I am a Coach- what you make out of it?

To the average person, when you say “I’m a Coach” what do you think it means to him?

Whenever you use the word “Coach," you will not be on the same page with the person on the other side of the conversation.

The situation gets more worse when a new coach try to explain about coaching by saying “Coaches don’t give advice” and “You have the answers within you,” and "You are responsible and accountable for the outcome you receive" which would cause most people to wonder “Really? If all the things are with me, then why would I hire you!!??”

Instead of explaining 'what is coaching' better focus on communicating the benefits and results you provide to them, and not how you provide them.

You are not a complete Life coach from the Beginning.

It's not very far, just matter of 5-7 years before, when I didn’t know how to make my own website, or how to write a blog, or how to approach clients, or how to overcome fear of public speaking, or how to to work through my fear of being visible on social media… !

But, I did whatever it was required to be done to move forward because I was so passionate about what I was doing.

In doing so, I’ve learned more than I have ever imagined before about various topics, acquired a wide range of skills, and most importantly have truly discovered my capabilities which I was not aware of, when I strongly believed in myself.

I hope everyone who is reading this and facing the challenges of being a life coach remembers this too.

I believe, we are not complete Life coaches from the beginning. We became life coaches in part by part because as we support people in finding their inner resourcefulness to move forward, toward their ultimate life goals, we are doing the same for ourselves too.

It's my own experience! 

Coaching help in employee engagement.

Take a scenario of an office, the staff and the boss interact with each other throughout the day. The sales team and the clients interact with each other multiple times in a week. In a shop floor of a manufacturing unit, the employee and their leaders must be interacting, every hour in a shift.

It can be plain interaction or can be directive, or can be informative. It can be a   monologue, a dialogue or a discussion, or an argument.

In fact, it’s very important that both parties essentially required to identify the emotions of those they are interacting with. These emotions affect employee and the leader’s engagement level and the overall performance of the organization.

In modern times, it is necessary to teach both, the leader as well as the employee, a proper way to read the non-verbal signs of communication.

May be right way of Coaching would help an organization.

Coaching will not only teach to read a non-verbal communication but it also teaches how to ask the right questions and how to respond rightly to the question being asked, It ensures that they understand the situation, and are able to empathize how it impacts the other person.

By improving emotional intelligence, individuals can realize how the person they are interacting with is receiving and responding to the instruction.

Stop trying to over deliver!

“Do you expect too much from your coaching clients?” A question asked by a CEO of a Pharma company at the end of coaching assignment, during a coffee break.

 

I just smiled in a reply to his question.

 

He continued, “Never expect too much from your clients, more than they actually want for themselves.”

 

My smile just went away and a serious look came on my face, starring at CEO and was trying to understand every word he spoke.

 

Yes, it is true, sometimes we just want too much from our clients. And unfortunately we don’t sense it.

 

Just like me, there will be many coaches, who would be experiencing similar feelings one or the other times, when they try hard to effect the change on their clients.

Coach should let go their desire to bring the change in their clients and develop an understanding that what is best for the client is what the client is ready to commit to bring the change within themselves.

The client may get overwhelmed by your desire to help them beyond their current level of commitment to help themselves.

Stop trying to over deliver! 

To be a great leader!

 

As a newly appointed manager, you are likely to feel some kind of pressure to be a “great leader.”

Most managers are aware of the basic principles of good leadership which they have learnt earlier or read in leadership books, but only few are able to organize their learnings over the years into an actionable framework.

As a great leaders you must know and need to practice that there are two major areas of management focus - ‘tasks’ and ‘relationships.’

If you excel in both of these areas, you will be able to receive a superior performance from your team. However, it is important to know that balance between these two focus areas is absolutely essential.

Managers who are only focusing on task eventually face the burn out of his teammates.

Managers who are relationship focused, are not able to set sufficiently high performance standards and fail to challenge their teams to achieve set goals.

As a manager you need to learn to focus on task and relationship excellence to become a great leader.

What is your 'coaching package'?

 I received a text message from someone whom I don’t know before- ‘I am looking for coaching, pl. send me your coaching package.’

After a deep thinking I have derived my understanding of coaching package, what the client is asking for ( I might be altogether wrong).

