Approach
A powerful, personalised way to build your leadership capability
What's my Coaching Approach?
All coaches have different approaches, use different frameworks, tools and techniques, and have a different personal flavour. What suits one person won’t necessarily suit someone else. The fit between you and me as your coach, and my coaching approach, is critical for your coaching comfort and success. So here’s a few features of my coaching approach…
1. My coaching approach is personalised, specific to you and your challenges
I work together with you to help you actualise goals that matter most to you. I help you uncover your fuller potential, achieve higher levels of self-awareness, become a better leader and tackle specific challenges you face in your existing or emerging role, culture and work context.
2. The focus of your coaching sessions is individually determined and controlled by you
Whether it’s personal mastery, mindfulness, leading with emotional intelligence, building better team cultures, or tackling your own….workplace improvement priorities – you choose what goals you want to work on and what your goals and directions should be.
3. I'm flexible about you changing your coaching course or direction too
I know things come up between coaching sessions that might change the tack you want to take with me or lead you to rethink your coaching goals or focus. Sometimes, too, as your thinking or insights deepen, new lines of self-inquiry emerge that may be more relevant to you.
4. I know how essential a comfortable, emotionally safe and non-judgemental coaching climate is
At work, you seldom get a safe environment to practise in. You’re under pressure ‘playing the game’ – there’s no time to reflect, it’s too risky to try out a new tool or approach and you may rarely get feedback about what you’re doing.
By creating a conversational climate of positive mutual regard, you can safely open up, say what you feel, speak your mind and feel free to explore yourself deeply, take risks and admit mistakes – without feeling blamed or judged. We also carefully protect the confidentiality of your sessions with us.
5. I take a beliefs-based approach – aligning beliefs and values to behaviour
Whether you choose to acknowledge or discuss them directly, beliefs and values are always with us. They’re embedded in our work culture, our teams and our actions. They’re often a crucial key to understand what’s happening at work with recurring problems, troublesome behaviour or continual conflict situations. I help you identify your key beliefs and values and explore how they impact on how you handle particular problems or situations.
6. I ‘optionalise’ with you – not suggest ‘right’ answers or approaches
We both know there’s never one right solution, one single person or causative factor behind any dilemma and that seeing how many things contribute beats blaming every time. I help you think systemically, test different propositions and scenarios, identify multiple options and choices, weigh up consequences and outcomes for yourself, and ask self-reflective questions that promote discovery of new possibilities and approaches as we delve deeper into issues.
7. I take an action learning, practice-orientated approach
The coaching cycle involves decide on what actions you can try out and then we reflect together on what you learned from that action. During each coaching session, we’ll discuss try-out actions to practice, tools you can use to master your specific challenges and also explore how to adapt what you learn to your every-day work situations, model new approaches and behaviours, and build on your unique experiences, skills, strengths and knowledge.
8. I coach cognitively and emotionally to cultivate critical reflection and inquiry skills
With cognitive coaching, you get in touch with your thinking – mental models and assumptions – reflect on the significant effect they have on you, and develop sound habits of questioning your own thinking – what I call inquiry.
I also ensure we explore the primal connection between thinking, feeling and action. This is the realm of emotional self-awareness – tuning in to my emotional patterns and the impact they have on other people and how I come across.
9. I’ll challenge you – respectfully - and give unconditionally constructive feedback
I assume you’re not doing coaching just to have your current thinking and behaviour patterns confirmed (though we’ll do a bit of that too!). Now and again I’ll challenge you to look at what you’re doing from some different angles, see yourself through some different lenses and try on some different mental models and emotional perspectives. I hope I do this respectfully and safely most of the time at least. And when I give feedback, I try to make it unconditionally constructive.
10. Self-coaching guides and tools to support you during coaching - and beyond.
Over the time we spend together, you’ll build up a customised self-coaching kit of tools – all laid out in a simple to follow, step-by-step format – suited to your particular context and challenges.
I see tools as absolutely essential to enable you to apply coaching outcomes, work with your teams and help you bridge the gap between idea and action. We also encourage you to work toward self-sufficiency by learning how to apply our simple to follow self-coaching model between sessions so you can sustain your effort after the coaching we do together concludes.
- We find out a little bit about each other. We discuss what my coaching approach is like, what your expectations and coaching focus might be, and the kind of help you want.
