With the complexity of clients and what they bring to coaching there is also a need for you as the coach to be flexible with the way you coach and the experience that you bring to a session.
A common thread in a lot of my posts is that coaching does not always need to bring in just a typical goal setting approach and tasked based formulae to helping people achieve outcomes, but can through coaching style conversations bring clarity, purpose and meaning to clients in their life.
I also see coaching as a dedicated art that needs to be practiced to hone the skill of being a coach.
Also the need to coach congruently, confidently and with the client at the centre of the dialogue is desired.
It is also true to say that depending on what the client brings to a session will determine the way you coach.
This may mean that you do work with smart goals to allow exploration of all the key points of the goal.
The key point here is that if we just focus on goal setting when other areas need to be uncovered and explored then we are not only not coaching ineffectively at times but actually not giving the client the best experience.
The core transformation for individuals may not be typical coaching questions in how are you going to get to your goal but what is getting in the way at present?
I have coached top executives in corporate settings that at first want to ”just” focus on the problem at hand and what isn’t working but also want to get a quick fix in getting better results for the business whether that be higher turnover, more profit or other areas of concern.
In fact one client said categorically that he didn’t want to talk about emotions.
Did this happen?
At first we looked at what he wanted to change in terms of his business and what this would mean to him and started to formulate very specific goals and how he would be able to measure success in his own way and words.
The coaching then took on a different energy when I asked if you know this to be what you want and what could help why aren’t you doing this already?
This is where we started to go beneath the surface of the goal and look at values of the company but also we started to look at my clients individual values in terms of his place as company director. This also brought into the mix limiting beliefs.
It was deemed through exploration that my client was striving for “perfection” his map of the world demanded this and when asked where has this come from? The clients’ parenting was brought into the equation.
How his father had given him messages as a child that you have to be perfect to succeed.
This was a task too much and a benchmark that caused my client to transfer the being perfect script onto peers and colleagues.
People were rebelling (a bit like resistant children to a critical parent) and key work tasks were not being completed and things were not getting done.
Staff were turning up late or not at all and the general atmosphere was negative and unproductive.
The useful part of this coaching session was that my client had a shift in perspective in how a deeply rooted belief system was getting in the way and causing issues.
I worked with my client to not change his values but to understand how his belief system was creating limitations for him. We worked on changing his limiting belief with a wonderful and powerful tool to help this happen.
The end results were that he was more realistic with himself in achieving success – he said a weight had been lifted (that he had been carrying since childhood) and the way he would work with his staff would be to get to know them more and to understand their drivers, motivations and values.
Part of this was to later bring in actions and accountability to these actions but the session was (as you can see) not just goal setting.
In subsequent sessions we reviewed progress and his staff morale was much better, sickness had decreased by 50% and targets being achieved were 6% higher, which increased bottom line profit.
The key to this transformation was that we did look at more personal areas of the client’s life but linked them to the goal at hand. The goal was not the fundamental milestone. Although we needed to start with this initially.
This was a very useful experience for my client and emotions were discussed but with purpose, confidence and skill to make them relevant to the client and their situation.
The next time you are coaching be flexible with your approach, understand what is required and trust yourself to work in the best way. “for your client”
