My blog has moved

In order to integrate my blog with my new website, I have re-hosted this blog at http://blog.turnkeycoaching.co.uk. All future posts will be there, and in due course this will be deleted.

Book Review - Coaching for Performance: GROWing People, Performance and Purpose, John Whitmore

Whitmore, a former professional racing driver turned business consultant and partner with Timothy Gallwey in his Inner Game business, writes about coaching in a management environment, using illustrations from the world of sport. For Whitmore, the key tasks of coaching are raising awareness and responsibility in the coachee. A manager's task is to get the job done AND to grow his staff, and this second task is achieved by coaching which increases the subordinate's responsibility and retention. In a time when change is the norm, a coaching culture increases involvement and responsibility and reduces stress which is caused by lack of personal control.

Awareness and responsibility are raised by good questions, illustrated by the tennis coach who asks “which way is the ball spinning” rather than “are you watching the ball.” This compels the coachee to watch the ball and to focus to a higher order. Whitmore introduced the GROW sequence of questions in coaching: Goals, Reality, Option, and What, When, Whom and the Will to do it. A chapter is dedicated to each of these headings with guidelines and examples. Whitmore goes on to discuss performance and its relationship with learning and enjoyment; purpose and meaning, feedback, coaching teams and overcoming barriers to coaching in corporations.

First published in 1992, according to Whitmore, Coaching for Performance is “widely accepted as the definitive book on coaching in the business context.” Whitmore is credited by other authors on the subject for developing the GROW model, a widely used framework.

What I learned from this book was the practical application of the GROW model, particularly in a management environment. Throughout the book, Whitmore gives examples of coaching dialogues that illustrate the principles he is explaining in the text. What I will do with this book is to go back to it repeatedly, not to memorize the questions, but to increase my familiarity with the kind of coaching conversations that increase awareness and responsibility in clients.

John Whitmore, Coaching for Performance: GROWing People, Performance and Purpose, 3^rd Edition, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2002, 180 Pages.

Change your Diet, Change your Life

The 1st of July 2013 marked six months of a radical transformation in the state of my health and wellbeing.

At New Year I weighed 91 Kg - overweight, bordering on obese and, having been a marathon and ultra marathon runner in my twenties, I was close to sedentary.  For the previous ten years, doctors had been telling me that my blood pressure was too high, and I had been resisting their suggestions that I take medication, promising them and myself that I would change my diet and exercise regime and not following through with my good intentions.

At Christmas, Santa brought me two things that changed all that - a blood pressure monitor and a copy of Tim Noakes' Challenging Beliefs: Memoirs of a Career. I started reading the book and found it fascinating. The title refers to the fact that Noakes, a South African professor of Sports Medicine has spent a large part of his career challeging medical orthodoxies that his research has shown to be wrong.  These are often based on a logical but unproven hypothesis that is expoited by commercial interests and then defended by those interests against any evidence that they are in fact not true.

Noakes has been something of a hero of mine since, with the naked eye, he diagnosed the cause of knee pain I was suffering, after my GP, a physiotherapist, a radiographer and an orthopedic surgeon had all failed to identify the cause.  In his early sixties, Noakes was looking for a way to overcome his tendency to pick up weight, and to reduce his risk from a genetic predisposition towards diabetes.  He researched and then tried a low carbohydrate diet, and reported that after six months he was lighter, faster and healthier than he had been in the previous twenty years.

On New Year's day I tried my blood pressure monitor and was shocked to record a reading of 216/125. That's not high, it's explosive!  I sanity checked the meter by testing it on others known to have normal blood pressure, and it registered a normal reading of around 120/80.  I decided that urgent action was required.  With Noakes as my guide, I adopted a "paleo" i.e. low carbohydrate, high protein, moderate fat diet.  I dared not run initially, fearing I would have a stroke or heart attack, but started walking every day.  As my weight came down, my blood pressure came down in parallel.  After two weeks I began jogging and, to cut a long story short, four months later and 13 Kg (35 lbs or 2 stone 8 lbs) lighter, I ran the Plymouth half marathon.

