal measures include self-scoring/self-validating assessments that can be administered initially and at regular intervals in the coaching process, changes in the client's self-awareness and awareness of others, shifts in thinking which inform more effective actions, and shifts in one's emotional state which inspire confidence.
A living example:
In October 2001, the artist Shu Lea Cheang asked me to join her "Make-World-Festival" for a live coaching session. Individuals currently not employed and wanting to uncover their areas of expertise were coached by me for a half-hour-session.
deutsch print