What is Coaching?
Coaching is one of the most personalised and intimate of all the development options. A coaching engagement is like a journey with a critical friend – one who’s there to help you find a reflective space, new insight and a mindset drawn from strengths and possibility.
You will always shape the approach we take in a coaching engagement. As a coach I’m absolutely present with you, bringing curiosity, unattached compassion and constructive challenge to the mix.
Why might you engage a coach?
You may seek coaching for a range of reasons, such as:
An individual, conscious decision to invest time/energy in your own growth
To support you in a career transition, winning a new role or promotion
As a consequence of a conversation with a mentor or immediate manager
To consolidate new skills and behaviours following a development program
Following a recommendation from a diagnostic process
To foster clarity, performance and wellbeing in a challenging environment
If your employer is sponsoring your coaching, it’s a good idea to seek your manager’s view of what’s important, via a three way get together, and how they can support you in achieving the outcomes you and the organisation respectively seek. Sometimes these overlap, but not always.
What Does Coaching Involve?
In my experience, a coaching engagement is a process of realisation, reframing and renewal with three parts:
1. Unlocking energy, potential and belief in your unique self
A sense of who we are, our vision for the future and what we bring (our skills, intention and qualities) is powerful. Yet some of us continually question ourselves; hyper-aware of our own flaws. We can’t learn as effectively or do our best work if we focus on deficit, or if our inner critic rules our head! Heart (emotion) and gut (instinct and courage) must feature as well.
2. Hearing and seeing afresh
In coaching we press pause on the ‘doing’ – immersing ourselves in tasks – and take time to acknowledge beliefs, assumptions, self-talk, prevailing patterns and habitual responses. If we gear up to look at these with openness and curiosity, we start to recognise their impact, where they’re helping us or making us ‘stuck’. Then we’re more able to catch them in the moment, capture the positives and release those that aren’t true or helpful.
3. Building ‘outsight’ and renewing your purpose
We need perspective to navigate the whole system in which we’re operating and perceived blocks or opportunities. It’s hard nudging out of our comfort and into our growth zone. We have to work at it to hold the stretch, not revert to a comfort or fight or flight response. A clear purpose helps to steady us, so we are more likely to have wellbeing and achieve our potential and less likely to be derailed by uncertainty or hopelessness.
where do we focus?
In coaching, we focus where you want to. For a lot of people, this seems to be about ways to navigate a changed context and bring out their ‘best self’. So emerging themes are:
Connectedness and responsiveness - without spending all day on Zoom!!
Staying steady, confident, ‘centred’ and looking for possibility and opportunity (in the face of perceived loss)
Holding the stretch in this space without relapsing to our comfort zone or a ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response
A refreshed purpose and narrative – the story you tell yourself and others about who (you are), why (you’re here), and what (you’re hoping for and working towards)
Perspective and creative/lateral thinking – questioning old habits and patterns
Catching beliefs, defaults and big assumptions and challenging and releasing these if they’re no longer valid or helpful
Being an engaging presence, a collaborator and an influencer
Listening deeply, to understand, and deploying curiosity, courage and skill to engage in breakthrough conversations
Experimenting with new roles and holding the default ones more lightly (e.g. the rescuer, fixer, solutioneer, trouble shooter)
Supporting growth and career shifts and using strengths, purpose and mindset to execute these