- I suppose we both get a chance to size each other up, decide whether we may be able to work together or not, and whether you want to give coaching with me a try.
- I always say go away and mull it over for a few days. After that, you let me know whether we connect well enough to continue on, or whether you want to explore other options.
- In this first session I want to get a better idea of the challenges you face in your workplace context and the kind of coaching work you may want to do.
- I’m interested in finding out about your story - what’s happening for you personally, as a leader, and how you relate to those in your team and others around you.
- From this session on, we’ll agree on a few self-coaching activities you can do between sessions – maybe a personal reflection exercise, a checklist to think about, a self-assessment survey or a coaching tool to practise.
- As you know, goals guide the actions you take and fuel your commitment to improve. They need to be relevant to your workrole – you need to own them and they need to relate to challenges that matter.
- Goals may change as you find out more about yourself, reflect more on situations, rethink your approach or want to stretch yourself more.
- We might repeat this cycle a couple of times during the coaching process as new issues or challenges emerge or we dig deeper into what’s going on.
- Sometimes you’ll modify your goals. but largely our sessions will review your progress and obstacles and issues that arise along the way – including your own patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.
- As we continue to work together, you’ll build up a useful bank of tips, tools, models, frameworks and action ideas derived from some of our numerous self-coaching guide-books.
- At its core, coaching is not about knowing or deciding. It’s about changing by doing things.
- Many of us never move from deciding to doing. Deciding means nothing if we don’t have a habit of taking action.
- It’s this that brings about the practice improvements or service innovations you’re trying to achieve.
- My underlying coaching aim and value is to help you achieve self-empowerment, self-determination and self-sufficiency. You settle into sound habits of self-inquiry and reflection that increase your capacity to change by yourself.
- Our coaching relationship may become more informal, less regular and more directed by you than me, as you take on more responsibility for carrying on your own self-coaching work. At this stage, we may both agree to also decide to exit or pause the relationship.
What will our First Meeting be like?
As stimulating as it can be, I know that some can also feel apprehensive meeting with their potential coach for the first time, We don’t know what to expect and that goes for both of us! Perhaps you’ll also be wondering: “What will my coach want to know?” and “How can I prepare myself for this meeting?”
Explained in the first stage of coaching above, our initial session is to get to know each other and discuss your overall goals and what you expect to get out of a coaching relationship with me. So all you really have to bring is a willingness to tell me a bit about yourself!
- Your work background - major workroles, significant incidents, experiences or challenges you have, or are, facing
- What brought you to coaching and what expectations you have for it
- What you broadly want to focus on and what you want from coaching
- What coaching arrangements might best suit you (face-to-face, on-line or phone sessions, or a combination of both)
- How many sessions we might have, how long they might be and how often we might meet
Of course it’s up to you how you answer these and how much you’re prepared to share…
Coaching Questions
What do I need to do to make this work?
Coaching’s not a quick-fix. It’s taken years to learn some of the habits that may trouble you – which you certainly won’t unlearn in a few weeks. So what about your role or contribution? What will coaching call on you to do for yourself?
Coaching takes perseverance and commitment to the process, willingness to critically self-reflect and of course behavioural practice along with the discipline to do it and keep it up. The biggest barrier to getting the results you want from coaching is YOU. But we bet you already knew that.
If you pursue a coaching path, you’ll be challenged by the changes you see you may have to make – and perhaps even more so, by your natural resistance to them. Some things that get in the way of seeing ourselves more clearly – as we really come across to others – include:
Here’s some of the coaching commitments we’d ask you to consider...
Personal growth and change is neither easy nor quick. It takes time and practice – it’s not an event, it’s a process!
Coaching Commitments
I imagine you probably have a pretty good idea of what kind of coaching help you need already – though maybe you haven’t exactly sat down and translated it into specific goals and actions yet.
Part of what coaches do is help people get in touch with their best selves – talents, dreams, life directions and sources of inspiration. As I often say, coaches also help people reveal themselves to themselves – reach new understandings about what motivates or drives us and what makes us tick emotionally.
Here are some challenges I’ve helped people work on over the years…
Coaching Challenges
Common Coaching Topics
Coaching can address so many different things, and the coaching topics and areas we cover are really up to you to self-direct.