My weight has plateaued since then and I am not yet at my goal weight, nor is my blood pressure "normal" but with the lowest reading so far of 159/96, it is a huge improvement.  My challenge now is adjust my diet, increase the amount I exercise and get rid of another 5Kgs in weight while also replacing fat with muscle.  Regular monitoring of my blood pressure has shown that apart from weight and diet, stress, or rather, poor management of stress is a big factor.  Managing my response to stress is my next big challenge.

While blood pressure and fitness were my key goals, an enormous benefit I have enjoyed is a vast improvement in my resistance to colds and infections.  The first six months of this year have been the first time I have gone that long without a cold in as long as I can remember.  It is also the first time in decades that I have been without almost constant nasal congestion.  I attribute this to the gluten and largely dairy free nature of my diet.

My conclusion is that you, quite literally, are what you eat.  If your body isn't performing the way you'd like it to, change the fuel you put into it!

Six Months In - How are your New Year's Resolutions doing?

Did you make any New Year's resolutions?  Or are you among those who cynically reject the whole concept, knowing that most people who make New Year's resolutions have abandoned them half way through February?

If the only planning you do is a last-thing-in-December resolution that "I'll eat less in the New Year" based on guilt over your over-indulgence at Christmas time, then the chances are that your New Year's resolutions won't last.  But planning is an essential part of a successful life.

Imagine building a house without any plans... no idea where to dig the foundations; when to have the concrete delivered; how many bricks to buy... not a good idea.  It's a cliche that many people spend more time planning their summer holidays than they spend planning their lives, but sadly it's true.

If we are to make the most of the opportunities life offers us, we would do well to think it through, plan it, monitor our progress and get some accountability for actually doing what we plan to do.  Of course, our plans need not begin on the first of January, but periodic reviews are essential and January and July are as good a time as any to begin a new cycle.

So here's my review of goals I've achieved over the last few months:

1) Completed my first degree - 36 years after first enrolling at university!
2) Run my first half marathon in 25 1/2 years.
3) Enrolled for a Certificate in Mentoring and a Diploma in Coaching, which will take me a long way towards a long held goal of becoming an expert in personal development.
4) Been accepted as a "matriculated" student for an MBA - another long held goal.
5) Launched my career as a professional coach. Professional status and paying clients are still to come, but I am coaching and my coaching is making a difference.  I'm on my way.
6) Last, but not least, I've broken out of a six year long mental slump, feeling a failure, and I'm getting back to feeling like the high achiever I was previously.

I've set myself a list of new goals ... which I'll share with a small group of people who support and believe in me, and I'm on course with plans to achieve them.  I'll be writing more about setting and achieving goals in the coming weeks.

If you'd like some help planning your life, rather that letting in be "what happens while you're busy making other plans" give me a shout.

FREE COACHING - LIMITED OFFER

I am currently studying for an Advanced Diploma in Coaching with Kingstown College in Dublin and a Certificate in Mentoring with Moorlands College, and I am coaching clients in three countries on two continents. The feedback I have had so far is 100% positive. I am looking for more clients in order to build up the experience needed for International Coach Federation accreditation. 

Sign up in the next week and I will give you 3 x 45 minute coaching session free of charge.

 I coach by Skype, telephone and for those in Malvern/Worcester, face to face. My clients include professionals, students, stay at home moms, aspiring novelists...

The kind of topics we discuss are life balance, goal setting, time and energy management, anger management etc, etc. The idea is not that I am an expert on all these areas, but that you, a healthy, well educated, balanced individual have all the potential you need to achieve your dreams. What might help you is the trained ear of someone who will listen to you, challenge you and help you to work out your own solution to getting from where you are to where you want to be.

Go on, give it a try!

