UK Coaching Partnership Blog

Why Coaches Need Supervision

Neil Williams is a mentor and coach – you can find him at (www.nvwsolutions.co.uk ) and he has kindly written this article on Why Coaches also need Supervision for this blog. 

“It was back in 1997 when I became aware of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) which helped me plan my own life/work balance better and this led me to complete a masters in NLP in 2004 and then carried on into coaching and supervision”.

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Why Supervision?

Don’t think that once you start coaching your own learning never ceases - you always want to be improving your own coaching skills in order to do a better job for your client and/or coachee.

According to the UK Coaching Roundtable “Supervision needs to be consistent with the coaching philosophy of positive support and adding value to its clients – both coaches and indirectly coachees: this is about professional development, not rules based enforcement – as it is all about enhancing all that is good about the service and diminishing all that is poor”

What it is not is “looking over a coach’s shoulder to pick faults”

One way of identifying what supervision provides is to think of it as a process of Reflection, Insight and Support.   Supervision enhances ‘seeing’, the seeing into one’s practice, the illumination of subtle processes in coaching conversations and of blind spots in oneself and in one’s thinking.   Supervision is something that I, the coach, take away with me – an enhanced view, a super-vision of my practice. 

Reflection and Insight also point to the level of learning which emerges as a result of sustained, supervisory focus on a piece of coaching. Insight is often collaboratively unearthed and enables coaches to think about their own work.  Insight may also be in the form of information or teaching on a relevant coaching theme. 

Support can be undervalued. Coaches in supervision often refer to the relief of having time and space to think about particular aspects of their work and, especially, to think/reflect with a trusted colleague who will microscopically explore their practice with them and contribute to their understanding. This support enables the coach to contain and resolve some of the more challenging parts of their work

The greatest impact for me after my supervision training was on myself and my own coaching where I found I was questioning and reflecting on issues some days later. This reinforces my belief that each coach should have their own supervisor.

Weekend Two coming up!

Weekend Two of the Life Coaching Course is now upon us.  I am looking forward to it very much following on from my dipping of my toe into the coaching  water, albeit as an observer, last month.  You will already have read the post from David Evans on how he found that first weekend and here is another viewpoint from student Judy Hoskins:

"Alarming, Brilliant, Coachee, Demanding, Elucidating, Frightening, Group, Hopeless, Intriguing, Job, Knowledge, Leading, Mindful, Nurturing, Organising, Paraphrasing, Questions, Reflection, Surprises, Therapy, Understanding, Voice, What, X-factor, Yes, Zeal.

So, for me, there was all of the above plus rewarding, exhausting, enjoyable, friendly, daunting.  My greatest pleasure came from interacting with the group - everyone different but all of us gelling.  My greatest fear is that my first few coachees will render me speechless and I will sit there opening and closing my mouth like a goldfish.  My greatest surprise is that what I do as a LL Counsellor is much more about coaching than counselling per se. 

 

So what is it that's so weird?  Since doing that first weekend, I have found myself getting things done in a way which has been previously rather alien to me.  Not only is this happening to me, but also to people around me.  Things put off for months (years?) have suddenly been undertaken and achieved.  Preparations are being made in advance rather than left to the last minute.

A Coach friend who has put off doing anything about her business for months has suddenly gone into overdrive and got herself busy.  Another friend has finally laid her problems with her daughter to rest by refusing to get involved in her 'games'.  Am I taking credit for all of this?  No, not really, I am simply delighted to find myself and my loved ones strangely and newly empowered to get things done and make life better.  Perhaps it was something in the Harwich air that somehow wafted back to Leigh with me.  I don't know, but I do like it.

I am really looking forward to the coming weekend and meeting everyone again and getting my coaching top-up".

May I add my own comment here?  I had something unexpected to deal with a couple of weeks ago that normally would have thrown me into a panic, but I sat down, had a think and remembered what I had heard from Lynette and Meg and just putting into place and practising what they had discussed, enabled me to come up with a plan that helped put my mind at ease.

Now, if that can happen after just one weekend, just imagine what you can do when you have finished the entire course.....

Guest post by Shona Partridge

Think like a Business Owner

www.womenmeanbusiness.co.uk

 

The single biggest shift I had to make in order to be successful was to start thinking like a business owner, instead of just thinking like a coach. It’s fantastic when you complete your coach training and celebrate your achievements, but now the real work begins.

