Coaches can learn from exploring how narratives unfold

The findings of my academic research into the use of narrative in coaching have been published by the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring. I interviewed six coaches whose approach is informed by a sensitivity to stories.

The project was an opportunity for me to take further my life-long interest in narrative. My background to this was as a journalist who naturally makes sense of things through shaping events and information into stories. When I first experienced coaching, I was drawn to becoming a practitioner because I noticed an affinity with my earlier career as a reporter – asking challenging and open questions, cutting to the chase, synthesising and summarising on the fly. While my approach has changed since then, I realised that this story-driven frame of reference was still influencing my style as a coach, even though I wasn’t consciously nor explicitly make it a part of my coaching model. So I decided to use my research project to bring some rigour to my belief in the relevance of narrative to coaching.

Some of the coaches I interviewed drew on a different tradition, that of oral storytelling, and for them narrative was a much more intentional act of creating emotional connection. Other influences that I discovered included the mythologist, Joseph Campbell, and the narrative therapy movement which took inspiration from the ideas of Michel Foucault.

As a result of the study, I still wear lightly the affiliation of a narrative coach. I am not drawn to encouraging clients to think of their coaching challenge as the fashioning of a new story. I might use narrative techniques – such as encouraging someone to imagine their story from another person’s point of view – to help clients gain a fresh perspective on things. More generally, I find myself listening for the narrative that unfolds between coach and client and reflecting this back as a means to improve the quality and depth of the client’s self-awareness. I am very conscious that every time a story is told it is unique to the specific circumstances of the telling and that this puts an onus on me as a coach to be sensitive to my part in its narration. This is not to call into question the coaching doctrine of non-directiveness. Rather, it highlights for me what is involved in maintaining a non-directive stance.

Story matters: an inquiry into the role of narrative in coaching (pdf) is in International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, Vol 10, No 1 pp. 1 – 13.

My thanks to the coaches who participated in the study: Jackie Bayer, Lisa Bloom, Karen Dietz, Cliff Kimber, Judy Rosemarin and Limor Shiponi. Also, to Ian Wycherley, my supervisor, and to David Drake, who was a generous expert informant.

What can you glean from first impressions?

How to work with a coach, part 4

Before you work with a coach, you should aim to meet two or three before deciding which to appoint. In part 3 of this series, I argued that you should never be choosing from a field of one.

When it comes to the meeting, your main purpose is to establish whether there is the potential for a good working connection between you both. At one level, this is a job interview and you are the recruiter. There is a certain amount that you have to ascertain in order to make an informed decision. You have to be clear in advance what information you need to get out of the meeting.

At another level, though, the transaction is more complicated than this. Coaching is what economists call an experience good. It is difficult to know the quality or value until the coaching is experienced. The personal connection between coach and client determines whether the coaching relationship will be successful, and this is established over time. Your initial meeting with a prospective coach is your opportunity to gauge whether the basis for such a connection exists. You have to give a bit of yourself in order to gain insight into how the coach can support and help you, and you have to concede space for the coach to demonstrate what kind of working relationship with you he or she might facilitate.

This puts the potential client in a more vulnerable position than that of the recruiter in a typical job interview. Not for nothing is the initial meeting between a client and prospective coach often described as a chemistry meeting, which hints at the centrality of the inter-personal dynamics which have to be tested before entering into a coaching relationship.

A good coach will be sensitive to this and will ask questions that facilitate your buying decision rather than give you the hard sell about the benefits of coaching. It’s important to understand why the hard sell should cause you alarm in relation to coaching.

Jenny Rogers, a leading UK coach and author of Developing a Coaching Business, argues that the old way of selling – bombarding customers with facts about the product and bamboozling them into the sale – works on the assumption that the customer is dim. A more facilitative way of selling is based on the premise that customers understand their own needs. The role of the seller is to work collaboratively with the customer to help him or her make the decision whether or not to buy.

Now think about what you want from a coach: someone who believes that you have the resources and the potential to make the change you want; who will challenge you to work out your own development needs, not lecture you on what you should do; and who will support you as you endeavour to make the change.