I usually find leaders want to address one or a combination of these kinds of areas…
My approach to coaching leaders taps into a deep-seated need we all share, to challenge ourselves, achieve things that matter to us, and leave a leadership legacy we can be proud of.
More than ever before, staff are demanding challenge, latitude and self-direction. They want to be engaged, facilitated and coached, not coerced, directed and told what to do. They want you to help them unleash their creativity and talent.
As a leader, you need to know how to…
- Infuse enthusiasm
- Mobilise change energy
- Inspire commitment to shared vision
- Have constructive conversations
- Be a culture-creator and team-builder
- Be a change-manager
- Be a meaning maker
- Be a Mentor, coach and facilitator
Whether you’re new, aspiring, or a leader who’s been around and wants to lift your game, I operate with the conviction that leaders need practical, relevant tools and guiding ideas you can readily apply to lead with authenticity, emotional balance, mindfulness, foresight and wisdom.
My approach revolves around a dynamic model of 10 critical roles all leaders need to play against which you can stocktake your approach using our Leadership Roles and Challenges Survey.
Some areas leaders often ask me for coaching help with include:
The realm of Personal Mastery revolves around the idea that leadership starts with you – no matter what your leadership level, roles or goals, the critical factor to begin with is inside each of us.
Personal Mastery is the ability to tune into our deeper selves, our visions and aspirations, and be more aware of the impact our patterns of thinking, acting, behaving and responding have on what happens around us and the results we get.
In coaching leaders for Personal Mastery, we’ll cover areas like:
Casual, crucial or contentious, the calibre of the conversations you have count in terms of your relationships, your culture, team cohesion, high performance and ultimately your effectiveness as a leader.
I offer conversational coaching for individuals, leaders, executives and teams in areas such as:
Conversations are a telling indicator of workplace culture and crucial for the effective functioning of any team. Through conversations, leaders connect, inspire, influence, energise, make decisions, problem-solve and move people to action. Conversational coaching centres around 7 essential principles for more constructive conversation-making (see link below to expand on what these are) It equips you with easy-to-learn tools to tone-up your conversational leadership and boost your ability to conduct more penetrating, powerful and connective conversations.
Difficult discussions cause so much conflict and stress in workplaces. Poorly handled, they detract from performance, erode work relationships, misunderstandings multiply, trust deteriorates, productivity plummets and teams turn toxic.
Difficult discussions coaching provides robust, easy-to-use tools to navigate your way through troublesome topics more confidently, practising a methodical, step-by-step approach to resolving differences that converts destructive confrontation into constructive conversation.
Tackling poor performance is one of the most commonly avoided and widely feared species of difficult discussion. Coaching to improve your ability to have mor positive performance conversations – whether it’s with diligent or difficult performers – works on a simple principle: focus on future positive performances you want rather than past negatives.
I’ll take you on a step-by-step tour of carefully-crafted footings, frameworks and formulas to deal with difficult performers more comfortably and make tough performance talks a little bit easier.
Difficult discussions coaching provides robust, easy-to-use tools to navigate your way through troublesome topics more confidently, practising a methodical, step-by-step approach to resolving differences that converts destructive confrontation into constructive conversation.
Whether it’s shyness self-doubt or sheer panic, speaking-up can be a pretty anxiety-provoking proposition for a lot of us. Whatever your job-level, Building Conversational Confidence shows you ways to combat anxiety, engage positively in meetings, speak with more confidence and say what you have to say in ways that will be heard.
Coaching to build your conversational confidence can benefit anyone, regardless of position or level, who wants tools to help them overcome conversational hold-backs & confidence-drainers and speak-up with a bit more self-assurance.
There’s so many ways we use conversations but a prime way is to persuade and influence – to talk others round to our way of thinking or at least, get them to understand and consider our point of view too. Coaching to be more influential and conversationally persuasive is about saying what you have to say in ways that will make it more likely you will be heard – to have our say, and have our views, positions, feelings and assumptions listened-to, acknowledged and understood..
Coaching in this conversational arena with me involves using positive strategies for more persuasive and balanced conversations, advocating respectfully and robustly for a particular point of view, putting your position clearly but also encouraging others to as well and being able to respectfully disagree or put an alternative point of view
Emotions are at the bottom of top performance whether it’s building great teams, cultivating culture, being a more mindful, connective and compassionate leader, or boosting morale and performance.