Life Coaching and Christian discipleship

I first read about life coaching in 2005.  At the time I was assistant pastor of a York church, and my thought was "It sounds new agey and it'll never be accepted in church circles."  So when in February 2006, an article titled "Coaching for life - Putting a secular idea to spiritual use" appeared in Direction Magazine, the monthly magazine of the Elim Pentecostal Church, it grabbed my attention. 

The author, Karen Green together with husband Dave are pastors of the Elim church in Halifax, not far from York.  I gave them a call, took a drive to Halifax and spent a morning hearing about how they were using coaching techniques as a means of helping people in their church grow in confidence and become doers - disciples.  Karen recommended a book, Christian Coaching by Gary R Collins, and a correspondence course taught by a college in Newcastle.  My scepticism behind me, I began to study and apply what I learned, and was thrilled to discover how simple techniques of listening, questioning, feedback, etc, could help a person achieve clarity about their values, goals and the path needed to get from where they are to where they want to be.

A few extracts from the article:

The introduction states: "Many have heard of 'Life Coaching' and may be suspicious of this latest trend in personal development. But Christians hold the secret of 'life to the full' - so shouldn't we be doing the coaching?

"Karen  writes,  "Make disciples, make disciples..." - that was all we could hear God saying to us. "We get the message, God, but how?" ... Then I began to hear about life coaching. It's a tool to help people move forward in their lives through asking the right questions, clarifying their values, setting goals, identifying plans of action, and establishing accountability. ... The tools in life coaching help us in discipleship in that they work by helping the individual make his or own decisions, not by imposing our ideas on them. ... 'What do you want?' was a common opening line Jesus would use. It is invariably the opening line in life coaching.

From my recent reading on Christian leadership, I've concluded that Jesus' leadership training was so broad that it encompassed much of what is taught today as "coaching," "mentoring," and "leadership development."  As one of my lecturers would say: "good research only reveals what God already knew." 

Coaching - what's it all about? Part 5

Chad Hall writes that “all coaching is life coaching; coaching brings forth life for a client, a company, a church, a team, a community, a family, or anyone touched by the coaching  relationship."  That is true, and as I've indicated so far in this series, the primary tools that all  coaches use are good listening skills and good questions.  I've also indicated that each coach has  specific tools in their tool box, depending on their background, experience and training.

So, as in counselling, we find specialisms within the field of coaching.  Life, or personal coaches  work with individuals, dealing with the broad scope of “life”: priorities, relationships, purpose etc.  Corporate coaches deal with individuals or teams within a corporate setting: values, teamwork, and customer service are some of the areas corporate coaches may deal with.  Executive coaches  work with senior leaders, who are often assumed to “know it all,” and are least likely to receive training and mentoring, but, like everyone else need someone who will journey with them and provide a sounding board.

An area of interest to many people today is wellness coaching. A coach whose specialism is wellness may have a background in sport, nutrition etc, or perhaps they have themselves overcome health problems, giving them  valuable insights and experiences to share.  I am in the midst of such a transformation, having lost 2 stone, 9 pounds (37 pounds), and reduced my blood  pressure by 49/23 in 14 weeks.  In two weeks time I will run the Plymouth Half Marathon after a break from running of 27 years.  This has been achieved through diet, exercise and stress management.  My experience is equipping me to help others achieve their weight management,  fitness and health goals, and this is a specialism I am building into my coaching practice.

Time for the TurnkeyCoach to Go Pro

Coaching is one of those “people helping” skills that everyone does, with or without training, to some degree of proficiency. Like parenting and mentoring, it is something that most of us will be called upon to do, usually with little or no formal training.

When first introduced to coaching, I was wary of the field until I met someone in a recognised profession who had adopted coaching techniques as a means of developing the people in their sphere of influence. My training consisted of reading the book that person recommended, attending a number of introductory courses and enrolling for a correspondence course I didn't complete. More importantly I took the plunge and coached a number of friends and acquaintances and together we learned what worked and what didn't, what was useful and what less so.

