All coaching is ultimately personal coaching
Together we make it unique and exciting. Together, we create a living way ahead, one that you can thrive on. Serious play or play, or play the bills, it all works best if we come from your core. Where you really thrive. Here are some of the factors: Coaching offers:
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. -- Helen Keller
Check out the diagram below. Think of
it in terms of coaching. If you get coaching from someone like you,
similar to you, then you gain comfort. If they have similar skills
and background as you then you grow comfort and decrease potential
for learning. We need to cycle into stretch, and avoid overloading you, so we cycle back into 'similar', then later try again. We grow learning-growing cycles.
On one hand, if you have a 'similar' coach and are learning tech/technical things then you can learn more comfortably. A business person can potentially learn business stuff more easily from someone else who is similar. The modern term 'coach' comes from people helping people with their studies, whisking them along like being carried in a horse drawn coach.
Some success studies show that entrepreneur courses are best taught by teachers with similar thinking/ways to the students. Such teachers are often implicitly acting as role models. (A good coach may not 'role model' you so much. If nothing else they spend much less time with you.) Engineer teachers have good results teaching entrepreneur courses to engineers. They think and act in the same boxes of behaviours. This is particularly effective for the creation of engineering companies.
Take care with your role models and with your group adventures: "You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears." -- Winston Churchill
On the other hand, we often need to go beyond the recipe, beyond the cookbook, to find our own way. We need to form our own life, our own bliss. We need to grow learning-growing cycles.
If you want to extend, to stretch, you
need to leave your comfort zone, to go outside the box. If you learn
from a 'different' person then learning might be more difficult. The
advantage is that you have to stretch more. This way is
particularly apt if you are learning leadership or management or
people skills. Or strategy. Or if your company will not be, per the
example above, an 'engineering' company. It can be a liability to
design and structure things like an engineering company when you
really want a chain of customer appreciating flower shops.
My value is in the agile creating new, innovating, start-up, troubleshooting, stretch area.
AgileA.G.I.L.E. (A)daptive (G)oal driven (I)terative (L)ean, simple (E)mergent
It is a very common company problem to have a formal strategy that is different from the working strategy. You personally do the same if you are trained and coached, built-in habits, to think and act one way when you actually need another behaviour pattern. “Saying one thing and doing another” is the common saying. Continuing to overspend for years when you could adopt a simple frugal lifestyle might be apt. A worse case might be someone with type 2 diabetes who can't/won't change their eating and exercise behaviour while their health disappears. Companies die when their perfectionists see their innovators/creatives making too many misktakes and get rid of them. This cuts off the inflows of new ideas and products just like damming a river. What's left righteously puddles, dries up in the sun, then blows away as dust. Sorry, I prefer learning from the misteaks. High Performance Pattern
If we work on your personal High Performance Pattern we pattern you on you. You become your own best role model when you follow your own HPP. A big part of my job as we discover your HPP is diffusing any tendency you have to model on other people or cultural 'right' ways. Career CoachI don't call myself a Career Coach, and I've coached lots of people into new careers. Your HPP matches the seven stories in “What Color is Your Parachute?” Many people I've coached are exploring, try this, then this, then that, to explore and learn what they like, within their situation in life. They often use their own sense of self and what they like, they don't do a full HPP and don't do what tests suggest for them. They are creating an ongoing adventure in learning their lives.
What I like to do is cycle. Go from comfort out into stretching and back. You only spend some time with me, so for most of your time you get to choose your stretchiness without coaching. If part of my arrangement with you is 'stretching' then I only have limited time and opportunity. If we stretch you in a session then it's up to you to keep stretching between sessions. Yes, stretching can be in terms of learning-skills-by-doing and interpersonal emotional intelligence capability. It's normal in things like public speaking, stretch while speaking in front of others, then relax while stretching in a different way learning to evaluate someone else speaking. It's a yin yang cycle.
