That was 2009

Coaching generally looks forwards to the future. However, sometimes it's useful to have a review - it strikes me that the end of the year is as good a time as any and from the number of TV programmes reviewing the year and the decade it would seem that I'm not alone.

This can be as big and fancy as you like, but I suggest you ask yourself a couple of questions, at least. Thinking back to this time last year:

1. What's better? These are your successes and it's important to acknowledge them as such to yourself. Have a little celebrate if you like - or a big one, up to you.
2. Is anything not working for you, and was this the same last year? If so, consider what you can do to ditch it, you don't want it coming up again this time next year. Can you just ditch it, or do you need to find a work around? As it's been twelve months now - at least - it would seem that you need to do something differently.

Share your thoughts here if you like. I'll be back in the coming days looking forwards again, until then, wishing you all a very happy new year.

Coaching can save the world!

Of course it can’t. Not by itself at any rate.

Even people like me – and there are others out there – who wax lyrical about what can be achieved by working with a really good coach don’t believe that coaching is the answer for all of the people all of the time. It’s often difficult to answer the question, ‘What is coaching good for?’. There’s not a definitive list of what coaching will do. Attempting to describe it tends to fall into consultant-speak or fluffiness.

I think that because it’s tricky to define what coaching will do, the tendency is to say that it’s for anything and everything, and it can be. That depends on the people, situation and intent. One of the strengths of coaching is that it’s not a tangible thing, or a bespoke tool. It’s the fluidity of coaching in which lies its strengths, the ability to ‘follow the interest’ as Myles Downey terms it.

For this reason, coaching can be used in many arenas – life, work and sport. Whenever I tell someone that I’m a coach, they’ll ask me in which sport – I also sometimes get some quizzical looks while they wait for me to tell them about buses and saying that I’m an executive coach just makes things worse, buses with curtains. People tend to think sport, because that’s where coaching’s most established. It’s still a fairly new intervention in this country – less than twenty years old. Does that make us coaches and coached pioneers? We’ll see.

So, it can be used in any arena, but I would argue not for every person or situation and of these, it’s probably the person one that’s the most interesting – but then of course, I would say that, I’m a coach…

Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow say the coach should ask themselves if they have a client for change? That means, is the person who’s to be coached up for it? If they’re not, forget about it – Ian Lawson says, ’Don’t try to teach a pig to sing, the results won’t be very good and you’ll annoy the pig.’, and that holds true in this situation.

How do you know if you have – or are – a client for change:
· Ask.
· Is this something – the coaching and the goal – that the person being coached wants for him/herself?
· Do they have a clear intention of what they want to happen as a result of the coaching? Note, this isn’t the same as having a clear vision of what they want, often a desire for clarity is what brings people to a coach in the first place.
· Are they willing to choose actions for themselves in the coaching session and then take those actions?

So, coaching might not save the world, but one more person – two if you count the coach – will be nearer to feeling that it’s possible – in their world at least.