Coaching has featured heavily in the last week.
As well as having some fabulous sessions with clients, a coaching approach has informed interactions with professional colleagues, potential business partners, friends and family.
I have also been in receipt of a very particular form of coaching: supervision. Professional coaches are expected (gold standard ones anyway) to receive at least quarterly supervision and for me that occurred this week. It’s a chance to check in, share and hopefully resolve any questions regarding your practice or perhaps, how best to be of service to a particular client.
You see, coaching is a competency, just like any other professional skill, and is a blend of multiple elements.
Knowledge for coaching
The what of coaching starts with some tools and frames such as “perceptual positions”. Where a coachee (client) is guided through discussing an unexpected encounter from their own, the person they interacted with and also a fly on the wall’s perspective. It is an amazing tool for shooting into an open mindset – an effective precursor to problem-solving.
Skills for Coaches
This is a simple one, for me, there really is one paramount skill: hearing. Not just listening, but hearing what is being said. Not just the words, the tone and body language, but the meaning of what is being said.
Being able to hear is a superpower for coaches and for many clinicians as well. This is one of the ways coaching has also improved my clinical ability.
The key enabler for this super-power is something equally simple: silence. Being silent both in terms of speech and also of mind (well quieter at least) enables your coachee to have the space to share and for you to focus on them.
Coaching behaviours
This is potentially a long list. For me, it has to start with curiosity and humility. With these two behaviours in place, silence naturally follows. Well, it does for me anyway!
Other behaviours include empathy, mindfulness and that thread running through everything we do at An Turas: gratitude.
So, who coaches the coaches?
One of my clients runs teams of personal trainers across the region. In recent months more and more of them have become aware that our conversations (that we intentionally conduct in the open in the gyms’ cafés are coaching in nature. Curiosity has awoken and we have decided to move to running some workshops & seminars for their team together every few months.
The value in getting the team together and interacting is immense. There will be unintended positive consequences – there always are. Talking this through, the first session may well be another coaching tool – that of artefact sharing.
Artefacts in coaching
Artefacts in coaching are the use of an item, photograph, poem or even a specifically mad piece of art to form the focus and frame of a person sharing something about themselves. For An Turas, artefact coaching and workshops we most commonly use artefacts to help support a person or team sharing their own leadership journey.
In this way, everybody contributes to the development of the team. Understanding and shared experiences are deepened, which in turn fosters trust. Trust is the keystone of psychological safety, which we know underpins team performance.
In a recent artefact session, we identified that setting an example would help support the team go through their own. So, I presented mine first. To share my current journey, I used a “D20” – a twenty sided dice. This being a key tool in the mechanics of a game called “Dungeons & Dragons” that I played as a kid and recently restarted to support my own son’s enthusiasm to play. Doing so has felt very much like a manifestation of “coming back to myself” which has been a cornerstone of my being able to coach with authenticity, and gratitude whilst being of genuine service to my clients. Which is nothing short of a joyous privilege to be honest!
So, who coaches the coaches – we all do!