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Andrew Parrock
Sally East
Pradip Shroff
Epimetheus
Lilian Abrams
Martin Richards
Maria Biquet
Simon Dennis
Katy Tuncer
Ian Flanders
Simon Darnton
Geoffrey Ahern
Alan Robertson
Isobel Gray
Laurent Terseur
Aubrey Rebello
Lynne Hindmarch
Doug Montgomery
Sue Young
Jeremy Ridge
Naomi Dishington
Wendela Wolters
Nicholas Wai
Charlotte Murray
Yvonne Thackray
All in Con PPD
The following tips are a summary of my 11 years’ experience as a Coach, Coach Supervisor and Professional Coaches Trainer.
The results shared in this report aims to fill in key gaps on what it takes to be a coach, and what’s involved in having a sustainable career in coaching. Where useful, we’ve also added some key insights and frameworks for coaches to consider alongside their own practice.
For Maria and Yvonne, after working for a combined years of 20+ years and collectively over 350 clients around the world, it’s been a while since we’ve taken those training wheel off and in each of our ways moved to that curiosity stage of all the different components that makes coaching coaching. We wanted to share from our experiences some of the myths we hold that when we begin to explore in more detail, that there is more to consider than what meets the eye.
At the start of this year one of my goals was to complete an Executive Coaching qualification mainly to rubber stamp my many years experience, and as a backup for tenders and other business requirements, not really appreciating just what a difference it would make.
The reason I am writing this article is to offer some ideas that will improve the quality of the work we do as Coaches and add value to the process.
Almost every day there’s at least one thing that I get annoyed about. It can be something like being stuck in traffic, losing battery on my smart phone, a slow internet connection, or not finding a key ingredient for a recipe (like bamboo shoots) in the local store. Ring a bell?
I cannot remember a time when asking questions was not at the heart of my work. Whether as a trainee, as an investigator, as a team leader or as a manager.
In some circles this is a controversial question. Coaches do not need domain knowledge to coach effectively yet many successful coaches are known for their niche.
As I stepped back to further reflect on what I’ve written, and integrating them with my recent experiences of coaching, I began to evaluate my style of coaching and what could be underpinning my approach. The key word that continuously popped up for me was ‘character’.
On 9 Jan 2020, in the midst of deep fissures surfacing in Hong Kong, I wrote an article about my naughty 103 year old grannie and her sufferings as a young woman. (What I learnt from my 103 year old Grannie) At the end of the article, I expressed my hope for 2020; “My hope for 2020 and beyond is this: to stop and pause to capture
transcendent beauty even in places of darkness, where love and kindness abide.” Little did I know that this was an overture of my life message for 2020 and beyond.
Getting a clear idea of what Soft Skills are is easier if, first, we have a definition of Hard Skills because the contrast puts them into context.
As a coach I help my coachees, as a manager I help my team, in conversations I help my colleagues and in supervision I help my coaches do one thing above everything - achieve clarity. Above all else – a great coach I know, Simon North, says, ‘Clarity Wins’. I think that is the role of a manager. It's the role of a coach.
The pandemic has provided an opportunity for coaches to re-evaluate and take stock of the practice and business and determine how they want to deliver coaching. Coaching is often described as the 'Wild West' because it has a perception that many who come into coaching consider that it's easy to earn money in coaching, versus those people who are coming to coaching to deliver something of value through coaching.
I’ve always believed that somewhere in a person’s experience there is something that they can use to look at a current problem and use their experience to solve that problem. And my experience shows me that, very often, that person has forgotten or discounted their experience and have built up the issue they face into a problem in their mind.
A few years ago, my dear colleague Yvonne Thackray asked me, “Who are your ideal clients?” I was puzzled by the question. “I can work well with any leader who wants to work with me”, I said. To me, it was a simple question of them being motivated to achieve their coaching goals, and their feeling with a comfortable fit with me. She countered by saying that she suspected that that might not be the full picture.
What’s your view about Critical Thinking? Would it be correct to say that internal criticism of your company would only be acceptable if it were initiated by management? It’s difficult to imagine a situation where an employee would proactively aim a critical opinion at their employer.
I am a Coach and a thinker and the best thing I can do is to question everything. It is probably the only way to maintain a clear view on the events and understand them as facts before we classify them in our thinking as patterns or phenomena.