Who would give you more confidence that they would meet your needs: a coach who gives you the hard sell or one who collaborates with you through facilitative questioning? The latter is not only more congruent with what coaching is about but will also give you a representative experience of what it might be like to work with the person as your coach. A coach who asks facilitative questions in not only helping you clarify what you want but is taking the trouble to understand you as a unique individual. So you both have the opportunity to work out whether there’s a good fit and there is no shame in either one of you deciding not to proceed.

As you meet the person, it’s worth considering what constitutes a good fit. If the person is similar to you, would this work to your advantage in making it easier to open up or would there be a risk of you and the coach colluding not to make an issue out of certain weaknesses you may have? if the person is very different, would this bring valuable freshness that might challenge you in new ways or would it create an obstacle to working well together?

While I have suggested that you should expect the coach to facilitate your thought process and buying decision, it is still valuable to be clear about some things you need to find out. If you have followed my advice in part 2 of this series, and given some thought to what you want from coaching and what kind of person you would like to work with, this should give you some criteria to with which to think about about whether the person you are meeting would be a good coach for you.

You should already have some insight about the coach’s credentials so use the meeting to flesh out your understanding about his or her approach and philosophy. What influences does the person draw on? What experiences does he or she have that may be relevant to your coaching needs? What is the process by which the coaching happens? This last question covers logistical matters – such as the length of the sessions, the length of the programme, whether the coaching happens in a place which is private and conducive – and more contemplative ones such as what kind of areas the coach will explore, whether it is very focussed on the task at hand or will look at the broader context of your life.

You also need to gain some assurance on the coach’s professional values. What explanation are you offered about the confidentiality of the coaching? Do you gain a clear sense about the boundaries of the coach’s competence – in other words, will the coach know if the coaching is straying into areas better handled by a counsellor, therapist or just some other kind of coach who may be more appropriate for your needs? Does the coach work with a supervisor to keep a check on the integrity of his or her practice? And what kind of work is he or she undertaking to keep improving as a coach – in the jargon, continual professional development?

Finally, if the coaching is being paid for by someone else, such as your employer, you need to understand the coach’s perception of who is the client. What is the coach’s responsibility to your employer and how confident are you that you can trust the coach to put your needs first?

If you are satisfied that you have answers to these questions and you have experienced what it would be like to work the person you meet, you will be in a strong position to decide whether to commission his or her services.
Part 5 will look at agreeing terms.

Previous posts in How to work with a coach:

1. Why use a coach?
2. What do you want from coaching?
3. How do you find a coach?

What's the story?

Are you a coach whose practice draws on a narrative perspective, or explores how clients make and tell themselves stories? If so, can you help with my research project?

I’m doing a Masters dissertation on how an awareness of stories can help clients. I want to talk to coaches who work with a narrative perspective. I’d particularly like to hear from you if your approach resonates at all with what I describe below.

I bring a particular interest to the subject as a coach whose practice draws on an earlier career in journalism. I retain the journalist’s habit of viewing events as stories and instinctively try to tease out the stories represented in coaching conversations. But narrative has a broader relevance to coaching than this.

Stories are how we make sense of the world and together make our social world. With the fading of the grand narratives which traditionally provided meaning and direction for people, individuals are challenged to create their own personal narratives to make sense of their life’s purpose. I’m interested not just in the outcome of story creation, but also the process – since a story is always materially affected by the circumstances of its telling.

My impression is that coaching can help individuals understand the narratives which shape their expectations of themselves. Some people also suggest that coaching can help clients construct narratives which can give them a more positive sense of self and direction. I’m open-minded about this.

In my view, the narrative perspective can foster reflexivity in coaching, providing a language to enable coach and client to see their own conversation as collaborative story-making. This can help clients see beyond the perception of reality as a given, and see themselves much more as the author of their own meaning. I want to test these assumptions in my research project.

I’m also interested in exploring a narrative-based approach as creativity. It can help elicit resourcefulness in a coachee: triggering things like memories, lateral thinking and imagination – insight that may be embodied in an individual but not always readily accessible.

