Business Coaching

Focus on the FUTURE more than the PAST. Sometimes it’s helpful to analyse the past and what went wrong, but beware of getting stuck in accusations and defensiveness. If this happens, switch to finding new options for the future.

Avoid blame, make REQUESTS. Faced with blame, all we can do is defend ourselves. Faced with a request, we have the option of accepting, rejecting or negotiating. One keeps us stuck, the other may get us unstuck.

Intuiting
Like empathy, this is either an innate ability or emerges from practising the other coaching skills. Sometimes during a coaching session you can get a sudden thought or feeling about the coachee or the subject under discussion - it’s as if something were prompting you to ask a question or share what you’re thinking/feeling. It doesn’t matter whether you call this a hunch, an intuition, a sixth sense, mirror neurons or your unconscious mind - what does matter is how willing you are to trust this feeling and act on it. Sometimes the effect can be like a thunderbolt - the other person can’t believe how you’ve ‘picked up’ something vitally important that they hadn’t been fully aware of. Other times, the coachee looks at you blankly and it turns out your ‘insight’ is either obvious or useless. Because of this uncertainty, it’s very important not to get too attached to our coaching intuition, and to always check whether it matches the coachee’s reality…
Checking
I’ve not seen this listed as a separate skill in coaching books, but for me it’s one of the most important habits for a coach to get into, and it can take considerable skill to know what, when and how to check. It might seem pedantic or boring relative to the ideas and energy encountered elsewhere in the coaching conversation, but if you don’t keep checking, you risk letting all that creativity and enthusiasm evaporate. Here’s a brief (ahem) checklist of things I typically check in coaching sessions:

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  Checking understanding. Making sure that I’ve understood what the coachee is saying. Often involves asking ‘dumb questions’ and summarising the answers in the coachee’s own words.
  
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