Coaching Quote of the Day 27th May 2011
“Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions.”
(Earl Gray Stevens)
questions
Chocolate Pudding and Coaching
My first full time jobs out of education were all in the hospitality industry. Working as a manager it was obvious that some waiting staff were taking more orders for desserts than others. One of the main differences between those who were selling more was with the way they were describing the desserts.
For example, imagine that you are dining out and at the appropriate time your waiter/waitress came to tell you “Today’s special desert is a chocolate pudding.”
That may sound appealing and you may even place an order. However, now, imagine the same scenario but this time your waiter/waitress tells you that:
“Today’s special desert is a must for chocolate lovers It’s a moist chocolate sponge, with a gooey dark chocolate filling that oozes out when you cut into it, topped with a white chocolate sauce. It is served warm with homemade smooth and creamy vanilla ice-cream that really compliments the chocolate-ness of the pudding.”
If you do like chocolate, which one of the two descriptions is going to have you drooling at the prospect of eating? Which conversation do you think will encourage you to say yes please?
(As a side note I think it’s important to add that both descriptions actually match with the dessert that was served)
One of the other things that those who sold more desserts did was that they did not take “no” personally. They knew that some people don’t like chocolate so are never going to order a chocolate pudding for themselves. They also know that sometimes a guest was just not hungry enough to have anything else. It didn’t mean that they were any less “worthy” as an individual.
I invite you to consider the description that you use to describe your coaching/work that will cause your potential ideal clients to drool at the prospect of working with you?
Learning to be a great coach
I was having a conversation recently revolving around an underlying desire for this person to learn to be a great coach. Rather than write a post about one of the specific skills I think a great coach demonstrates I am going to focus more on how you can learn to be a great coach.
How do you currently define a “great coach”?
This is a step that I find is often missed out. In conversations with people who tell me they want to be a coach but don’t feel that they are there yet it’s not at all uncommon that they haven’t actually defined for themselves what that means.
Once you know that benchmark it’s so much easier to then learn to be a great coach.
I invite you to take a moment to see what your current definition is, and share with you the following questions to aid you with that:
What is an example of a testimonial that a client would write for a great coach?
If you were following a great coach around, what would you see/hear them do?
What skills does a great coach possess?
What qualities does a great coach demonstrate?
Where are you now?
Once you have your benchmark of what a great coach currently means to you then you can take steps so that you are a great coach too. So my next question is where are you now?
I know as a coach/trainee coach you will probably have seen clients give an answer to a question that is outdated yet they still believe to be true. It’s a human trait to get caught up in that from time to time – you may be a coach but as I’m presuming that you are also human I invite you to consider the possibility that you may be wrong with your initial answer and check out the current reality.
So my first questions in this section are:
How do you know? What proof have you got?
My guess is that if you have got this far through a post about learning to be a great coach you are likely to think that there are skills that you could develop further. So my next question is:
How would you know if you too had those skills of a great coach?
Sometimes it’s a lack of information that can keep someone stuck – if you do find that any of your answers are “I don’t know”, find out!
Take action
Don’t just wish for these skills to appear overnight, the chances of your skills developing and you becoming a stronger coach increase dramatically if you actually do something to create that.
The action you take will depend upon the answers you have to the first two sections. My question to you under this heading is
How can you strengthen a particular area of your coaching?
Just some potential actions that may be relevant are:
Practice, study, observation, training, drills/exercises, establishing a strategy. working with a mentor, get your own coach, seeking feedback
What is it for you?
Evaluate the difference a particular approach made
Once you have taken action, check to see how it’s worked. One word of warning here – Don’t beat yourself up if the action you have taken hasn’t immediately resulted in you perfecting a skill. Learning can be “clunky” at times and things can be strengthened using many different ways. However, I find that beating yourself up isn’t one of the most effective ways 😉
Repeat
I was very conscious while writing this that I did not want to give a list of skills/qualities etc that I believe a great coach demonstrates. However, I also know that my definition has influenced what I’ve included and this stage is a prime example. For me, one thing great coaches demonstrate is continuing to develop their own skills etc.