I link this to a view of the mind being developed by neuroscience (and here I’m at the limit of my intellectual competence). This sees the mind as largely unconscious and comprising diverse mental models of the self, which are activated and synthesised in different ways according to different perceived triggers. Narrative inquiry can encourage a client to explore a story from different perspectives. This can mobilise the client’s imagination to bring more of the mind’s stored experiences to bear on the subject at hand than might otherwise be the case, for example helping the client more easily to empathise with a difficult colleague.

I see a further link between narrative and a developmental view of the self as a process of evolving meaning-making. The narrative perspective provides a way to think about how the self is influenced by each experience incrementally. If a story is always unique to the circumstances of its telling, we are also slightly changed every time we tell or hear a story. Even where a story is retold between narrator and listener, it is different the second time since the way both individuals interpret its meaning will be influenced by the first telling and whatever experience has occurred in the interim. So how a story unfolds in a coaching conversation will itself have an impact on how the coachee perceives it. What does this mean for how coaches should work with stories, and how will stories developed between coach and coachee stand up in the coachee’s life beyond the coaching sessions?

I am interested in testing these thoughts-in-development by talking to other coaches who draw on narrative, and exploring how they use it. I’d like to understand: what you consider narrative and story to be; how you apply these concepts in your coaching; what outcomes you think are brought about for your clients by drawing on a narrative perspective; and what are the avenues for further developing your narrative-informed practice.

Initially, I’m looking for a short exploration of your views. The methodology of my research after that will be influenced by the response I get to this request. Most probably, I’d be looking for about 90 minutes of your time for an in-depth interview (either in person or by phone or Skype).

If you’d be interested in finding out more, please get in touch via this contact page or LinkedIn or Twitter.

Image courtesy Julia Manzerova

Are you looking in the right place?

Finding a coach is harder than finding a doctor, lawyer or most other kinds of professional service. Coaching is a fast growing profession, but strangely invisible and not clearly defined to its market. People often reach a coach through word of mouth; but chances are you won’t know many people who have experienced working with a coach. Alternatively, you might pick up a flyer for a coach who works in your neighbourhood; but how do you know if this person is the real deal or a quack?

If you’ve done the work of the part 2 in this series, and spent some time ascertaining your coaching needs, you will be well placed to find a coach with whom you can have a productive relationship. Instead of approaching the market with a broad and open agenda, you will have a reasonably clear idea of what you’re after and this should make your approach to finding a coach more focussed. So the first thing to understand is that you are not simply looking for a good coach. You are looking for a coach who is right for you – someone whose model of coaching is relevant to your needs, someone who inspires your trust and confidence and with whom you can imagine sharing aspects of yourself that would not normally enter other professional relationships.

Where do you find such a person? You need to seek candidates and interview two or three of them before selecting the coach that you will employ.

If you have a very specific need – such as decluttering or weight control – you might find the internet a good place to start. But these are very task-focussed examples which are on the borders of coaching and may well encompass a degree of mentoring or directive advice that coaching wouldn’t normally provide. Web searches are reasonably effective at connecting practitioners and clients for this kind of work.

More typically, coaching is one of the few areas of life in the digital age where a web search is not going to be especially helpful to begin with – although looking closely at coaches’ websites will be a significant part of the finding process later on.

If you work in a company and are considering business coaching, it’s possible that your HR department or senior management may have an arrangement in place to provide coaching. The important consideration in this situation is to keep in control of the selection process and not simply accept the first person who is offered to you. In most corporate situations, good practice is to offer you a choice of coaches and allow you to select the one who seems to offer the best fit for your needs. If this does not happen, you should insist on it: it is not for your boss, HR director nor anyone else to tell you who is the right coach for you.

If you are looking for a coach independently, your best bet is to seek recommendations from people you trust. These may include someone who has had coaching or someone who works as a coach (if you have a friend who coaches, it’s probably best not to choose this person as your coach since the boundaries between your friendship and your coaching relationship could get confused).

