Newsletter 2010/01

A British coach told me the following story. A manager with whom he had his first coaching session started telling him about his “problems”. “The people here are incapable of doing things, they don’t know how to do things, nothing works the way it should, I have to take care of everything myself and I have to explain everything to them down to the last detail,” he said …The coach listened, and after about half an hour of similar grievances said to the manager, “I’ve been listening to you for half an hour and it’s made me feel sick. I find your negativity very destructive.” The looked intently at the coach, thought for a minute and then replied, “You are the first person here to be honest with me. Thank you very much.”

A coaching session begins. A coach, generally using the GROW method immediately asks: “What issue do you want to resolve? What is your goal? The reply is often: “I don’t know…well, basically to improve my efficiency/be more efficiency/to handle crises better/to achieve a better balance between my work and personal life…”
Sometimes coachees say this to the coach with strong conviction, on other occasions it is the “expected answer”, and sometimes it shows an unwillingness or inability to stop and think deeply about goals, and so the above statement rather becomes an artificial “sticker”.

What must we do to better define our goal and, most of all, test whether it really is a proper goal?

Coaching is a way of developing potential through a dialogue between the coach and the coachee. It could be asked whether coaching is a dialogue, and the answer is yes and no. Strictly speaking, coaching involves dialogues on several levels, with a whole series of conversations taking place!

Taking part in and completing the four-day Executive Coach Training course in London, led by Alison Sheridan (CPCC) and Lori Shook (MCC), was an exceptional experience for me. Participants from five European countries (Switzerland, United Kingdom, Romania, the Czech Republic and Portugal), as well as Australia and Brazil, came together at the course, which was devoted to coaching principles and involved intensive work. Sharing our experiences and a thorough exploration of the principles of “transformational coaching” was a novel environment for developing one’s skills and personal approach to coaching. Seeing how the “awareness of reality” and “taking responsibility” coaching principles could be turned into the work of individual colleagues was extremely useful. These principles are part of Sir John Whitmore’s approach

How would you describe your coaching experience?
From the outset I was scared to talk openly about my problems. I didn’t know whether these difficulties that I’d experienced at work were normal and could be talked about. Then I realised that it isn’t like that and that we are here to find a way of sorting out a situation, and to learn to work on it or make the best of it. It was great to talk with somebody neutral, who wasn’t caught up in our problems. It was good to talk about it, analyse the issue and see it from another angle. It was also good to know what I could do about it.