You may have noticed that in the first stage I asked you how you currently define a great coach. I know that over the time I’ve been coaching some of my answers to the questions have remained relatively constant. However, there are aspects that I am aware of now that I was oblivious to when I first started coaching. Your perspective of what makes a great coach can change over time, so it can be worth checking what it is for you now.
Additional questions you may like to add in when you repeat this process –
How can you strengthen your coaching?
How can you make a bigger difference for your clients?
Feel free to share your views below, including your current definition of a great coach 🙂
Coaches, what question is your coaching client actually answering? 2
Imagine the following scenario:
You have asked a straight forward and in your opinion perfectly crafted question to your coaching client. However, the answer you get is actually one that may have lots of words but didn’t actually answer the question you asked!
As a coach there are many things that you can do in such a situation.
- Perhaps you just repeat the question without comment and see if you get an answer the second time.
- Maybe you point out that they didn’t actually answer the question that you asked.
- You may even decide that the answer that they gave actually takes the conversation in a useful direction so let the none answered question pass by.
One of the things I personally find really useful is to consider:
What question would the answer given make more sense?
We all filter information through various beliefs and values etc to get it to make sense. Sometimes, the questions that we as coaches ask can also get caught up in one of those filters so that the question they “hear” is different to the one asked.
Identifying the question a client actually “heard” can give some indication about the beliefs, values, your clients perceptions and any patterns. It can give you a clue about what is getting in their way.
For example:
As a coach, you ask a client “What would you love to do?”
The response they give you do not believe is something they would love to do at all. The answer is actually a much better fit with the question “What would be the next logical step to take?”
Why can being aware of what question your client actually answered be helpful? Firstly, it can show you what is getting in your clients way and assist you in wording a “killer question.” It may also indicate beliefs and values that impact other areas of their life.
Using the example above, by immediately considering the logical next step they are missing out on considering bigger better things. Are there other beliefs and values about what “admitting” what you actually want means? Perhaps, looking at the logical next step is something that they think is the natural thing that you should always do.
How often do you consider the question your client is actually answering?
Coaching Quote of the Day 8th March 2011
“Some man see things as they are and ask, why?
I dream things that never were and ask why not?”
(George Bernard Shaw)
As a coach, how are you judging if you are doing a good job? 1
It’s possible that the scenario that you are coaching in is likely to partly influence the focus and perspective of how you judge a specific coaching session.
If you are coaching where you are developing and practicing a specific ability in a training environment then perhaps you will use how you performed a specific technique, coaching model or skill as a way to judge.
If you are coaching in a business context as an internal member of a team then perhaps the judgement about how well a coaching session is influenced by other aspects of the expectations of your job role.
If you are coaching in a business context as an external provider then you may have other influences about how you judge a session was a good one.
Broadly speaking there are 5 different scenarios you may find yourself coaching:
- In a training situation to develop a specific skill, technique or style.
- A “formal” session in a business where you are also a team member – An example of this is a manager running a coaching session for a team member.
- A “formal” coaching session in a situation where you are “paid” by someone other than the person you are actually coaching.
- A “formal” coaching where you are “paid” directly by the individual you are coaching.
- An “informal” coaching conversation with family, friends or colleagues.
For the purposes of this list by formal I mean a session where both you and the person you are having a coaching conversation with are aware that you are coaching.
By “informal” I mean a situation where the other person may describe it as a chat at lunch, or an interesting conversation in the corridor etc. – As a coach you may have been very aware that you were having a conversation that would easily be identical in a formal coaching session. It’s just not necessarily the label the other person would use.
The question I ask today is as a coach, how are you judging you are doing a good job? I appreciate that potentially the scenario and context you are coaching in may influence your judgement.
Do you form a judgement given what you have personally seen or heard? Perhaps you just get a specific feeling that tells you that you’ve done a good job.
Maybe you let your client(s) be the guide about if it was a good session and use the feedback from those directly involved.