If your personal contacts yield no results, your next ports of call are organisations in the coaching field such as professional bodies, training schools and coaching companies. Among the professional bodies, the International Coach Federation and the Association for Coaching operate public directories of coaches which are accessible online. But these are fairly blunt instruments.
Ideally you want to speak to someone to explain what kind coaching experience you seek, so as to filter the recommendations you receive to your needs. Many training schools will be happy to put you in touch with alumni coaches (or even coaches in development who may offer free coaching in order to gain practice) and most coaching companies maintain panels of associate coaches and should be able to put you in touch with a number of people to speak to.

Armed with a few leads, the next step is to check out the websites for the people whose names you’ve obtained or the companies with which they are associated. These tell you an awful lot, and not always in the way their authors intend. You need to interrogate the websites, not passively absorb the information they present. Try to build a picture of the person who is putting him or herself forward as a coach.

In the first instance, look for obvious signs of professional credibility. These include relevant qualifications from reputable training establishments or accreditation by a professional body, membership of professional associations, subscription to a recognised code of ethics (pdf), and a commitment to ongoing development of the coach’s practice.

Next, ask yourself whether the website gives you a reasonable overview of the coach’s approach. What impression do you gain of what it would be like to experience coaching with this person? Some coaches will provide a model to explain what they do. Others, including me, blog about coaching-related subjects to give a more qualitative insight. Sometimes coaches provide resources on their websites which enable you to try out for yourself some of their techniques.

What do you learn about the theories, beliefs and perspectives that the coach brings to the task. How well do they fit or complement your own world view? If they challenge it, is this in a way that might help shift your thinking in a constructive way or is this giving you a warning sign that you could be looking at a dead end?

Step back a bit further and consider to what extent the coach’s website is in the service of your buying decision. Does it make you feel comfortable or uncomfortable? Is it written in language that is meaningful? Or does it bombard you with jargon about the coach’s credentials which make little sense to you? What is your reaction to the colours, design and style of the site? Is information provided freely or is it conditional on you submitting contact details? What do the answers to these questions tell you about the kind of relationship you might establish with this coach?

A note here about price. I know of few coaches that post pricing information on their websites. Here’s why. Most coaches operate in a variety of markets with different levels of price sensitivity. A large corporate client will expect to pay considerably more than an individual who funds the coaching from his or her own pocket. It’s quite hard to address these expectations simultaneously from a single website. But you should expect a clear and accountable answer to your questions about price once you get into a conversation with a coach. Within reason, few would want price to be a barrier to a client benefiting from coaching (indeed many coaches do a certain amount of pro bono work for causes or individuals they want to support).

The implication of this is that, if your search is price-led, you won’t get very far. In the first instance, focus on finding a coach who fits your needs and deal with the question of price later on. By this time, you shoul
d have a good idea in your head of the value you would put on coaching and how to tailor your budget accordingly. Fewer sessions with a coach who will challenge you and move you forward are better than more sessions with one whose approach is not right for you.

Your objective in comparing websites is to find a few practising coaches with whom you can have a useful conversation about your needs. An initial conversation on the phone should be enough to tell you whether this person may be a potential coach for you.  If the signs are not encouraging, don’t be embarrassed to ask for recommendations for someone who might be a better fit.  If the signs are encouraging, you will want to meet the person for a reasonably lengthy conversation to enable both of you to explore the kind of working relationship you might establish together.

In both your initial phone call, and your subsequent meeting if you proceed to that, you’ll want to have in mind the same kind of considerations that apply to scanning coaches’websites.  Aim to meet two or three people and think about whether the impressions you formed from looking at their sites and talking to them on the phone are borne out. Each meeting will give you a real insight into what coaching with that particular person would be like. And being able to compare your experiences of two or three different coaches will give you valuable data about which approach might best suit you at this particular time.

You need to be clear what you can expect from such an encounter and what you might want to get out of it. That is the subject of the next post in this series.

Coaching reaches parts of the brain other approaches don't

During these past three months, I’ve resumed my Masters studies in coaching – which partly accounts for the lack of posts here.  Aside from earning a living and maintaining family life, most of my spare capacity has been absorbed by keeping across the reading.  So it’s high time to put the studies aside and renew my acquaintance with my blog.

