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.