What is my coaching model?

So what is this coaching business all about?  What is your coaching model?  This is the question to be answered in a contracting session with a coach.  “What is your coaching model?”

In the rush for recipes and quick fixes, I found the book “Coaching – evoking excellence in others” refreshingly intense and hard to digest.  Which I think is an appropriate oxymoron.  I grappled with the writing for a long time to grasp and integrate his thinking into my coaching model.  At the start of the book, author James Flaherty explains the challenge of writing a book about coaching and how he set out:

• To say something distinct enough to foster change and yet familiar enough to be understood.
• To deal with linear concepts in conversation that can only be incorporated holistically or systemically.
• To present material to evoke a paradigm shift in a way efficient (cogent) enough to maintain interest.

As he points out, these are the challenges we face at the start of a coaching relationship.  The role of the coach is to hold the conversation at a level where clarity on the current situation surfaces, and people are freed to take action.  But clarity may bring the obstacles and constraints into focus so he asks the reader to continuously ask themselves this question:

“What way of seeing this topic am I attached to or defending?” and “what would happen if I saw this a new way?”.

Well, I like that and I have based my coaching model on his book.

He points to three products of coaching which I have adopted as the desired outputs in my coaching model:

1. Long-term excellent performance – against agreed, objective standards.
2. The capacity for self learning and self correction.
3. A practice for self-improvement through observation and practice.

Great outcomes, I am sure you will agree.  But the big question is “how do you achieve them?”

JF pours contempt on the behaviourism (which he calls “amoeba theory” – you poke it or give it sugar to get it to move) as a viable management theory.  He points out that people are more complex than amoebas.  He draws from phenomenology in which someone’s actions correspond with their perceptions and interpretations of situations.  The task of the coach, then, is to get alongside a client, to understand their structure of interpretation and to offer, through the medium of language, a description of the structure of interpretation as well as language for a fresh perception that allows for action towards the outcome desired by the client.   This language, he urges, should be backed up with practices to make the language a permanent part of the clients’ structure of interpretation.

I have shown this process in the following set of slides to describe my coaching model:

But we need to take into account how we filter everything we see through our beliefs (we see what we believe):

And these perceptions lead to a certain way of being in the world – which I illustrate in this way:

So the role of the coach is hold a conversation with the client, understanding and surfacing the way the client sees the world and suggesting alternative perspectives:

And as part of the conversation the coach suggests practices for the client to entrench new ways of seeing leading to more effective ways of being:

Language and metaphor is a core part of the coaching conversation.

A while ago in a coaching conversation with a client she spent each session talking about her vindictive manager and how snared she was in a role she hated because of her family commitments.  The following metaphor, a painting by Frank Frazetta, came to mind which I shared with her (in words):

And together we crafted a different metaphor more in this vein:

Then together we agreed some practices she could adopt to test out the approach.  Since then I have found the best coaching experiences happen when I fall in step with my clients, stopping now and then to challenge their ideas.

I combine this approach with Solutions Focused Coaching.

In the next posting I would like to offer some principles to govern coaching, also from JF.