One of the things that strikes me is how my attitude to coaching has subtly shifted since I was last here.  I’ve always paid a lot of attention in coaching to my clients’ conscious sense of self.  I often tend to explore people’s values and aspirations, and what it would take to achieve better alignment with one’s values.  What this often flushes out is that we tend to hold a range of values that may contradict each other – such as the perennial tension between work and personal life.

Sometimes people are barely conscious of contradictions in their values and, when challenged to prioritise them, find it hard to do so.  We hold in mind at any one time only a small part of our sense of self.  The rest tends to be filed away or even difficult to reach.  The person we are tends to be different according to context and the expectations people have of us in each context – at work, at home, with friends, and so on.  Even within a context, we play different roles: at work, for instance, how we are depends on whether we are dealing with our boss, our colleagues or people we lead.

Coaching can help people achieve better integration of these diverse aspects of ourselves.  But my view about how this is achieved is changing.  In the past, I would put a greater emphasis on rational analysis, setting a personal strategy and striving for it.  Now, I tend to allow things to emerge much more organically.  I see coaching as providing a space in which people can luxuriate in reflection, and become more aware of the person they are.  It is a shift in emphasis from doing to being.

Now here’s the strange thing.  Most clients seek coaching because they want to change something with which they are not comfortable and you would assume that you achieve that through diagnosing the problem and setting a plan of action.  But more lasting and deeper rooted change flows from taking one’s attention off the objective and agenda for action and looking instead at where one stands and one’s orientation to the challenges life throws up.   We can try to behave differently to achieve our hopes and aspirations, but this is more likely to yield results if we are comfortable first of all with who we are, what matters to us and why.  And if we do this work first, we may find that the hopes and aspirations which were originally causing some unease were actually misconstrued and if anything needs to change that may be quite different from what we originally envisaged.

So much did I learn from my practice as a coach.  What I have been learning through my academic studies is there’s a sound reason why this should be the case.  From a neuroscientific perspective, there seems little ground for maintaining a belief in a conscious, rational self that gives us a sense of agency in life.  Consciousness is an artefact of evolution, and a somewhat over-developed one at that.  Much of our mental processing happens beneath the level of consciousness and our self takes credit for it retrospectively.  There’s a whole spectrum of physical, emotional and intellectual activity which governs how we respond to situations.

We literally embody the wisdom of our diverse selves in different contexts.  The challenge is to bring a greater part of this embodied wisdom to bear across the range of contexts in which we operate.  This is what I think of as achieving a better sense of personal integration.  It comes through surfacing associations between these different versions of “me”.   And this is best done tangentially than through head-on rational discourse.   Commonly used triggers to these kinds of associations include drawings, mindmaps, role models and simple questions such as “What does this remind you of?”   These are routes to informing ourselves by a broader and richer awareness than we routinely draw upon.

But I’m increasingly interested in pushing this further through approaches to coaching which, on the face of it, seem beside the point: learning through art, working in nature, developing stories.  It seems to me that one of the gifts that coaching can offer is not so much the opportunity to think in depth about something that is on your mind, but the chance to think about something else – the more off-topic, the better.  And from there, work back to the things that you’re grappling with.

By locating ourselves in our responses to things that mobilise our our other selves, that generate a rounded sense of who we are, we understand better what we bring to the things that are predominantly on our mind.

Image courtesy Liz Henry

Understand your needs

In the first part of this series, we looked at what coaching is and in what circumstances it might make sense to turn to a coach.  This post is about how to work out what you want from coaching.

I’m not thinking here specifically about your goals for coaching, although this is a part of it.  It’s more about how you like to learn and develop and what kind of coaching experience would best suit you.

It is important to get clear about this before you even start looking for a coach.  As I discussed in the previous post in this series, coaching is an unregulated profession with fairly low barriers to entry.  There is a wide variety of approaches to coaching out there.  Taking some time to work out up front what your needs are will help you to discriminate between the different models with some rigour.  The answers to the questions you need to ask yourself will determine what kind of characteristics you should look for in determining which coach to work with.  They will also help you articulate a clear brief to your coach, which means you are likely to achieve a productive relationship more quickly and will have shared benchmarks against which to assess how well the coaching is going.