Another aspect that some people use to judge is criteria either given directly to you by someone other than your client (ie a trainer/organisation). Alternatively, you can judge using a comparison with someone else.
You may have noticed that I specifically used the word judging, as in “to form an opinion about,” in my question.
Each method of judging can have an impact on how confident you feel about your coaching and the action that you take which can positively or negatively impact your business.
As always, if you are judging if you are doing a good job, and that way is working for you then do keep doing what you are doing. If it isn’t working you may want to consider how you are forming that judgement and what you are doing with that opinion.
Here are a few questions and observations that will apply more to some judgement methods than others:
- Not confident about your coaching? Leonard Orr’s said “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.” (Otherwise known as Orr’s Law.) Are you ignoring “evidence” from another perspective?
Just for fun, if you were to consider the opposite to your judgement, what “evidence” could you find? If you were to use that judgement what would you do differently?
- Comparing yourself with someone else? What are you doing with that comparison? If you are using it to beat yourself up with “I’m not as good as” thoughts, is that a useful action?
I’ll also mention that many people pick someone with years of experience and thousand of hours of practice to use as a comparison – hardly a fair comparison if you haven’t also got years of experience and thousands of hours practice as well!
- Totally ignoring what your clients are saying and preferring to make a judgement using other methods? Just for a moment consider the question: “What actions would you take if you let your clients guide that judgement?” What impact would those actions have on your coaching practice, either your literal business or how you approach coaching?
If you haven’t already I invite you to consider how you are judging your coaching and the impact that is having.
Why, oh why, oh why?
On Mondays post a comment by Dave Doran asked my thoughts about using the question why. I thought Dave’s question was great and an interesting topic that deserved a post all of it’s own. So here are more thoughts:
Some of you may have attended a training that has specifically taught you that in coaching you never, ever ask the question why? I know, I’ve attended those courses as well 🙂
There are reasons why the question why is often taught not to be asked to new coaches. Asking the question why can have a negative effect upon a coaching conversation. There is much to be said about that negative influence but to keep this post to a reasonable length perhaps the two main impacts are:
- Asking the question why can cause an individual to feel attacked in some form, resulting in defensive answers.
- It can focus the attention upon the past rather than in the present or future.
I’d hope that anyone who has been taught not to ask the question why also focuses upon what they want to achieve with a question and the potential outcome rather than just not saying the word why. Just because you don’t physically use the word why, it does not mean that your question doesn’t focus someone’s attention towards past events.
For example the question, “how come?” doesn’t contain the word why but potentially provides exactly the same answer if the client had just said “I don’t feel wonderful at the moment.” Equally in some situations you can provoke a defensive response with the phrase “What were you thinking?”
When Dave asked about what I personally felt about using the question why I replied that I didn’t rule out the possibility of asking the question why. For me, it’s about still having the flexibility to use it in appropriate situations and contexts. When I do use the question why, I do so deliberately and often it is woven into a much bigger framework of the work that I am doing. I know the reason why I am asking why.
So having said that I wouldn’t rule out asking the question why I thought I’d expand on the situations and contexts I may use the question why:
If my client tells me that they keep asking themselves why.
Anything a client tells me they keep asking themselves is potentially a question worth answering so I often check if they’ve actually listened for an answer. Listening for an answer may seem obvious but often people stop at the question and use that thought as a reason to beat themselves up.
To discover motivation /why something is important.
In some contexts it can be beneficial for a client to be aware about why something is important to them. Often this is an answer that is not based about something that has happened in the past so you don’t have the consequence of getting bogged down with a story about historic events.
Asking why may reveal individuals values, if they want to get away from a situation or if they want to move towards something new.
Discover somebody’s limiting beliefs
I normally only ask why for this purpose when I’m pretty certain I know what those limiting beliefs are and want to tackle them head on. I’m often looking to get the precise wording that they are telling themselves. It’s also something I usually only use if I feel that the trust is there between us – it will minimise any potential defensive feelings.
Mastery
You may have heard of a theory in learning called the steps to learning, or the conscious competence theory. In this model of learning it is considered the 4th stage is unconscious competence, when someone is so comfortable with a skill that they can do it without thinking about it.