“Hang out with weird—get more weird. Hang out with dull—get more dull.” -- Tom Peters
If you watch me in live settings I use many ways to stretch the process. Some say I thrive on chaos, more so if they're gripping onto some rut that we need to leave behind. I often use food and clothing to stretch people. Normally you, or your group, provides the clothing, and we share the food. An example, you get more effective evaluations if you dress casually when practising presentations in front of a group. If you wear a suit the evaluations back-off, and become too spiffy. If you're already good, I might suggest you wear a cloth tied around one wrist, or only one shoe, or something, so you learn to function past the obstacle. Jumping to food, potlucks share North to South and East to West. I am very likely to add bits from other cultures or other kinds of business – mostly because such benefits have proven valuable in the past. (Bitter melon is great for diabetes 2) A lot of this is awareness-of-habit stretching, most people are only half conscious (it's called your secondary process in processwork) of many differences. This means we need to change your awareness of your habits, then have you creating new habits in order to make lasting changes. If we just change your doing you may not learn how to keep learning, and we may have wasted much of the opportunity. If you have something like type 2 diabetes then we need to make you very aware, change your habits, reinforce the good habits, and have you enjoy the process so you continue your healthy lifestyle. Companies commonly bring in consultants, make the recommended changes, then the company relapses a year later, because they haven't really learned from the consulting process. Using video cameras for presentation training works the same way, it shows fast and people adjust fast, much too fast to learn growing habits. Commitment
Jumping for your pocket, to get commitment. Many coaches collect checks/cheques from clients for 3 or 6 months ahead as a way to grow commitment. I don't ask for that, and of course I'm delighted if you decide to do that. More important, and the real point is, you should think in terms of 3 to 6 months as the time needed to grow skills and change habits. If coaching goes well. our agile cycle should routinely bring in new matters to be covered, so the coaching continues on. A fair number of people continue being coached for longer periods, years and years. Where Coaching works
Coaching works in one or more of these areas:
It's good to know where and how you want to focus. And blends or combinations are great. Some people, including quite a few managers like to explore “The Hero's Journey.” Their agenda then goes through self-development into performance that shows up as improved skills and capability in some areas of life. Other people don't feel so much for the hero and do very much like to “Follow Your Bliss” along much the same Journey. Feel free to peruse the Catalog for Hero – Bliss – Optimism – etc, stuff that we can cover together.  To repeat, please look at the Catalogue and pick an ebook or similar from it, for free as part of your coaching package, to include in your Agenda if you like. For example, if you want to ensure your Buoyancy – Optimism, it's akin to resilience, then try that package as part of your Agenda. How my coaching program works
If we're doing some program, like from one of the ebooks in the Catalogue, then we include that program. It's often useful to throw in emails to support the affair. Sometimes, people have something come up and need to call at short notice. If so, try to give me some kind of warning first, so I can clear the decks. Be the change you are trying to create. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Discovery - Intake InterviewQuite a few good coaches do a one or two hour Discovery session – Intake Interview. It's very good for forming a good foundation to our relationship. It includes a wider ranging listen and talk about things than normal coaching. It also tests compatibility and verifies that I meet your needs. We can do that, or we can do it the agile way, with something like a month of weekly normal sessions. If we do it the agile way we normally take extra time for bridging during each session for the first few sessions. In a business setting we'd call part of it a Needs Analysis. It can be very good to do that. Why not propose that you lead me through one for you? Why not practise them in case you bump into them? I've coached a wider range of kinds of clients than most coaches, and I can handle a range of situations. For example, I've had someone threaten to blow my kneecaps with a shotgun. His partner really appreciated his explosion. This was at a coffee table in the review after all the bad things had already happened and the clouds were clearing, when I brought up 'next time'. The real limiter is in how much we feel “we're in this together” - trust and bonding. Agile coaches find that doing something some times in quick succession provides faster learning. It's the same pattern as learning from reading something, learning to read faster, and learning a language. It's also why I might coach live some times a week or some times a day. Rapid cycling yields rapid benefits when one is learning in the cycles. 1 - 60 minute Discovery session - $150
All of this is normally done by telephone or Skype, and I now daily meet face-to-face with people. |
Coaching, & kinds |