Coaching today is a profession, with an established body of knowledge, standards, and professional associations. While the informal coaching I have practised to date has, I've been assured, helped my clients, the time has come for me to “Go Pro.”

This week I will enrol for a 140 hour ACSTH course (that's an International Coach Federation designation for Accredited Coach Specific Training Hours). I'll also be applying for admission to an MSc in Personal, Corporate and Executive Coaching at the University of Lincoln, a city I'll be moving to later this year.

As part of the accreditation process with the International Coach Federation I need to report on 100 hours of coaching, 25 of which can be free of charge! I will therefore be offering coaching services at no, or low cost and will appreciate your help in achieving professional status.

Please email me at frank@turnkeycoaching.co.uk if you'd like to know more.  

Coaching - What's it all about? Part 4

In part 3, we looked at life balance, an area that often yields significant progress for a client in the early days of a coaching relationship. Having achieved a degree of clarity on priority areas for change, and identified a few specific steps that they should take, the next logical task is to set goals and make action plans. I suspect this is an area where most coaches don their mentor's hat, and do a bit of teaching. Despite the fact that we are the most educated generation in history, surprising few have ever been taught how to set goals.

There are variations on the theme, but the general formula is that goals must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. With the definition explained and a few examples given, the lesson is over, and we're back to coaching mode, the client setting their own goals and plans of action to achieve them. One of the keys to actually achieving the goals we set, is to make ourselves accountable to someone who will help us keep our word to ourselves when we say, “I will do, become or have ... by this date … .” Here a coach can play a vital role, as an “outsider” who we've actually paid to help us set goals and to hold us accountable for taking the necessary action. We're often more likely to “perform” for this uninvolved outsider, than we would be for friends or family.

Of course whole books have been written about goal setting, project planning etc, but there, in a nutshell is the role a coach can play in helping us prioritise, set goals, make plans and carry them out. While I've presented the process in, perhaps deceptively simple terms, the value and importance of this process can not be overstated. For most people, the failure to carry out this process, means a life lived well below its potential, and for many it is the cause of the proverbial “life of quiet desperation” we so often hear about.

Coaching - what's it all about? Part 3

In my last note, I said that this time we'd look at how a coaching session might help a client.

A coaching relationship is a designed alliance or collaboration between coach and client, aimed at helping the client achieve more of their potential.  The coaching conversation could therefore begin in any number of different places depending on the client's situation.

One starting point that often yields valuable insights is to explore the balance in a client's life. We could begin with a "wheel of life," a circle divided into 8 segments which represent various life areas, e.g. career, money, health, relationships, spiritual, personal growth, fun & recreation, and home.  The client rates each area of their life on a scale of 0 (couldn't be worse) to 10 (couldn't be better).


The coach begins the conversation by observing the scores, e.g. there might be several 3s and 4s, and one 8; how does that feel?  There is no judgement, nor even a sense of where the conversation is headed - that will be determined by the client.  The client may then indicate that he'd like all areas to be in the 8 - 9 range, to which the coach might respond by asking which area would have the most impact if it were improved.  The client might come up with career, and in the same breath mention self development.  On probing the connection, the client clearly sees a causal relationship between the two, decides that personal growth is the priority area, and as the discussion develops, he comes up with a further link between recreation and personal development.  

Asked by the coach to suggest next steps that he could take, the client suggests that he could a) call a colleague or customer and arrange a golf game, and b) go through the things he had learned in this coaching session, and explore further steps that he could take.

Asked to "dip in" and come up with another area that could yield significant change, the client returns to career, and with further questioning, decides on changes he can make to his relationships, which might improve his working environment.  

Using this sort of process a client could potentially move from confusion and a sense of life spinning out of control, to clarity, and a clear set of action steps to take based on their own priorities in less than one hour.  