Does that mean that when you’ve learnt to do something naturally it can’t be improved or strengthened? Personally I don’t subscribe to that belief, so if the context of the coaching is around improving an individuals skills I may very easily ask a why question. Asking why in that situation will bring those skills back to the conscious stage. Or as I have heard Michael Neill describe as a conscious unconscious competence stage, which can otherwise be referred to it as mastery.
Let me re-stress that these are just scenarios where I might consider using a why question. In practice I choose each question depending upon what the person in front of me (or on the phone) has just said – it’s a bespoke service not a one size fits all approach. 🙂 I’m also not condemning any coach who chooses not to ask a why question. If you are a coach I invite you to consider, at an appropriate time, why you are using a particular question.
You may not agree with what I have said above and I’m happy for that to be the case, feel free to tell me so below. Alternatively, if there is a situation when you would use the question why I haven’t mentioned I’d love for you to share those as well.
What model of coaching do you employ?
Several years ago I was attending an HR/training exhibition/conference. One of the exhibiters that I got speaking to was a company that specialised in coaching. Quickly this individual read my name label, which also had my then job title of a trainer. The very first question they asked me was do you use coaching, followed quickly by which model do you use?
The first response that came into my head was “the one that works for that situation and individual.” However, I figured that in order for that question to make sense to the person asking the chances were that they felt that you just followed one coaching model. So I resisted answering with my first response and spoke about a model that the business I was in at that time had devised.
However, I have to admit that I was feeling slightly mischievous. As I know and use, as appropriate, many different models I could choose to mention one of several. The one I choose to tell them about one that was unique to the company I worked for at that time – one that they had modelled, identified the steps used and created their own acronym to act as a reminder of the steps.
In case you’re reading this thinking I’m saying that models have no place in coaching let me make it perfectly clear that is not what I’m saying. Coaching models can be fantastic for many reasons:
- They can aid your mastery of coaching as they assist you to be conscious of what you are doing and to make choices deliberately.
- They can assist you in deciding a particular course of action to take, which question to ask next, the technique to use or a suitable approach.
- A model can be easy to teach to someone totally new to coaching
- Following a model can be very reassuring to those new to coaching.
- To some audiences models add credibility about your expertise as a coach.
- Not forgetting that in the right context they can work!
The downside to coaching models is that some take the idea that coaching models exist and look for step by step instructions. A one size-fits all approach if you like. It’s almost as if they are looking for an “if they say x you say y” level of instruction without paying attention to other skills. My own personal belief is that when done skilfully coaching is so much more than a formula.
Imagine that you have the experience of calling two different call centres – Call centre A where the agents have to follow a script and are restricted by what their system allows. Call centre B is one where the agents have received training, have product knowledge and are allowed to have a conversation in their own professional style that focuses upon you as a caller.
Which one would you rather be involved with? If your situation fits with the script and their systems then you may have a satisfactory outcome to your call with call centre A. If you have a more unusual scenario or one that doesn’t work with their system then Call Centre A is not likely to be able to assist you, and you’ll have far more chance of success with Call Centre B.
What has this got to do with coaching? From time to time I see coaches using the same approach as call centre A. They have a model they use and they put all their focus on using it the “right” way.
I like to give this approach the benefit of the doubt and think that the coach’s motivation is about doing a great job for their client. The only thing is that the client is often ignored because the focus is on the process of the model, which means signs and cues can be missed. The coach is very inflexible with their approach trying to get the client to adjust to their approach instead.
Does this mean that I am suggesting that you should not learn coaching models? – Again, I say no.
What I am suggesting is that:
- You are open to the possibilities that there can be more than one approach.
- Don’t be afraid to change direction if one way isn’t working.
- Remember your other important coaching skills – such as listening
- Don’t ignore the client and their response
Thinking back to just the last couple of coaching sessions I’ve run I know that I have employed many models such as GROW, Transformative Coaching and High Performance Coaching. And I do mean employ – models are there for you to use the services of, not for you to surrender your control.