Many life coaches offer 1-off / complimentary coaching sessions. Someone may sign up for 1 coaching session, even if it goes well, it may end there itself if they fail to ever book another session. With my last 3 years of complimentary coaching session, I have realized that one off coaching session model doesn’t work. You end up chasing clients.

That is why many coaches would be offering a coaching PACKAGE, which means clients are committing for 3 or 5 coaching sessions at once.

By making clients to commit to a certain package of sessions, it ensures they realize their investment for coaching process. Single session of coaching do not accomplish anything, for coach as well as for client.

It’s just not 3 or 5 sessions for client, but actually they look for specific result.

Hence, what I understand ‘coaching package’ as fixed number of sessions with Coaching fees to deliver a specific result to client.

Water-cooler Coaching

“Water Cooler Coaching.'

These are essentially informal chats between manager and employee where no direct instruction is given to the employee on any of the issue which might halt the discussion.


There could be conversation in the form of open-ended questions, such as.
“What would happen if…”
“Why do you think that is…”
“What are the options…”

This might take a while for employee to open up, but the very fact that as a manager, if you are doing, it is a sufficient proof that your subordinate is “capable" enough.

As a manager if you are able to point that out to them, may be that’s all is needed to give them the boost required to 'push' them more to perform more.

Take a pause and reflect.

 In a society that we live in, it values speed over reflection, as a result patience doesn’t get the credit it deserves.

We are so habituated to react quickly that sometimes the event is forgotten, only reaction is remembered.

It's time now, that we learn to create a space between events and our reactions.

You can choose to take pause and reflect, or you can react without thinking.

we must learn to step back and look at things from a distance.

Discernment is the ability to judge well.

Culture making process is like a dealing with a Black-box.

Many companies are hiring consultants and take their help to build a desired company culture. CEOs and Consultants are spending time to figure out the 'Why' and 'How' of the resultant outcome.

It would not be too much to say that Culture-making is like a dealing with black box.

Black box is a process or system of which we only know its inputs and outputs.

We really don’t know anything about its internal processing, what it does internally with input and how it manipulate it to provide the black box’s output.

I guess, this is exactly how culture making works. Although, culture making is a process but we as organizational leaders can not easily control it.

We can only feed the inputs and monitor the resulting outputs.

The inputs we would process are the people we hire, the direction we give, and the values we impart to them as leaders.

And the outputs we can experience include behavior, performance, and willingness to stay longer with organization.

Howsoever, smart, able and effective leader we may be, we cannot control what is happening inside that black box.

We can’t change how our team interacts and responds to our inputs.

Hence, all of our efforts for growing and changing culture must be necessarily to be focused on the inputs that are in our control. 

As a leader you allow space to your team

 As leaders when you are so much deep into, you tend to become a dictator, you start prescribing how the response should be to every situation. You end up writing prescription which your team has to follow.

In doing so, you end up creating a group of rule-followers who cannot function effectively on their own.

When your company is on a higher growth curve, you need the least of this kind of response from your team.

On the other hand, you should be in position to trust your team and you need to have an immense faith in them that your team understands what’s important and are capable to take the right decisions in the right situation s, on their own.

This is possible if you allow space within the structures you create for your team so that they have the right interpretation on the instructions you give.

This will inspire the team to own their own part of the company’s culture.

To change behaviour, change the environment

 I have heard a story where a guy had a puppy who used to chew shoes. He has left no shoes without chewing. The guy was very much perturbed. He decided to train the puppy not to chew on shoes.

Every time his puppy goes over shoes and returns without chewing them, the puppy would get a treat.

The things went well for sometime.

As the time passes, puppy become smart, he will not chew on shoes when he knows his master got a treat in his hand—and puppy go back to usual business as usual, when he knows his master is not holding a treat in hands.

Result: Your puppy ends up training you, rather you training him.

There is an easier remedy, but you prefer to take awkward route to approach a problem.

Instead of trying to teach your puppy not to chew on shoes, you can simply move your shoes out of reach of puppy.

In fact, what looks like a behavior problem is actually an environment problem.

The same concept applies to human behavior too.

The principle is same, whether the behavior is of your puppy or your own.

To change the behavior, change the environment.

It's important to unwind from the work.

 Assume, you’ve got an important project due at work, you are required to put in few extra hours in the evenings- answering emails and chalking out ‘what’ and ‘how’ of the project.

