Posts
|
Why train as a life coach: Ruth Lawson shares her story |
Ruth Lawson shares her journey through the Smart School and what she is doing with coaching with her new business Foundation Tree
|
|
On learning and being…a business coach |
Taken from Nick’s blog at http://rapidresultsbusinesscoaching.com I’m currently reading On Becoming A Person by Carl Rogers, the founder of person centred therapy. And it got me thinking about how we approach the art of being a business coach.
Rogers was fascinated by what made a person function well in this world.
For him, it came down to the notion of self-actualisation in a world rich with contradictions, challenges, opportunities and complex relationships. It came down to trusting your own experience, constantly learning from it and discovering what really works for you to be happy.
Yet look around and you see many people relying on old knowledge, secondhand truths and ineffective habits. It’s a sad fact that people often feel far more comfortable sticking with the known and hoping it’s good enough.
So what’s all this got to do with business coaching? Quite simply, the business world is like life writ small. It shifts and changes, demands new knowledge, challenges us to grow and asks us to discover what works.
Yet just as in life, many business owners (and indeed business coaches) stick with what they know and look fearfully at the changing environment or the growing set of new skills that are needed to thrive.
To survive and thrive you need to look at it differently.
Let’s start by acknowledging that we are all of us learning beings. It’s one of the things we do best. From the day we’re born we absorb new knowledge and new skills readily, hungrily, excitedly.
When does that stop?
Oh! When we’re told there’s a right answer at school and get tested on it! When learning becomes conformity. When learning becomes a chore.
And sadly many people forget to turn their brain back from auto-pilot to manual after formal education has finished.
You know, the great thing is that the brain thing is still there, still churning and still learning. The question is, what is it learning? Is it learning to be helpless? Is it learning that you can’t succeed in a tough economy? Or is it learning new skills which show that you can? Is it learning that you can always be in charge of your destiny?
As a business coach, what are you learning? Right now, ask yourself, what are you learning? What are you reading? What are you experimenting with? What are you playing with? What was your last key learning?
Did it serve you? Did it serve your clients?
And what’s your attitude to learning? Are you fed up with the changng landscape and ever-increasing platforms to market your business and your clients’? Or are you excited? Are you learning to see patterns? Are you having fun?
As humans we have stunning potential. Yet all too often we have stunted potential.
Make a decision today to turn your brain back on to manual and learn to love learning. You’ll become a better business coach for sure. And I bet, just as Carl Rogers suggests, you’ll discover life itself has a whole new joyful flavour.
Filed Under From the Director's Chair
|
Cognitive Behavioural Coaching |
From the original blog post at: transformationallifecoaching.co.uk
When I think of coaching and all that people believe coaching to be there is a strong emphasis on task-based approaches leading to a goal being achieved and quite often action plans that focus on doingrather than being.
Within CBC (Cognitive Behavioural Coaching) there are some key pillars that underpin client interactions.
- Coaching provides a safe place for personal exploration
- The dynamic of “effective coaching” allows for self actualization for the client
- It is fully person centred and integrative
- CBC allows deeper meaning for the client and their experience and goes beneath the goal as the focus of the session
Cognitive behavioural coaching focuses on the internal world of the client, which could include values, beliefs, cognitions, physiology, emotions and results.
That’s not to say that there isn’t an element of actions and goals built into the coaching interactions but the shift will happen for the client on a deeper level and this in turn can create new openings and a future focus on how they will show up in the world based on these shifts.
In today’s society people are wanting more than a quick fix and an action plan.
Many times people can achieve their goal quite swiftly but may return to the original place of frustration wondering how they got back to there and questioning themselves and they change they want.
The reason why, is that without working on the deeper structures of experience the client could just be going around in circles and not moving ahead with any sort of permanency.
This can create further frustration and can fuel the negative mind sets that could be underpinning the clients original challenges.
Within a typical CBC based session the coaching practitioner would be looking to work with the client on emotive, important issues for them and really get to the core of the clients difficulties by using simple and powerful questioning, a sense of holding space for the client and allowing the conversation to naturally flow without the coach needing to fix, provide solutions or work to an agenda of a hard and fast goal being in place.
