Tag: Coaching Tools

2022 – Top 5

Range of metal measuring tapes — Photo by William Warby on Unsplash

Every year I stop and look back at the Top 5 most popular posts from the year, those that got the most traffic across all sources:

It’s a familiar list! People love Radical Candor, and are always keen on coaching tools. It’s great to see the Performance Review support making it into the top five for the year, and I’m happy to be sharing it more widely at the most useful time of year to do so.

Here’s a bonus top 3 from my LinkedIn Wednesday Coaching series:

Make sure to join me over there for more of these throughout the year, and why not sit down and answer one of these three questions to get yourself going in 2023.

If you’ve got thoughts for what I could cover over the coming months then I’d love to hear them. More book reviews? Alternative coaching tools? More techniques to show how well you are performing at work and get the recognition you deserve?

Drop me a line at james@jamesosborn.co.uk or connect on LinkedIn, I’d love to hear from you.

Tags Coaching, Coaching Tools, Leadership

Book Review Coaching Leadership

This or That?

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

A few days ago, I was observing a coaching practice session. The coachee was very generous, they would answer any question with a long and extremely complete answer. The coach was keen to probe into these answers and focus on the areas that were most important to the coachee.

“Do you want to do this or that?” – A common mistake from a novice coach trying to bring focus to the conversation.

When you use this approach, you are limiting the coachee to a couple of options that you have selected, and you are using your words to channel the conversation.

Imagine you ask the coachee “Do you want to go left or right?”. You have closed off the possibility of them continuing straight ahead, pausing for a while or maybe even turning around and taking another route!

When you present a binary choice, then the usual answer is one of those options, even if that wasn’t the best choice for the coachee, or it loses a lot of nuance in the answer.

Instead, gain the focus you seek by asking the coachee to tell you what’s most important to them. You can summarise back the various options they’ve provided, and use words like specific or one to build the focused response.

Which one of these is most important to you?
What specifically is the area you’d like to focus on?
You’ve mentioned five things, which of those is your top concern?
If you could only change one of these, which would it be?

All of these questions leave the power with the coachee to choose and provide the focus. You haven’t forced them to a particular channel, but you will move the conversation forwards!

Tags choices, Coaching, Coaching Tools, focus

Coaching Leadership

Coaching for Performance

This is a long overdue look at one of the fundamental texts of the coaching and leadership field, Coaching for Performance. It’s the book that introduces you to the GROW model, and builds the basic theory of coaching around this tool.

It takes you through a journey of understanding, starting with defining coaching and how taking a coaching approach will help create high performing teams and organisations.

Part two builds lays out the principles of coaching, taking you through Emotional Intelligence, coaching as a leader and how coaching builds partnership and collaboration.

Part three moves into the practices. It covers the vital skills of active listening and questioning. Then we dive deeply into GROW, with chapters dedicated to each step of the model. In part four, we look at specific applications, covering 1 to 1, team and other specific coaching areas.

Finally, we cover the potential of coaching, including measuring the return on investment, leadership qualities and effecting cultural change.

The appendices are great additional tools, a comprehensive glossary gives a short overview of every core coaching term covered in the book. The question toolkit give a wide range of powerful options and approaches to apply in many different stages of the coaching conversation.

This is a key read for anyone who wants to improve their coaching and step up to the next level. It’s approachable and well grounded, with each short chapter presenting powerful and actionable lessons. You can read it through from start to finish and then dip back in to specific sections to refresh and brush up on specifics.

It’s a book that should be read by everyone who calls themselves a coach or a leader.

Tags Book Review, Coaching, Coaching For Performance, Coaching Tools, Leadership

Coaching

PURE Goals

Now that you are making sure your goals are stated in a SMART way, you should also check that they are PURE.

Positively Stated – Make an inspiring and forward looking statement of achievement. Switch or invert negative terminology and find a restatement based on growth or improvement. Drop out “not”, “won’t” and other limiting phrasings.
Understood – There’s a easily explained “why”, you know what the goal means and you have a plan to achieve it.
Relevant – It’s aligned to your current situation, or the situation you are moving towards. It will help you reach your End Goal and achieve your dreams.
Ethical – It aligns with your values. It’s not just positively stated but it’s also going to have a positive impact on the world. If you achieve this goal, then something will have gotten better for a range of people.

Sometimes, it’s hard to write SMART goals, but we get better at creating them and holding ourselves accountable by doing, reviewing and refining. It’s the same with PURE. Your first statement might not match the criteria and that’s totally fine. Look at what you’ve written, restate it and keep going.

If you want to grow and change in a positive way, then have ethical goals, relevant to your wider desires, that are well understood and that are positively stated will give you the best opportunity to have the impact you want to have on the world.

Tags Coaching, Coaching Tools, goals, PURE, SMART

Coaching Leadership

Interference

Thanks to Patrick Tomasso for sharing their work on Unsplash.

What is interfering with you reaching the pinnacle of your performance? Where is the noise coming from? What’s the one thing you can do right now to cut some of it out?

Interference is the heat and light that blinds you, stopping you achieving your full potential. This fundamental idea was shared by Timothy Gallwey, writer of the Inner Game, a classic text of modern coaching practice.

It’s a simple concept, your Performance is equal to your Potential minus the Interference.

You can take steps to increase your potential over time, by learning, choosing to reflect and grow rather than just do.

