What the Fluff is coaching about?
(by Simone Lawrence)
Why coaching?
Coaching is far from fluffy. It is powerful stuff. Effective coaching conversations create insights and transformative shifts that enhance leadership. Being coached focuses you on the future and is extremely helpful for people in times of uncertainty, transition, growth, and change. Bringing clarity and alignment to what is most important to you. Revealing your guiding radar and increasing your motivation to move towards your goals and adapt your leadership behaviors towards optimal professional and personal impact.
Trust in yourself, the coach and the process
Establishing a high level of rapport and trust between the coach and the person being coached is essential to create the right foundations for effective coaching. The person being coached is often referred to as the “coachee”. At the ameliorate group we prefer to call the person being coached the “coaching partner” because we believe a coaching process is a true partnership.
Coaching is a process where the coach and the coaching partner agree to enter into a relationship where a safe space is created for the coaching partner to connect with their thoughts on a deep level to break through what can at times be complex issues and create new patterns of behavior to more effectively serve your future. With the support of the right coach over a series of sessions, individuals and teams are able to access levels of thinking that are not likely to be accessed alone, expand their self-awareness, bringing new clarity, and creating new choices.
Leaders need to be ready for coaching by:
- Being brave and courageous
- Approach it with an open mind and curiosity
- Have an appetite for adaptability
- Embrace risk-taking and playfulness
- Be committed to the process
- Have a genuine desire to grow
- Make peace with your past to welcome the future
- Be willing to ask for the support you deserve
The magic starts to happen
The role of the coach is to listen very attentively and tune in to all the nonverbal cues in the conversation. To ask powerful questions, provide feedback and challenge the person being coached to expand their thinking, connect with their emotions, values, and purpose to inform their future.
Coaching in the true sense of the word is not usually a process of telling somebody what to do, providing answers and advice, this crosses over to be more the role of a mentor or a consultant. Sometimes when developing people, the coach may draw upon these skills as well dependent upon the required outcomes.
Being coached requires honesty, courage, commitment, and an appetite for personal growth. Being open to transforming behaviors to carve out new, improved pathways for the future. Helping build increased personal and professional impact and becoming a more effective leader.