As in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy the skilled coaching practitioner would be looking at faulty thought biases and how this could be impacting the client in negative ways. An example would be catastrophizing – “everything is always bad! – how many times have you heard this or possibly thought it yourself?
Through a CBC approach we can start to unpick what these thought structures are which will also affect clients physical responses and results both practically and emotionally . We can help clients formulate a different way of doing things with more positive results.
CBC can help with:
- Limiting beliefs
- Negative cycles of behaviour
- Low confidence and self-esteem
- Compulsive behaviours
- Interpersonal issues
- Any pattern that runs enough times for it to be a problem and so much more
Coaching isn’t a one stop for change but done skilfully, with congruence and trust the effects can be truly transformational.
Filed Under Coaching in Action, From our satellite blogs
|
|
What Is Group Coaching And Facilitation? |
Group coaching and facilitation, at its heart, is about creating self-discovery, decision and action within a group.
But what does that mean in practice?
In traditional one-to-one coaching, there is a direct and powerful relationship between the coach and the client in which the coach creates a space for a direct conversation to take place and learning to take place.
In group coaching this is no longer the primary role of the coach. The power of the coaching does not reside in the questions the coach asks which create learning, discovery and curiosity. The power resides in the learning and exploratory space that the coach creates between the members of the group.
We can think of it this way:
Imagine that each person in the group carries with them a private well of knowledge and wisdom, of questions and concerns, and of capability and strength.
When first the group comes together, each person brings their well in to the room but it is initially walled off and watertight.
Group coaching aims to break down the walls of the wells so that they become a pool from which the group can access the combined wisdom, ideas, passion and knowledge in the room.
Yet it also respects that the wells are private and so only requires the individual to give as much or as little as they want to.
The wonderful thing is that group coaching can only ever replenish and fill the well and not drain it!
The coach’s role then is not about asking powerful questions or challenging an individual, but rather creating, maintaining and nurturing the space that allows the group to function as a self-coaching entity.
As we will explore in the next chapter, the coach is less concerned with the specific content of the session and more with the process by which he or she manages the group’s interaction.
It is a different skill set from coaching that requires a fine ear for incongruence, limiting beliefs, faulty thinking. Instead, it’s about holding the space, facilitating participation, managing dynamics, knowing where the line is between a group learning experience and someone feeling picked upon.
Probably one of the biggest challenges for coaches in undertaking group coaching and facilitation is their relative invisibility and seeming passivity in the process and outcomes.
Great trainers, teachers and workshop leaders create learning through their knowledge and skills. Great speakers inspire, entertain and engross their audience. Great group coaches are like the best sports referees – unseen but in control!
If you’re interested in training as a group coach, head along to our course page at: Group Coaching & Facilitation
Filed Under From the Director's Chair
|
Confidence Coaching with Young People |
This blog post is from Robert Stephenson on our new youth coaching blog at http://dynamicyouthcoaching.com
Recently I have been working for Mousetrap Theatre Project, with a group of young people based in Southall. The young people are all taking part in the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, and at the end they have to do a presentation. This group is made up of young people who haven’t had lots of positive experience in making presentations, in putting themselves out there, in talking to large groups of people about their achievements.
With this in mind I was asked to help the group develop their confidence, which is something I come across quite often when working with young people. They often put up this front of ‘I’m ok’ and ‘I don’t care about anything’. However in my experience this is not always the case, in fact there are a lot of young people who do care and are will to work with you to develop their skills and confidence, so that they are able to make the best of their lives. With this particular group, we spent lots of time exploring what confidence meant to them, who they saw as having it, what it looked liked, getting all our ideas down. Read more
Filed Under Coaching in Action, From our satellite blogsComments
Categories
Most Recent
- Why train as a life coach: Ruth Lawson shares her story
- On learning and being…a business coach
- Cognitive Behavioural Coaching
- What Is Group Coaching And Facilitation?
- Confidence Coaching with Young People
- Introducing Person-Centred NLP
- What’s a small business coach for?
- Don’t Be Afraid to Think Beyond Life Coaching
- Group Coaching with Young People
- Small Business Coaching: A Tragedy & Triumph in 5 Acts
Connect with us
Another great way to keep in contact with us is to connect through the means of Social Media.
