When I was about 25 years old I started asking myself why I am What I am. I didn’t know what I was and even more I didn’t know who I was. This still remains a big question for most people…
published 5 and more posts
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
When I was about 25 years old I started asking myself why I am What I am. I didn’t know what I was and even more I didn’t know who I was. This still remains a big question for most people…
I extensively used role biography as a self-coaching technique during a two-year Executive Master’s program in organizational psychology. I reflected on the roles I had assumed throughout my life in several case papers and as part of my thesis.
I recently took part in a group supervision meeting with a number of my fellow internal coaches. For the coaches it is an opportunity, once a quarter to come together and discuss our practices. My sense is that for all of us it is an opportunity to get help and support, learn from others’ experiences, and take strength from the community. During this meeting two of the group shared quite different dilemmas that were troubling them,
Imagine you are not yourself, but you are “in charge” of you. You can deploy yourself to any set of tasks and activities you choose, in life and work.
I have realized over my time as an executive coach (and prior to that, as an OD consultant) that I have assembled my own personal treasure box of what I call “heuristics”. These are the pithy sayings, models, and go-to concepts that I have found useful in describing my meaning, in terms of providing a contribution to my client in that moment in our coaching conversation. (Understanding the nature of that prompting urge is, I suspect, a topic for another blog-piece!)
It was around five thirty in the evening. A warm, sunny August evening. Delightful. The course was now almost deserted as I descended the start ramp on foot with Finn, my 9 year old son.
I still find important gaps between my awareness of what actual Coaching practice involves, and what standards, or level of understanding, I believe is needed, that I can use to keep my awareness high about what matters in my practice.
I often work with strongly focused leaders, who operate in intense, highly competitive contexts and within very powerful organisational cultures. They are strong achievers, hold high standards and are usually incredibly skilled when it comes to observing, analysing, processing and coming up with powerful ideas.
In this blog-article I will discuss areas of cognitive bias that I have come across consistently in my coaching practice, my experience of transference, and the implications for coaching.
Career transition is a hot topic these days. People talk about it, engage in it, and fail at it. Only few seem to be aware of the breadth of coaching which could help them master this – after all, it is a long-term endeavor. Particularly coaching that facilitates access to one’s “intuitive” knowledge is
In the second part of this series I described how, to get a sense of this Chinese (and South East Asian) way of thinking, I had to learn a way to park my intellect. Not only that, I had to drop this idea I held about patterns appearing to be consistent and coherent - in my normal reasoned sense anyway.
In December 2016 I shared with you the benefits our internal Job+ coaching programme generates and how we worked in parallel with 5 internal full-time coaches and a pool of 13 Job+ coaches (colleagues who perform individual coaching in addition to their business tasks) to meet coaching demands. This way of working allows us to provide individual and team coaching as well as support leadership development.
Service - helping others. There, I’ve said it. After much reflection and rummaging in my memory I’d sum up my approach to coaching with that one word. Jeremy Bentham wrote, “Create all the happiness you are able to create. Remove all the misery you are able to remove.” And coaching is a powerful way of doing that.
Coaching as we understand it today is part of an evolutionary process in elevating human potential. As societies continue to realize that each individual has greater potential to live beyond their limitations, coaching has tapped into that growing awareness while filling a gap left by the decline of lifelong structured developmental experiences like guilds, formal mentoring, and initiations.
Everyone faces a constant steam of opportunities to shift focus away from planned work. Some distractions are externally imposed and others just seem to pop up in the mind. Either way, badly handled distractions can lead to wasted time and frustration. How often do you end the day frustrated with what you have achieved or irritated with yourself for wasting time on the wrong things?
The more and more I have coached people, the more I have started to see patterns emerge in that work. As I reflected on my work for this article, I realised I have seen three of these patterns strengthen into three of the primary effects of powerful coaching.
In our first two blogs of this mini series we explored what it took for us as former leaders and managers to expand our existing range of styles by adding a more coaching approach, and shared what we felt were the related benefits and challenges that may be of value to others.