So here are five broad areas to think about as you contemplate appointing a coach.

1.  What are your desired outcomes?
Having said this isn’t specifically about your coaching goals, it is important to start with a clear picture of the result you want to achieve through coaching.  I used to think it was important that clients come to coaching with very clear goals.  But now I’m not so sure.  It is striking how often clients arrive with quite vague objectives.  They are aware of a general unease about something, a feeling of being stuck, and an awareness that they might benefit from help to think it through.  For these people, pinning down exactly what is the issue is one of the objectives of coaching in itself.  Other times, clients turn up with very specific outcomes in mind and are looking for faster progress towards them than they would achieve without coaching.  Either way, most coaches will put in some time at the start of a coaching relationship to clarify goals with the client.  More fundamentally, I find the goals shift as the relationship develops and the client gains insight into the situation.

So why is it important to get clear before you start about what you want from coaching?  Because it will help you work out what kind of coaching you need (for example, do you want skills-based coaching to help you do something more effectively or more contemplative coaching to help you think through where you are in life?)  Also, when you do get into clarifying your objectives with your coach, if you begin with as clear a picture as you can, this will help ensure that the focus of coaching is rooted in your best understanding of your objectives rather than an agenda that the coach might bring into the conversation.

2.  How do you like to work?
Think of your best working relationships and try to jot down what makes them successful.  Think also of working relationships which haven’t been so successful, and the factors that got in the way.  This doesn’t have to be solely with reference to colleagues at work.  Experience of any close, one-to-one working is germane – it might be your doctor, a counsellor or a personal trainer at your gym.  How task-focussed are you?  To what extent do you like to consider a range of perspectives?  Do you like to make progress rapidly, or do you like time and space to evaluate ideas before acting?  What kind of feedback do you receive easily and what kind of feedback is more difficult to handle?  How honest are you in your working relationships and how do you give feedback?  How collaborative do you like to be?

Think about these questions and then use the answers to think about what they mean for the kind of working relationship with your coach would suit you best.  It is particularly worth reflecting on how open you are to challenge and in what ways you like to be challenged.  Coaching should be a supportive experience.  But it shouldn’t be cosy.  You come to coaching because you want to change or develop in some way, so there is an implicit onus on your coach to challenge you to move forward with this development.  Coaching is a rare opportunity to hear things about yourself that people won’t usually tell you.  Most people you talk to have some kind of stake in your life whereas your coach should be a more dispassionate observer.  You need to think about how ready you are for honest feedback.

3.  What kind of person are you?
It’s worth understanding the kind of person you are in order to think about the benefits and downsides of working with someone who is similar or different.  Coaches often describe different personality types by drawing on psychometric models such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  This is a tool to help you think about issues such as whether you are an introvert or extravert, whether you tend to prefer abstract theory to concrete data, whether your actions are guided by very rational considerations of more instinctive ones, whether you like to have things nailed down or keep your options open.

The question to think about here is whether you need to work with someone who is like you or different.  To work with someone who is similar may be more agreeable, but there is a risk that you may unwittingly collude towards your shared preferences and you may miss the opportunity to think about ways in which you may need to develop.  Working with someone who is different may bring more challenge to think about these areas where you don’t normally like to go, but the relationship may bring more irritations so you both may have to work harder to make it work.

4.  How do you like to learn?
How you like to learn is closely related to how you like to work and what kind of person you are.  Do you like to explore the broad picture or the gritty detail?  Do you like to try things out, learn by doing, or read up and then apply what you’ve read?  Would you prefer to use tools and models provided by your coach or reflect in a more open and exploratory way.  Are you better with pictures and flipcharts, or words and discussion?