You have spent the whole weekend behind that project work. You don’t remember the last time when you sat on dining table without a phone or laptop. You had all eyes of your family members drilling you while you are busy with your laptop.

Your department is short-staffed; you have decide to take a lead, sacrificing your much-needed day off and pulling up till late night to help out your team and the project.

You’re exhausted, stress has built-up, you need a good sleep to regain your stamina.

But you’re being a team leader! It’s meant to be like this, that’s what you think and others too.

Four out of ten of us struggle to unwind from the work in the evenings and/or at weekends. This is an obvious sign that our work-life balance is out of sync.

Nearly half of working parents claim that work restricts their ability to spend their time reading books or playing with their kids.

Almost 40% of my professional friends feeling overwhelmed by demands of the modern workplace, affecting their relationship with their partner. Because boundaries between work and home have become blurred thanks to technology.

Don't stop. Keep coaching.

 Don’t stop, Keep Coaching

Keep coaching. Don’t stop. Once you have entered in the field of coaching, don’t ever lose momentum. 

What I mean by ‘keep coaching’: 

I have fixed weekend as my coaching days, try to see that none of my weekend goes without coaching, at least coaching one person per week. 

Finding continuous client every week is not that easy, especially when on weekdays you are busy with your regular job and you are available for coaching only on weekends. 

More than once, I have gone through hardest moments when I hadn’t coached anyone for six weeks in a row. It happens because sometime clients having all the time during weekdays and weekends they wish to be with themselves or their family.

Don’t give up. Figure out some ways to keep coaching: do half an hour coaching with your sister, your cousin, your aunt or anyone in known friends or family circle. Do something, anything, to keep coaching. Don’t let anything stop you. 

Don’t stop coaching, even if your website is not designed yet. 

Don’t stop coaching, even if you haven’t prepared your Facebook page.

Don’t stop coaching, even if you haven’t found the right way to post your ‘coach profile’ on LinkedIn. 

Just keep coaching. It’s you who would change the world for the better, of course one person at a time.

Mid-career crisis

 

Mid-life and mid-career crises are not very different from each other, in fact they seem to go hand in hand. Many people will eventually arrive at some moment in their life when they’ll have to process or analyze many decisions they’ve made in their lives.

It has been observed and experienced that there is a strong connect between personal and professional lives. When mid-career crisis occurs, it would certainly impact your personal life too. It is absolutely must to resolve or cure your career crisis or otherwise it will ill affect your personal life.

A mid-career crisis is nothing but a feeling of getting stuck in your career. People going through a rough patch in their professional career will perceive a lack of growth opportunities in their present work environment.

As we have experienced that for professionals, career becomes a significant part of their life. As person grow old in age, he try to extract emotional meaning from his life and hence any kind of up-downs in a professional career gravitates problem in personal life too.

Not all mid-career crises are the same. It is our responsibility to assess whether what we are experiencing now is just a temporary or a sort of dysphoria that most of the people are going through. Or are we altogether in the wrong field?

If all of this sounds “familiar,” most likely you’re going through a mid-career crisis.

Gender equality- still a long way to go.

Last week I received a call, asking for a coaching session.

She was seeking coaching about reducing friction in relationship when woman earns more than her partner.

She narrated me her situation:

'I am a woman who makes more than my husband and our situation is growing less unique day by day.

It’s good to talk about changing social norms when you’re dealing with mere statistics while it is difficult to handle it in a real relationship.

Because of the disparity in what my husband and I earn, I am more often faced with adjusting my goals or finding a way to negotiate our feelings. I have no problem to make adjustment but in-spite of my efforts to do adjustment I am not in position to minimize frustration, hurt feelings and hurt pride of my husband.

 

Pl. help me on this subject.'

I guess, this is not just once example, many such cases might be there and people are still not frank enough to discuss it out.

In our society, although we may argue and discus about gender equality but I guess we have long way to go.

In a particular case, a woman earning more because her partner is unable to work due to unemployment or illness has different implications for relationship satisfaction than her having a better-paying job than his partner.

On the other hand when the woman being unable to work does not, on average, affect the man’s relationship equation.

Even when both partners are employed, different surveys show both men and women are less satisfied when she earned more.

Both men and women were generally more satisfied with their roles and relationship when the woman became the homemaker.