Business Coaching

Listening
This is often referred to as ‘active listening’ to emphasise the difference between passively taking in what the other person is saying and actively engaging with them and showing that you are giving them your undivided attention. This involves putting your own concerns and idea ‘in a box’ while you listen, so can be particularly challenging for manager-coaches, but it’s a skill well worth developing.
You can probably remember the last time someone put everything else aside and gave you their full attention - it’s a powerful experience, partly because it’s so rare. By listening intently to someone else, you send a powerful double message - firstly, that you are there to support them in
whatever they are doing, secondly, that you are paying attention and expect them to follow through on any commitments they make. There are various techniques and models used to teach active listening, but the easiest and most genuine approach is simply to become genuinely interested in the other person and curious about what they can achieve.
Empathising
Empathy develops naturally out of looking and listening. If you do this attentively, you can start to ‘get a feeling’ for the other person’s emotional state. Some people experience empathy as a powerful physical sensation - they literally seem to feel the other person’s emotions. (Scientists have linked this phenomenon to the operation of mirror neurons.) For others it’s more like being able to imagine what it’s like to be ‘in the other’s shoes’. The ability to empathise with the coachee is critical to the coaching process, as it not only helps the coach to accept the other person on their own terms, but also sometimes to ‘tune in’ to emotions and thoughts of which they are not fully aware. E.g. ‘I’m starting to feel quite angry when I hear you talk about what your boss said to you - was that how you felt?’.
Focusing on someone else for a sustained period can be tiring at first, but if you stay with it you will experience one of the great secrets of coaching - that empathising with another person can be a fascinating and enjoyable experience for you as well as the coachee. I often find myself looking forward to coaching sessions partly because I know it will take me outside my usual self-oriented state - at the end of the session, when I come back to my own concerns, I’m likely to see them with a fresh eye.
Questioning
If I had to pick one thing that distinguished coaching from other approaches to communication, management and learning, I would say ‘Questions’. At the heart of coaching is a willingness to put aside one’s own ideas about the ‘best/right/obvious way’ to do something, and to ask a question to elicit someone else’s ideas about how to approach it. For me as a coach, asking questions is an expression of my curiosity about life in general and human creativity in particular. For coachees, being asked a question can do three very important things:

1.