You can also perform better by cutting down on the interference. It might be your own self-doubt, or the nay-saying of those around you. Maybe it’s distractions in the environment, where too many options pull you in different directions. Possibly you don’t know what the end goal is, it’s too fuzzy and uncertain to progress.

Stop now and take five minutes. Where’s the interference right now? What can you do to reduce it, dialling down the background noise?

If you know where the interference is coming from, you can block it out and achieve your full potential, turning in to true high performance.

Tags Coaching, Coaching Tools, Interference, The Inner Game, Timothy Gallwey

Coaching

Wave a Magic Wand

The Magic Wand is a powerful technique that opens you up to the full range of possibilities. It clears everything out of the way that can slow you down or prevent your progress, and empowers you to take that first step.

When you wave your Magic Wand, you imagine what the fulfilment of your dreams will look like, the great outcomes of achieving your goals. You jump over anything on the path to get there, so you see and feel what success is like.

Once you’ve done that, then you can return to where you are now, recognise the steps you might take and the opportunities you have available. You can take all of these, smash down any barriers and start your journey.

To take the first step, sometimes you need to see where the finishing line is. Wave your wand to get started, and let that magic help you make the first move.

Tags Coaching, Coaching Tools

Coaching

What do you value?

When we look at our reality, stopping to think about where we are now, then understanding our core values is a key stepping stone towards making lasting positive change.

There is no point chasing goals that will leave us unfulfilled. There’s no reason for you to do something that will not make you happy in the long run.

Value mapping is a powerful exercise to help you understand what is truly important. Is it friendship, family or companionship. Do you seek comfort or relish a challenge. Is security important to you, and is that wealth or health. Do you seek recognition in your field, or to make quiet yet significant impact?

It’s easy to say all these things are important, so we must seek to prioritise. First take ten minutes to write out all the things that come to mind as an important value to you. If that’s hard, don’t worry. There are lots of lists online to start from, scan a couple and pick some terms that resonate.

The initial goal is to get everything onto paper. Look for concepts that resonate, and be brutally honest with yourself when you are choosing what matters to you. Go with an open mind, seek what is right rather than what you hope would look good to an external observer.

By now, you might have a lengthy list. That’s especially likely if you’ve not really done this exercise before. Many core values will have positive associations, so your short list can be quite long!

The next stage is to whittle it down. Aim for a top 5, and certainly no more than a top 10. This might be hard, particularly when cutting down to the final few. Trade off pairs, removing the one that speaks to you less. If you need to, build a bracket and cut out a swathe at a time.

This list of five values might be enough. It’ll give you a strong view of what’s important to you, what will drive your thinking and what will be a great success in the future.

If you are ready, you can also rank this final list, sorting the values to find out what is truly most important to you.

Now you know what matters, you are ready for the next step in your transformation. You can rework your goals to align with your values and look forwards to powerful and long lasting positive growth.

Tags Coaching, Coaching Tools, understanding, values

Coaching

Coaching Tools – Model T

Miles Downey shares the simple ‘Model T’ tool in Effective Modern Coaching. It’s a really great way to get past the initial thoughts of a coachee, and to really dig into the issue that’s most important to them right now.

It’s a model to enable us to move further up the coaching spectrum, following interest rather than giving advice or guidance. It’s especially useful for novice coaches, who may find it easy to latch onto the first suggestion from a coachee, rather than spending time to explore other options.

If you find yourself jumping on the first suggestion offered by a coachee, starting to move into problem solving too soon or falling into mentoring modes, then pause and use this model to move back to a coaching posture.

The model has two stages, first we Expand, which forms the cross bar of a capital T. Here the questioning is aiming to put more options onto the table, empowering the coachee to share anything that may be of interest:

Tell me what else you notice?
What else?
One more thing?

Then we Focus, diving into the most important topic, the downstroke of the T. The questions are driving this focus, selecting the most relevant area for the coachee:

What’s most interesting?
What stands out?
What’s most important to you right now?

Use this simple model to help set the topic of a session, to expand on goals or options, or anywhere else you need to spend more time understanding the coachee’s thinking.

Tags Coaching, Coaching Tools, Model T

Coaching

Watch out for Why

When we’re coaching, we should find that the majority of our questions are Open, designed to trigger more conversation and to give the coachee the balance of time to share their meaning.

That means that we will prefer to use questions starting with words like What, When or How as these will tend to be answered with more than just a simple Yes or No response.

Why is also an Open question, but it comes with a warning label. If used incorrectly, it can sound as if the coach is accusing the coachee of something, or suggesting that their answers are not ideal.

“Why did you chose that option?” can be taken as an attack on the coachee, with an implicit assumption that the coach disapproves, or feels another choice would have been better. If this happens, then it can close down the coachee, and the coaching outcomes will be less successful.

We can mitigate this impact with careful use of tone and rapport, softening our approach to show a desire to understand rather than to judge. We can also choose to rephrase our questions, flipping a Why to a less strong term “What was your process when selecting that option?”.

If we want to shock the coachee into greater awareness or to cause some deeper reflection, then we can use a strong form of a Why question to trigger this thinking, but this should be approached with care.

So, with all this said, Why is a powerful tool in the toolbox of a coach. We shouldn’t be afraid to use it, but we should be considerate of the risks it may bring to the conversation and how it can alter the flow of a relationship with a coachee.

Tags Coaching, Coaching Tools, Open Questions, Questioning