According to the education theorist David Kolb, we learn most effectively through a mixture of theoretical conceptualising, active experimentation, doing things in the real world, and reflecting on our experience.  Kolb suggested that most individuals are more drawn to certain of these modes of learning than others.  But if we learn most effectively by drawing on all four modes of learning, what kind of coaching experience would most assist the way you like to learn?  Do you need a coaching experience which takes you through all four modes of learning or one that complements your normal style of learning.  What you don’t need is a coaching experience which just goes with the grain of how you like to learn.  This may feel more attractive at first glance but it risks neglecting the approaches you routinely resist and which may be the key to unlocking your development.  Ideally, you want a mixture that both plays to your learning strengths and stretches you in new ways.

5.  What are your intellectual moorings?
Coaches draw on a wide variety of intellectual inspirations – some more robust than others.  Some are rooted in theories of psychology – such as psychodynamic perspectives, which often explore unconscious motivations and inner conflicts, or cognitive behavioural therapy, which can involve challenging behaviours and ways of thinking that are unhelpful and replacing them with more constructive ones.  There are also approaches which draw on systems thinking, management literature, organisational theory, adult learning theory and philosophy.  Many  approaches to coaching are based simply on talking and probably focus largely on how you think and feel.  Others take a more holistic approach, involving movement and an awareness of what your body is telling you.  Some coaches draw on a conviction that anyone can achieve anything they want while others will take a measured approach to helping you assess the things that can help you make progress and the things that can get in the way.

It is worth approaching this diversity of coaching models with some open-mindedness.  The models which are more alien to your preferred ways of thinking may contain precisely the wisdom you need to move you forward.  But it is worth also understanding the boundaries of your intellectual horizons so that, as you begin to search for coaches, you can be alert to influences or approaches which are likely to be unproductive for you.

You’ve probably noticed in my discussion of these five areas a theme of valuing difference.  I don’t want to over-state this.  If you work through these quesitons, you’ll gain some clarity about your preferences.  But you need to think about the right balance between indulging your default modes and casting against type.

Most good coaches will take you through many of the considerations outlined here.  But if you work through them yourself, as a preliminary to finding a coach, you’ll be in a much stronger position to articulate your requirements and make an informed judgment about who you should work with.

Once you’ve clarified your needs and preferences, you’re ready to start looking for a coach.  That’s the subject of the next part of this series.

Need space to think?

Coaching is a young profession and not well understood.  The barriers to entry are low and the standards and methodologies variable.  No surprise, then, that I find that people who approach me for coaching often have little idea what to expect.

So I’m embarking on a series of posts for people who are thinking of working with a coach.  It will try to shed light on what coaching is and how to use a coach.  Among other things, we’ll look at criteria to use when choosing a coach and how to get the best out of coaching once you begin.  But we’ll start with exploring how coaching can help you and when it might benefit you to work with a coach.

Let’s try first of all to pin down what coaching is – a surprisingly difficult question to answer.  If you have explored coaching at all, you will have quickly find that no-one ever seems to call themselves simply a coach.  There are life coaches and executive coaches, NLP coaches, ontological coaches, co-active coaches, performance coaches, wellbeing coaches, fertility coaches.  I could go on.  I don’t intend to get into the distinctions in approach between the various methodologies or niches within the profession.  Having explored a variety of philosophical traditions in coaching, I can see that they all offer a certain wisdom.  I’m more interested here in some of the common factors which underlie coaching, whatever tradition in which it’s rooted.  The reason for this is that, for prospective clients, the label given to a particular kind of coaching is less important than the quality and professionalism that a coach has to offer.

Now some coaches might protest that that the outcomes from coaching may be different depending on which kind of coach you choose to work with.  This is probably true.  But I am making an assumption here that it is most useful first to understand what makes a good coach.  Once you have this clear, you can make better decisions about what approach to coaching might suit you best.

At the most basic level, a coach is someone who works with clients to help them improve their effectiveness and fulfil their potential. Typically, this happens through a series of very purposeful, one-to-one conversations held over a number of months.  These are aimed at helping the client to learn and develop; it’s not about being taught by the coach.  So the coach’s role tends to be to listen and to ask questions rather than to give advice.

John Whitmore, one of the founders of the profession, speaks of the task of coaching as being to reduce the internal obstacles to performance which are often more daunting than the external ones (John Whitmore, Coaching For Performance).   If you can reduce the internal obstacles – the self-talk that makes you doubt yourself and your capability – then one’s natural ability tends to come to the fore.

