Monthly Archives: June 2019

I still like Timothy Gallwey's statement on performance coaching. He said the worst opponent is in your head, this is so true. The most critical person about your performance will be you, and most of it will be self-created by your inner voice, the voice that only you hear and only you listen to.

Coaching provides techniques to take away the barriers that are in coachee's heads. Work is like sport; it is about managing what goes on in the head. Another statement from Tim Gallwey was "Fighting the mind does not work, what works best is learning to focus it.” Coaching provides the focus in a safe environment where changes can take place.

Coaching can give an increased awareness of the coachee from the coach by only guiding around the data that presents itself in the room. Performance coaching will drive coachees using simple techniques like Grow. Relational/Gestalt coaching will look at all of the data in the room the feelings and instincts that pop up. The balance is the use of both to

I’m a very professional person when it comes to doing things whether it's part of my career or as part of a hobby, I relish the chance to improve.  I can’t help wanting to learn and importantly, improve in everything I do continually, but there’s one major obstacle I always face personally when I try to improve that holds me back all too often.

For some people, improving at things they do professionally or personally comes very easy to them, and they’re genuinely the lucky ones.  I’ve often been quite naturally good at things I’ve pursued in my life, but the real challenge comes when I need or want to improve in that particular role/task. As a professional trainer, I know an awful lot about effective learning and development methods such as feedback, reflection etc.  The use of many different ways really helps us, and when they are tailored individually, they work well, but it’s when we have to show then something new or to a higher level that I struggle.  I often thought about

I was delivering a training course recently, where we were talking about the importance of training evaluation.  A delegate on the course then said: “My boss won't let me do any evaluation”. I said “Why”, and she answered, “Well he said if you don’t ask them and we won't get anything negative”.

Yes, I know its incredible, the fact that this manager wasn’t prepared to ask the question because they feared something negative is unbelievable.  Sadly it's true, and I know there will be more people out there like that. They fear feedback because they see it as negative.

Of course, we ask the question to improve, we want to get better, and we can only get better if we ask for feedback.  Of course, that’s not the only thing we do, but it is undoubtedly an essential aspect of the evaluation process that all managers need to buy into.

As a manager, we should evaluate all main projects which would include asking a series of reaction questions to clients on how they felt it went.  This should

When a coachee presents the area they would like to work on with you, it is essential you feedback on what you think you have heard. You may think you have heard the area the coachee wants to work on, but unless you share this, you usually won’t know for sure. This becomes the contract between you and your coachee.

We all take information differently; some of us take big picture and creative things, others factual and specifics. Both areas are needed in life, but we all have a preference, and automatically our brains respond to the preference. Feeding back what you think you have heard confirms what you think you will be working on together.  Always when working through a coaching session if you feel the coachee is changing in a different direction, it is vital you feed this back for confirmation. Sessions change direction, so the key is to pull back the coachee or re-contract.

Hugely interesting when watching coaching sessions, the different pulls in different directions you can witness

Most businesses these days are quite smart in investing time and effort into ensuring production or operation processes are efficient within a continuous improvement cycle because the business will fail without it.  What about training then, surely, I’d be right in thinking it would be treated in the same way, yes?  Well, the truth is normally it’s not, no!

Why then is this? Surely training, being at the heart of ensuring right from the start of any employment the people within our business are productive and efficient should be given top priority?  I often find when I get to speak to people involved in both management and other roles within an organisation, the training function is diluted to be wrapped in with HR or given as a part-time role to one or sometimes many people as an extreme.  When this happens, the training system (as a whole) is often more about making the training and delivering it over and over, (a little like a sausage factory).  Let’s use that lovely analogy

Recently I have had the experience of working with a great group of people involved in an interesting project.  The group are keen and are interested in making the project work; they are highly motivated.  One manager of the group is also very enthusiastic but suffers from a potentially dangerous condition called overcomplication!

Paralysis by analysis is a severe condition.  You can take the most straightforward issue and overcomplicate it to such a level it becomes a real issue.  This is created by asking very complicated questions to such a degree you then start to forget what the simple problem was in the first place — asking questions to such a level looking for an issue when in reality, there isn’t one!

As a manager, it can cause you significant issues, including:

Staff Start to Question – they will question everything you do, maybe not to your face but certainly behind the scenes either to themselves or others.  “Here we go again” is a classic statement they will start

When coaching the key is to notice what is happening in yourself and the coachee. Everything you feel in the room is data, instinct. Always think what is missing, what am I not saying, what is the coachee not saying? then think about sharing this. Sometimes it is about taking a risk, but it is how you get it across that counts.

People believe it is all about question technique, well it is but this must be balanced with all the other data around you. The number of times in supervision when I witness people thinking about proper question technique; then they think about how to ask the next open question. This is hard to master, but the harder act to master is to not ask the question. At the point of asking the next question, think about sharing something you notice rather than questioning. The timing of this is also a key skill to learn and master.

Listening and sharing, great coaching skills can be an added skill to great training skills. Training and coaching as always get mixed up and

Most of us have witnessed it or even experienced it – you know, those moments when the person delivering the training looks lost on their feet and starts to spiral into a bit of a wreck where the audience is disengaged, and there’s no way back; not a pleasant thing to experience or witness.  Then it’s often the time for the excuses...

You’ll have likely heard some of the excuses from a trainer, things like, “Oh, they were tired”, “They were a tough audience”, “It was straight after lunch” or even worse, “They’ve done all this before, so it was just a recap”, and of course there are many, many more.  Just what or who are they excusing though?  Is it justification or excuse about the audience when this happens or actually, are they justifying themselves being poor trainers?  Of course, It’s the latter, and it’s convenient and easy to try and pin the blame on the audience. Everything that happens though is because of the trainer; a great example of cause and effect!  Now consider