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January 5 - February 13, 2018
practice, practice, and practice, but with greater awareness of yourself and other people, and to be committed to your own continuing personal development.
Coaching is not teaching at all, but is about creating the conditions for learning and growing.
Gallwey went on to claim that if a coach can help a player to remove or reduce the internal obstacles to his performance, an unexpected natural ability to learn and to perform will occur without the need for much technical input from the coach.
Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
The new model suggested we are more like acorns, each of which contains within it all the potential to be a magnificent oak tree. We need nourishment, encouragement, and the light to reach toward, but the oaktreeness is already within us.
Coaching requires expertise in coaching but not in the subject at hand.
This is a perfectionist definition. I believe past experience is important and helpful, but needs to be resisted and used wisely without instructing.
He must think of his people in terms of their potential, not their performance.
Good coaching, and good mentoring for that matter, can and should take a performer beyond the limitations of the coach or mentor’s own knowledge.
Mai Al-Qurashi liked this
Building awareness, responsibility, and self-belief is the goal of a coach
Building others’ self-belief demands that we release the desire to control them or to maintain their belief in our superior abilities. One of the best things we can do for them is to assist them in surpassing us.
We build self-belief when we make decisions, take successful actions, and recognize our full responsibility for both our successes and our failures.
Nevertheless, coaching that does not result in success – and the coachee’s own recognition of that success – will only cause a reduction in self-belief and undermine the primary objective of the coaching.
The underlying and ever-present goal of coaching is building the self-belief of others, regardless of the content of the task or issue.
Coaching is not merely a technique to be wheeled out and rigidly applied in certain prescribed circumstances. It is a way of managing, a way of treating people, a way of thinking, a way of being.
we have been brought up on telling, and we are very good at it.
Coaching provides the manager with real not illusory control, and provides the subordinate with real not illusory responsibility.
A manager’s task is simple – to get the job done and to grow his staff. Time and cost pressures limit the latter. Coaching is one process with both effects.
A coaching management style/culture results in getting the job done well for 250 days a year, developing people for 250 days a year, and a lot of self-belief
very idealist!
These companies have already identified that coaching is the management style of a transformed culture, and that as the style changes from directing to coaching, the culture of the organization will begin to change.
I hate it when authors depict their ideas as "the" tool that universally solves all problems!
A similar shift is occurring in managing people. You used to be able to tell or push people to do what you want, but now they expect and demand to be treated differently.
Blame is about history, fear, and the past. We need to refocus on aspiration, hope, and the future.
awareness, which is the product of focused attention, concentration, and clarity.
I am able to control only that of which I am aware. That of which I am unaware controls me. AWARENESS empowers me.
No two human minds or bodies are the same. How can I tell you how to use yours to their best? Only you can discover how, with AWARENESS
However good you are at processing the input received and acting on it, the quality of your output will depend on the quality and quantity of the input. Awareness raising is the act of sharpening the acuity of our input receptors, often tuning our senses but also engaging our brain.
The skill of the coach is to raise and sustain awareness at the appropriate level and in those areas where it is required.
not only awareness, but focused awareness where you target an area. this will avoid input overload!
Another word that characterizes awareness is feedback – feedback from the environment, from your body, from your actions, from the equipment you are using, as opposed to feedback from other people.
If I give you my advice and it fails, you will blame me. I have traded my advice for your responsibility and that is seldom a good deal
When we truly accept, choose, or take responsibility for our thoughts and our actions, our commitment to them rises and so does our performance.
In the workplace, when the advice is a command, ownership is at zero and this can lead to resentment, surreptitious sabotage, or ownership of the reverse action.
Choice and responsibility can work wonders.
Self-belief, self-motivation, choice, clarity, commitment, awareness, responsibility, and action are the products of coaching
These coaches denied their performers’ responsibility by telling them what to do; they denied their awareness by telling them what they saw. They withheld responsibility and killed awareness.
The coach is not a problem solver, a teacher, an adviser, an instructor, or even an expert; he or she is a sounding board, a facilitator, a counselor, an awareness raiser.
I am not suggesting that there is never a place for expert input, but the less good coach will tend to overuse it and thereby reduce the value of his coaching, because every time input is provided the responsibility of the coachee is reduced.
The tennis coaches were seeing the participants in terms of their technical faults; the ski coaches, who could not recognize such faults, saw the participants in terms of the efficiency with which they used their bodies.
Sorry Whitmore, bit this is an example of a coach who also have knowledge and experience in something related: body moves.
Our potential is realized by optimizing our own individuality and uniqueness, never by molding them to another’s opinion of what constitutes best practice
As skills become more specialized and technically complex, coaching is an absolute prerequisite for managers.
awareness and responsibility are better raised by asking than by telling.
Open questions are much more effective for generating awareness and responsibility in the coaching process.
Analysis (thinking) and awareness (observation) are dissimilar mental modes that are virtually impossible to employ simultaneously to full effect.
If we do need to ask such questions, why questions are better expressed as “What were the reasons…?” and how questions as “What are the steps…?” These evoke more specific, factual answers.
The principle is that questions should follow the interest and the train of thought of the coachee, not of the coach. If the coach leads the direction of the questions he will undermine the responsibility of the coachee.
“Are there any other problems?” invites the answer “No.” “What other problems might there be?” invites more thought.
Perhaps the hardest thing a coach has to learn to do is to shut up!
Projection and transference are the terms given to these psychological distortions that all those who teach, guide, coach, or manage others need to learn to recognize and minimize.
Here are a few questions that I consistently find to be helpful in coaching.
This is a good list of questions.
goals based on current reality alone are liable to be negative, a response to a problem, limited by past performance, lacking in creativity due to simple extrapolation, in smaller increments than may be achievable, or even counterproductive.
Goals formed by ascertaining the ideal long-term solution, and then determining realistic steps toward that ideal, are generally far more inspiring, creative, and motivating.