Emotional Intelligence is the background to everything else leaders do. It:
The good news is that EI and Mindfulness skills can be learned. We’ve specialised in designing and delivering practical, applications-based EI programs for executives, leaders, staff, teachers and teams since 2005.
We offer both learning programs and coaching in a variety of EI streams including:
Leading with EI is about realising that for people to put in a superior performance, you have to connect with feelings first. What sets successful leaders apart is their level of Emotional Intelligence – their ability to use emotions positively, deal with disruptive ones, emotionally self-manage and tune into the impact their patterns of feelings and behaviour have on people around them and the results they get.
This coaching stream centres on 7 Practices of EI Leaders. You start by assessing your current level of EI in using our EI Leader Inventory based on these practices that helps you identify potential EI goals to work on. Then we focus on selected EI leader tools you can apply to energise your leadership, create more connective cultures and bring out the best in yourself and others.
Personally, mindfulness matters to me because we all struggle in one way or another with the attraction of distraction and an emotional tumble-dryer of thoughts, emotions and reactive postures…
A major mission of leaders is to help their people focus so they can apply themselves to produce good results, relatively free of stress, distraction or upset. But before leaders can do this, they first need to set aside their own distractions and focus their own attention.
In this coaching stream I look at mindfulness from a practical leadership perspective and what you can do integrate more of it into your everyday leader activities. I’ll work with you on 5 Mental Markers of Mindfulness (see link in attachment below) and simple brain-training tools to lift your level of clarity, focus, presence and attention.
Helping you work through a specific change management challenge or initiative in your team or organisation
To better engage with a critical strategic, leadership issue or management concern that keeps coming up for you.
Aimed at specific performance difficulties behavioural patterns or other things you single out that are just not happening well for you at work
Equipping you with specific leadership or communication capabilities and tools to enhance role performance, meet new challenges or beat old ones that keep coming up
My approach to coaching leaders taps into a deep-seated need we all share, to challenge ourselves, achieve things that matter to us, and leave a leadership legacy we can be proud of.
More than ever before, staff are demanding challenge, latitude and self-direction. They want to be engaged, facilitated and coached, not coerced, directed and told what to do. They want you to help them unleash their creativity and talent.
As a leader, you need to know how to…
- Infuse enthusiasm
- Mobilise change energy
- Inspire commitment to shared vision
- Have constructive conversations
- Be a culture-creator and team-builder
- Be a change-manager
- Be a meaning maker
- Be a Mentor, coach and facilitator
Whether you’re new, aspiring, or a leader who’s been around and wants to lift your game, I operate with the conviction that leaders need practical, relevant tools and guiding ideas you can readily apply to lead with authenticity, emotional balance, mindfulness, foresight and wisdom.
My approach revolves around a dynamic model of 10 critical roles all leaders need to play against which you can stocktake your approach using our Leadership Roles and Challenges Survey.
Some areas leaders often ask me for coaching help with include:
The realm of Personal Mastery revolves around the idea that leadership starts with you – no matter what your leadership level, roles or goals, the critical factor to begin with is inside each of us.
Personal Mastery is the ability to tune into our deeper selves, our visions and aspirations, and be more aware of the impact our patterns of thinking, acting, behaving and responding have on what happens around us and the results we get.
In coaching leaders for Personal Mastery, we’ll cover areas like:
Casual, crucial or contentious, the calibre of the conversations you have count in terms of your relationships, your culture, team cohesion, high performance and ultimately your effectiveness as a leader.
I offer conversational coaching for individuals, leaders, executives and teams in areas such as:
Conversations are a telling indicator of workplace culture and crucial for the effective functioning of any team. Through conversations, leaders connect, inspire, influence, energise, make decisions, problem-solve and move people to action. Conversational coaching centres around 7 essential principles for more constructive conversation-making (see link below to expand on what these are) It equips you with easy-to-learn tools to tone-up your conversational leadership and boost your ability to conduct more penetrating, powerful and connective conversations.
Difficult discussions cause so much conflict and stress in workplaces. Poorly handled, they detract from performance, erode work relationships, misunderstandings multiply, trust deteriorates, productivity plummets and teams turn toxic.