In the next post, we'll explore goal setting which could be a logical next step.

How to ruin a perfectly good relationship

I posted this a few years ago when I started this blog, and felt that I should repost it.  Too few of us are taught how to build good relationships until we've messed up a few, sometimes the most impotant ones we ever build.  It's sad to see how many people treat the most important people in their lives with the utmost disrespect, then wonder why their relationships don't last!


Sound advice from Mentoring Marriages by Harry Benson

STOP signs: four ways to destroy a relationship without thinking about it. Or if you choose to think about things, four things to stop doing and build your relationship!

STOP sign 1: S = Scoring points

Scoring points usually sounds like this: “You did this.” “Well you did that.” Each of us has our finger pointed in the other person’s chest, blaming, accusing, scoring points. “You…”

STOP sign 2: T = Thinking the worst

He brings her flowers, she thinks “what’s he done wrong”; she’s pre-occupied with housework, he thinks “she doesn’t love me.”

STOP sign 3: O = Opting out

While one partner tries to connect, the other partner tries to avoid conflict. They might do this by looking away; they might stop listening or they might leave the room. Some researchers claim it’s the number-one predictor of divorce. Don’t do it!

STOP sign 4: P = Putting down

These vary from character assassination: “You idiot”, to rolling your eyes, to denying the validity of the other person’s feelings. For example: “I’m feeling angry about what the boss is doing”. “You shouldn’t, you’ve got more important things to worry about at home.”

These four STOP signs represent a bad attitude. It’s in the mind that behaviour begins and it’s in the mind that changes will take place.

Awareness of bad habits is the first part of the battle. Knowledge and practice of good habits is the second half. Good habits are practical skills that can be learned and need to be practiced!

Coaching - what's it all about? Part 2

OK, so a coach helps their client to “be the best that they can be” by asking them good questions and helping them to “see the wood for the trees” - to work out their own solution to the question of how to get from where they are to where they want to be. So how does this differ from counselling? Or mentoring?

Let's start with what these disciplines have in common. They are all about “people helping.” They are all, in one way or another, about helping people get from where they are, to where they want to be. They do, however have different approaches; different focuses; and to some extent, different tool sets. Having said that, there are no universally accepted definitions of these disciplines. One person's coach is another person's mentor.

Coaching is always future oriented. It's about how we make our way from our present situation to our desired future. It's not that concerned with the past. Counselling sometimes (but not always), delves into the past in order to explain the present. For coaching the present is our starting point.

Coaching is generally non-directive. A coach rarely, if ever, tells a client how to do what they aught to do. Mentoring is based on transferring the skills and experience of the mentor to the mentee, where coaching is based on helping the client make better use of their own skills and experience. Of course, a coach may dip into his tool box and don his mentoring hat for a period, if he has specific skills and experience that his client might benefit from, but that is not his primary mode of operation.

Next time we'll look at how a coaching session might help a client...

Coaching – what’s it all about?

What is coaching, what does a coach do, and who would need a coach?

A coach helps a person being coached to be the best that they can be by holding the mirror up to them to show them who they can be. They help the client to work out how to best achieve their goals using the client's own expertise. They help them to 'see the wood for the trees', 'get unstuck', and 'move ahead towards their potential'.

The coach's primary tools are a good ear, and good questions. The coach listens carefully to their client and asks them insightful questions that help the client work their way towards a solution. Of course there are a vast array of supplementary tools in the coach's toolbox, depending on their own experience and training. These include tools for assessing life balance, values and purpose; goal setting techniques etc.

Coaches help people in all walks of life. Anyone who recognises the need for assistance in getting from where they are, to where they want to be can do with the help of a coach. A coach I know coaches CEO's of large corporations, church bishops and poor students.

In tomorrow's post I will explore the question of what a coach does in more detail, touching on similarities and differences between coaching and related disciplines like counselling and mentoring.