How are you going to get your first clients?

Coaching is no different to any other business – in order to get clients you need to market your business.   The sooner you can make the mindset shift to “business owner,” the easier it will be to get your first clients. Every coach is advised to go out and offer free trial sessions in order to get clients and I did that too in the beginning. The drawback is that lots of people will take up your offer because they are curious about coaching, not because they are serious about hiring a coach. This method is not likely to give you a high conversion to client rate and every other coach out there will be doing the same thing.  Of course it’s a great way to gain practice and confidence in your coaching abilities, but there comes a point when you will need to start charging for your services.  

Advertising generally doesn’t work very well to get coaching clients either. The good news is that most of the best ways to market your coaching business are no cost or low cost. I’ll share some of these in up-coming blog posts.  

So what does thinking like a business owner mean to you? And what methods are you going to use to get these first few paying clients? Don’t be put off by the fact that you may need to spend a lot of time marketing your business, especially in the early days. Once you figure out how it works, marketing can be fun. I still find it really enjoyable even after more than seven years in business!  

So I’ll leave you with this thought for today. Try writing several different endings for this sentence:  

“As a serious business owner I am willing to market my coaching business by ..........................................................”

The First Weekend - Life Coaching Course

David is a trainer and coach having worked in such diverse fields as medical sales, the banking and legal sectors. He has managed teams and has 15 years experience of training all levels of staff up to and including senior executive level and specialises in: sales, negotiation, influencing and persuasion, chairing and facilitating meetings, effective communication and building and maintaining relationships. He has a particular interest in helping individuals to develop themselves, achieve their goals as well as developing team-work and business strategy.

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Wow! What a weekend this has been. It was pretty intense with lots of information to take in, new ideas to assimilate and new people to meet. I'm already a professional trainer and have used coaching methods as a manager so some of the principles and ideas I was already familiar with. That said, the emphasis on, say, Open questioning techniques was very different when coaching to sales for example. There you are often leading someone to a conclusion you already have in mind. In coaching it seems that's entirely wrong. The coachee leads the session and one of the things that came out over the weekend is that the coaches idea of a good result is not the same as the coachees. That is going to be interesting to explore in future weekends.

So, a couple of days later and with sleep patterns generally restored (it's amazing how many ideas race through your mind at 3am in a hotel bedroom!)I've managed to take some of the lessons I learned over the weekend and apply them. I had a meeting today with some people I will be training in sales techniques and questioning skills and subconsciously found myself using the coaching methods to help them through a particular point. I even came away at the end with a new idea that hadn't occurred to me before the meeting that probably would not have been explored without the experiences of weekend.

So the upshot is: this stuff really works! Already! I learned a lot of great ideas, but I also am learning about myself. Lynette and Meg are both excellent mentors and coaches and it's going to be great fun learning from them and using their knowledge and support to build a whole new exciting career.

 If you are reading this and wondering Is it  for me? Well, put it this way.. When did you last really get enthused about something? When did you last just know that this is what you really, truly want to do for the rest of your days?

I can't wait to get started..

The Tao of Coaching, Meg Reid reports

The Tao of Coaching- Max Landsberg.  This book lets you find out about coaching in the workplace in a really engaging way because it’s written as a story rather than in a text book format. The central character Alex is a manager who wants to develop coaching skills to use at work.

The story covers key points such as structuring a coaching session using the TGROW model; increasing motivation in the work force; getting over an employees’ reluctance to be coached; the benefits of asking rather than telling and how to give positive feedback.

Landsberg includes some appendices giving information on good coaching questions, a coach self assessment and some exercises to use with teams.

The issues Alex faces and the mistakes he makes will be familiar to many of us making this book an easy and helpful read.  Click here to go through to Amazon

New Girl on the Coach

Hi - my name is Elaine and I have recently climbed on board in order to help Lynette and Meg with all the administration and paperwork necessary to run the UK Coaching Partnership and, as I am a full paid up member  of the Get a Grip Brigade, bossy to boot and know full well I would make a very poor life coach, they very kindly suggested that I come along as an observer on one of their courses in Harwich.  I have received coaching in the past and have also read a bit about it, but my knowledge is limited so to say I found the weekend an eye opener is putting it mildly.   Within ten minutes of the course starting and seeing the topics to be covered and the skills to be acquired, including Listening, Clarifying, Establishing Rapport and many more,  I realised this was serious stuff and started to wonder how on earth these hard working students around me were going to assimilate all this information.  By lunchtime I was very glad that I was just an observer......

