All in Practitioner Experience
Every coach listens; the difference lies in the ways we each focus on what we’re listening to and how (self-) aware we each are when we’re listening to our client communicate with us.
During my postgraduate diploma studies in psychological coaching with the Metanoia Institute, I followed a strict study regime – devouring coaching books in my spare time. One such book was Much Ado About Coaching, published by the contributors to this website.
Most of us are fed up with instructions, ready-made solutions and all the literature about “the X steps to success” that somebody else has tried (or just imagined) and presents them to us all as the Guru in the matter of self- development and success in life and business.
Understanding how I am developing my coaching practice has enabled me to become more aware and sensitive towards assessing how I apply what I do in coaching on myself, first, before advising others. I think it is important to “walk-the-talk” to demonstrate that a coaching approach is effective. It also helps with putting oneself
Every day corporate leaders announce plans that will revolutionize their organization, move them forward and provide the environment to successfully take on more challenging work. The process can be likened to a business owner at the turn-of-the 20th century writing his hopes and dreams for the company on
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Mobilising the company’s stakeholders on behalf of full sustainability entails the development of their stories about the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is our era in which we humans have an increasingly significant influence on the Earth.
When I first wrote about self-mentoring five years ago, I was just beginning an interesting journey that chose me and has been leading the way ever since. I am the developer of the practice of self-mentoring. I own the registered trademark so by business standards, it belongs to me. It belongs to me because I lived it – I used self-mentoring to survive. I now run a successful start-up that focuses on the
