What do you do when a person wants help on something you know they’ve been struggling with for years?
Imagine you have offered to coach someone you know well?
You want to help them, but the thing that they want help on is something you know they’ve struggled with for years.
How do you feel about being in the ‘hot’ seat to help them break free?
This is what coaches face every day!
Whether it’s a person you know well or not so well, as coaches, we end up coaching on topics that have been impossible for people to move forward on for a long time!
What can we do in this circumstance?
As coaches we are trained in a couple of areas that really help.
1. Self-Management and Coaching Mastery
Firstly, coaches are trained in what we call ‘self-management’. This skill allows us to take a very helpful step back and feel relief that it’s not our responsibility to ‘fix’ this person.
Self-management trains us to park all our ‘helpful’ suggestions and solutions. It trains us to trust the coaching process itself to take our coachee somewhere wonderful where they haven’t managed to get to before.
As coaches we are trained to be okay in the ‘not knowing’. This means we don’t know where the session will take us both.
Self-management is helpful, as it trains us to park all our pre-judgements, or our feelings of helplessness and doubt so that we can enthusiastically coach our person!
The coaching process empowers the person, it increases their awareness, it ignites their creativity, and it helps them explore ideas and realms outside the box they’ve been trapped in, in their thinking. The result is of course breakthrough. Masterful coaching achieves this.
As simple as this part of the process may sound it’s a lot harder than you may think. If you are a coach reading this, you’ll remember how much training and how much practice it took you to find self-management easy, and how much effort it took you to get to a level of coaching you would call masterful.
2. Beliefs and Attitudes
The second skill a good coach brings to this circumstance is their training to adopt and apply appropriate beliefs. Now this is like self-management but deeper. When we start students off on our Level 1 coach training certificate, we have a lesson on ‘coaching attitudes’. These are so important. Adopting these coaching attitudes shifts your beliefs about what is possible in a person and in each and every coaching session. When you believe wholeheartedly that breakthrough will happen, despite someone having been stuck for years, your belief in that breakthrough changes the coaching and enables it to happen.
A masterful coach has enough experience to have developed that belief and confidence, which is priceless!
3. ‘Flipping’ Tools
Thirdly, coaches bring tools which will ‘flip’ a coachee. Chances are you’re looking for a 180-degree change!
We have so many tools as part of the Co-Creative coaching model which bring about complete and radical shifts. For example, what we call the ‘ideal tool’ which we teach right at the beginning of the curriculum. This one helps people think beyond what they are stuck in and to create something wonderful which they really desire.
Coaching using the ideal tool, means you simply get your person to think beyond the problem to what the ideal outcome would be and what it would look like. This focuses the thinking on the solution rather than the problem.
Another tool we would use is our perspectives encounter coaching (this is a Level 4 technique). This tool is super creative. You take your coachee into their imagination to go to a range of different places. (Sometimes we may use up to 8 in one session!) We get them comfortable and connected to that place. Then we coach them from that perspective on the stuck area they want breakthrough on. It works amazingly as they think of so many things they haven’t done before. Their thinking is changed by the different perspectives. We are in a sense tricking the brain to think differently.
We have dozens of what I call ‘flipping tools’ which we train in from our program. As a coach you learn the art of carrying your toolkit into each coaching session and pulling out appropriate tools to help bring breakthrough, transformation and incredible progress.
The training equips you to feel empowered to be able to help and it gives you confidence that you can bring breakthrough where it’s never happened before!