When I told my friends and family that I would be working with the UK Coaching Partnership I received the usual quizzical looks and ‘What on earth is a Life Coach?’ and I tried to explain it in my own feeble way.   If you have an illness you go to the doctor, if you break a leg you get it put into plaster, if you have a problem you can’t solve then you need help and, depending on your type of problem, you go to a Life Coach. ‘What’s wrong with chatting to friend?’  Nothing of course, but their advice is going to be biased. Ask a second friend and they will tell you something totally different.  The giveaway word here is ‘tell’. If there is one thing that is going to be burned in my memory after this weekend it is that one – Life Coaches never ever tell their clients what to do. 

The role of the coach is to enable their client to work out a solution for themselves.  It works.  I can vouch for this as I volunteered as a guinea pig for an earlier course so that one of the students could practice her newly acquired coaching skills on a real live person.  At the time I was gearing up for my daughter’s wedding and had worries regarding my ex-husband and his family, none of whom I had seen or spoken to for ten years.  During the course of the coaching session I gradually found solutions and answers to my problem – and they all came from me with the coach enabling me to work my way towards them.  I discarded those I felt I could not use, but homed in on one that was workable and would help me get through the day.  Blindingly obvious solution as well, but I could not see it for myself.

I am very happy to be working with Lynette and Meg and am full of admiration for the quality and depth of the course – I have a few more weekends to go and am going to come along to all of them.  I may not be qualifying, but just sitting listening and observing, I am learning a huge amount.

Oh and the wedding day?  Went off perfectly, I was confident enough to speak to my ex, years of bitterness vanished in a short conversation and it was a simply wonderfully happy occasion.

If you had a choice...

Click here to read about one of the BEST questions a coach can ask!

Their first weekend complete!

Wow, what an excellent first weekend on our eighth Life Coaching Diploma course.  Click here to read how it went.

Best decision I ever made?

 

Hi. I’m Shona Partridge of Women Mean Business and I originally trained as a coach back in 2002, setting up my own business later the same year. I’ve never regretted taking the plunge into self employment and I thought it would be useful to share aspects of my journey with you in some blog posts.

There’s a ton of advice I could give you – a lot of it I learned the hard way! I made some expensive mistakes in the early days but I learned from them and moved forward. These blog posts are my personal views and my personal journey. I’ll share what’s worked for me, but if something I say doesn’t resonate – feel free to let it go. By all means comment on the posts – I don’t mind people challenging my views! Agreeing is nice too!

In the beginning, the most important thing (besides being really committed to your training of course) is to get lots of coaching practice. Developing that coaching muscle is so important. You’ll develop your own style as you get more experience, but in the beginning it’s good to follow a framework of sorts. It means you always have somewhere to go in the coaching sessions. With practice, it gets to be like driving. You’ll flow through the session naturally and easily without having to consciously think of the mechanics of what you’re doing.

You’re going to love this profession. Even after 7 years I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing! Re-training as a coach is the best career decision I’ve ever made. Look out for more posts from me about coaching life and business.

 

It's that time again!

We can't believe it's that time again!  It's time to start our next Life Coaching Diploma course, it actually starts on Saturday 10th October, it's the 8th one we've run and we're just buzzing with excitement!

We choose out student coaches very carefully, and we're very proud of this autumns intake.  Firstly, we never take on more than a handful of students as we believe in giving them our undivided attention and secondly, we like the group to gel as one.  At 9am on Saturday 10th, they'll all meet each other for the first time but you can guarantee by 5pm on Sunday 11th, they'll be swapping phone numbers, laughing with each other as they leave and planning what their next coaching read will be.

By Christmas they'll be well on their way to understanding exactly what it takes to be a coach and getting their heads around how to do it properly and by February, they'll be absolutely prepared to take their first exam.  It's usually a couple of months after that that they qualify having handed in all their written work, then who know's what they'll be doing. 

Previous students are now experienced coaches with great businesses, some are coaching in the workplace, others are writing books and appearing on radio and television, others are serial coaching bloggers building up a reputation that way.

Either way, whatever they do, it still means that we can sit back and admire their achievements.  You'll just have to trust us...this is a cool job!

Lynette & Meg, UK Coaching Partnership