Jenny Rogers, a highly respected coach and a wise writer on the subject, speaks of six principles in coaching (Jenny Rogers, Coaching Skills):

1. The client is resourceful
2. The coach’s role is to spring loose the client’s resourcefulness
3. Coaching addresses the whole person – past, present and future
4. The client sets the agenda
5. The coach and client are equals
6. Coaching is about change and action

Taking these ideas together, the coach’s purpose is not to offer answers but to create a relationship in which the client gains the space, perspective and support to find for him or herself the right way forward.  The logic of this – and this is sometimes hard for clients to grasp initially – is that the coach does not need to be an expert on the client’s situation.  As Jenny Rogers puts it:

Only the client can really know what to do because only the client knows the full story and only the client can actually implement the action and live with the results.  This does not preclude the coach from offering useful information, but it is the client’s choice whether or not to use it.

The other implication which flows from the insights of Whitmore and Rogers is that the field of inquiry in coaching is quite broad.  If you’re seeking help with a work issue, the conversation can’t realitically be confined to office matters because the person you are in your whole life affects how you show up at work.  Similarly, where you have come from and what your aspriations are inform the decisions you are likely to make today.

I tend to think of coaching as providing a reflective opportunity for the client.  In our time-pressured lives, it is a real luxury to be invited to step out of your routine in order to pause and take the measure of what you are doing.  Add into the mix the focussed attention you will receive from your coach and it becomes a rich learning experience.

A good coach, above all, is someone who listens.  A coach will offer you feedback about how you are that you are unlikely to receive from anyone else, because the coach is concentrating on you but – unlike others in your life – has no particular interest in the decisions that you take.  A coach will challenge your assumptions and established ways of thinking and feeling, encouraging you to see new possibilities.  And the simple commitment of working with a coach will in itself facilitate your development, since your the deadline of your next meeting tends to provide a point of accountability for you to show progress on what you are trying to achieve.

So if coaching is about your own resourcefulness and not about the knowledge or expertise of the coach, it follows that the issues on which you might seek help from a coach are almost limitless.  A business coach might help you with things like the way you lead a team, how you deal with your boss or getting a better work-life balance.  A life coach might help with organising yourself at home, leading a more healthy lifestyle or improving the your personal relationships.  Either might help you to think about where you’re heading with your career.

You might think about turning to a coach when you have been struggling with something for some time and seem never to make much progress or when you are at a point of transition and want to draw together the insight and capabilities that you possess in a new way.  Coaching can be really useful when you are in a new job and want to think about how to approach it most effectively.  Or when you are aware that you want to develop in some new way but are not quite clear how.  Generally, you will be drawn to coaching because there is something that you want to change and there is a lot at stake.

Since coaching is a relatively expensive way of dealing with the issue, it is important to think about what other approaches are open to you and what distinctive value coaching adds.  Sometimes I encounter prospective clients who can get what they need from a book and I suggest they try that before turning to coaching.  Sometimes people have read all the books or had loads of training but want to try something new.  Or they are turning to a coach for support or challenge as they put their knowledge into practice.  Maybe they are drawing on some other means of support and want to work with a coach to help them critique their development or to move forward more quickly.

These are the reasons why you might be drawn to coaching.  But they make coaching sound quite mundane and instrumental.  What you gain from coaching may, in the long run, be qualitatively different since coaching, at its best, is a wonderfully mind-expanding and life-affirming experience.  It’s about developing a trusting relationship with someone, connecting with your values, developing and growing.  In achieving the thing that brought you into coaching, you may reach your ostensible destination but you may discover that in fact you are on a wholly different journey.

You should, by now, be gaining an impression that the nature of your relationship with your coach is everything.  Strike the right match, and the rewards of coaching are rich and unexpected.  The secret to achieving this lies in knowing  your own needs and preferences before you start looking for a coach, so that you are clear about the kind of person you will best work with.  How to gain that clarity is the subject of the next post in the series.