Over the last two days, I have learned new perspectives of the terminologies and approaches about the training, consulting, mentoring, advising, feedback, and coaching. From now on, I shall only stop duplicating my approaches as I used to earlier. I shall only coach wherever there is a need for it. Also, I shall apply coaching with a new approach, i.e., to partner with the client in their critical situation.
A major difference that I clarified in this session is that coaching is for the future. In contrast, for any current/past situation, it requires either feedback or corrective action. Also, coaching is only when an individual understands that s/he has some troubling situation that needs some corrective action so that his future turns out to be even better.
The coaching process is now clear to me. I understand that coaching is only to be applied while any individual is in a troubled state due to any situation. As a coach, I shall try to discover if what the client is telling is the actual thing to address, or there is any other thing too that is not being shared. For this, I need to be more in listening mode and try to link what is being said with the client’s situation. The power of asking powerful questions has now been evidently clear to me. I need to polish this skill and practice more to try to get my clients deeper to the root cause of their troubled states, rather than addressing the surface level stuff only.
Furthermore, the coaching process gave me another insight. I shall start off with making a comprehensive agreement that shall have key clauses from ethics, confidentiality, data storage, and necessary disclaimers. Both the client and I understand what we are opting to. Next, the planning phase is where I shall invest a while in understanding their purpose, if I find some ambiguity, I shall partner with them to find another purpose. This is the stage I shall try building a rapport with them. Now I understand that this is the stage where I need to listen more and allow that necessary trust to build on, and I shall speak only to understand the client better instead of being judgmental about them.
Another new thing for me in this session was a coaching model. This really had a great impact on me to better understand myself and how I can now implement this in my workplace. I shall introduce this coaching model to my organization initially to the leadership team and then to the organization’s rest. Now I also understood why when we try practicing a known deficiency, we struggle to perfect it in the first go, and if we fail to improve that, we tend to think that we are not capable of doing it. Hence, the third stage is critical as if we dedicate some more practice to it, then we can achieve mastery level, and hence that can become second nature to us. Hence the reason I shall practice more than before to gain a new skill myself and suggest the same to my fellow colleagues and clients as well.
Next comes the learning of the coaching competencies. I would invest more time and resources in learning these competencies in some more depth as well. I will utilize all mediums, i.e., reading books, articles, youtube, etc., so that I develop an understanding of them in detail before actually having the client coaching sessions. With more learnings of them, I shall be able to reflect upon my sessions that I conduct.
Going forwards, I shall schedule my coming 6 months to stay committed to my mission of practicing and then reflecting and stressing the areas where I need improvement and betterment. I shall also enrich myself with reading ways to polish my competencies in coaching and crucial conversations. I shall keep myself open to improvement and self-development so that I sharpen my coaching skills. I shall also approach colleagues from the cohort to learn from their experiences that shall make me work in the right direction.