Difficult discussions coaching provides robust, easy-to-use tools to navigate your way through troublesome topics more confidently, practising a methodical, step-by-step approach to resolving differences that converts destructive confrontation into constructive conversation.
Tackling poor performance is one of the most commonly avoided and widely feared species of difficult discussion. Coaching to improve your ability to have mor positive performance conversations – whether it’s with diligent or difficult performers – works on a simple principle: focus on future positive performances you want rather than past negatives.
I’ll take you on a step-by-step tour of carefully-crafted footings, frameworks and formulas to deal with difficult performers more comfortably and make tough performance talks a little bit easier.
Difficult discussions coaching provides robust, easy-to-use tools to navigate your way through troublesome topics more confidently, practising a methodical, step-by-step approach to resolving differences that converts destructive confrontation into constructive conversation.
Whether it’s shyness self-doubt or sheer panic, speaking-up can be a pretty anxiety-provoking proposition for a lot of us. Whatever your job-level, Building Conversational Confidence shows you ways to combat anxiety, engage positively in meetings, speak with more confidence and say what you have to say in ways that will be heard.
Coaching to build your conversational confidence can benefit anyone, regardless of position or level, who wants tools to help them overcome conversational hold-backs & confidence-drainers and speak-up with a bit more self-assurance.
There’s so many ways we use conversations but a prime way is to persuade and influence – to talk others round to our way of thinking or at least, get them to understand and consider our point of view too. Coaching to be more influential and conversationally persuasive is about saying what you have to say in ways that will make it more likely you will be heard – to have our say, and have our views, positions, feelings and assumptions listened-to, acknowledged and understood..
Coaching in this conversational arena with me involves using positive strategies for more persuasive and balanced conversations, advocating respectfully and robustly for a particular point of view, putting your position clearly but also encouraging others to as well and being able to respectfully disagree or put an alternative point of view
Emotions are at the bottom of top performance whether it’s building great teams, cultivating culture, being a more mindful, connective and compassionate leader, or boosting morale and performance.
Emotional Intelligence is the background to everything else leaders do. It:
The good news is that EI and Mindfulness skills can be learned. We’ve specialised in designing and delivering practical, applications-based EI programs for executives, leaders, staff, teachers and teams since 2005.
We offer both learning programs and coaching in a variety of EI streams including:
Leading with EI is about realising that for people to put in a superior performance, you have to connect with feelings first. What sets successful leaders apart is their level of Emotional Intelligence – their ability to use emotions positively, deal with disruptive ones, emotionally self-manage and tune into the impact their patterns of feelings and behaviour have on people around them and the results they get.
This coaching stream centres on 7 Practices of EI Leaders. You start by assessing your current level of EI in using our EI Leader Inventory based on these practices that helps you identify potential EI goals to work on. Then we focus on selected EI leader tools you can apply to energise your leadership, create more connective cultures and bring out the best in yourself and others.
Personally, mindfulness matters to me because we all struggle in one way or another with the attraction of distraction and an emotional tumble-dryer of thoughts, emotions and reactive postures…
A major mission of leaders is to help their people focus so they can apply themselves to produce good results, relatively free of stress, distraction or upset. But before leaders can do this, they first need to set aside their own distractions and focus their own attention.
In this coaching stream I look at mindfulness from a practical leadership perspective and what you can do integrate more of it into your everyday leader activities. I’ll work with you on 5 Mental Markers of Mindfulness (see link in attachment below) and simple brain-training tools to lift your level of clarity, focus, presence and attention.
Helping you work through a specific change management challenge or initiative in your team or organisation
To better engage with a critical strategic, leadership issue or management concern that keeps coming up for you.
Aimed at specific performance difficulties behavioural patterns or other things you single out that are just not happening well for you at work
Equipping you with specific leadership or communication capabilities and tools to enhance role performance, meet new challenges or beat old ones that keep coming up
Do you want to become a better leader?
Something here about booking in coaching with us or getting in contact
Coaching Prospectus
For you to read offline… designed to give you some background on what leadership coaching is about with some ideas and question prompts to help you reflect on what you might be wanting to achieve, your reasons for doing coaching, what it requires from you, and some benefits you and/or your organisation might expect to see…
Preferred Learning Consultant and Leadership Coach
