Mapping Motivation for Coaching

James Sale, Bevis Moynan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351257107
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business General

Mapping Motivation for Coaching, co-written with Bevis Moynan, is the first of a series of six books that are all linked to the author's Motivational Map toolkit. Each book builds on a different aspect of personal, team, and organisational development. This book is a practical guide to understanding how personal and career development is underpinned by motivation, and how coaching and mapping are perfectly complementary activities. More specifically, it shows how using Motivational Maps within an accepted coaching framework can not only accelerate the process in order to achieve results for the client more quickly, but also go deeper, both in mutual understanding and also the possibility of facilitating a successful outcome; for the client not only needs to understand their issue more effectively through the coaching process, but also needs to be motivated to want to take significant action to deal with it.

Understanding, then, is one thing, but having the energy for follow-through is another, and it is precisely in this area that combining Maps with coaching techniques is so powerful. This highly original approach will enable all coaches everywhere in the world to get into the heart of their clients' issues faster, better, and be able to help them solve these issues more easily.

1 Coaching questions

Underpinning coaching, and great coaching especially, is the issue of asking useful, relevant, and sometimes intuitive questions. In later chapters we consider in more detail other core skills that make up the tool-kit, as it were, of the effective coach. But keep in mind that it is not the function of the coach to provide answers for the client – mentors¹ may do that – however, coaches enable the client to find the answers for themselves. In fact, the coach is always acting as a mirror to the client, reflecting back to the client what they have just said because:

1. In the pause between saying what the client says and the coach re-stating it – reflecting it – back to the client, the client’s own deeper mind, their subconscious mind, has more chance of kicking in and providing a new insight that had not occurred before;
2. And in the re-statement the perceptive coach has a chance to not only re-state what has been said but also to draw out its true significance. Re-statement is not always exactly the right term for what the coach is doing; paraphrasing would perhaps be more correct. The essence of paraphrase is summarising the essential aspects of what is said;
3. By reflecting the issue back to the source, the client is hearing it again, though with a slightly enhanced or nuanced emphasis (where the coach is being effective) and what this does is reinforce the client’s personal ownership of the issue. This increased ownership intensifies the desire to solve the problem² – it motivates.

People want to use a coach because they have an ‘issue’ or a ‘problem’; in a perfect world they would not need a coach since they would know what to do. But it mustn’t be thought that coaching is for ‘problem’ people; on the contrary, coaching is possibly the number one technique (alongside its cousin, mentoring) for enhancing just about anybody’s performance. Recent research in business indicates that coaching has dramatic effects on performance outcomes³ and this sort of effect is felt in all areas of coaching. Thus coaching, as has emerged over the last 20 years in the Western world, is a standard process that can help not only the performance of individuals and the productivity of organisations, but also anybody and everybody in facing the ‘issues’ they have in their private and personal lives. These range from improving health and fitness, raising the level of sporting achievements, coping with relationship, emotional and stress issues, and helping break addictive tendencies.

What, then, can we say coaching is? In the Introduction we cited Professor Nigel MacLennan’s powerful definition and its limitation. Expanding it, we derive our own view of coaching:

Coaching is a planned intervention(s) by one person (the coach) for another (the client) in which the central purpose is either to motivate, enable and improve the performance of the client in a specific area or for a particular task, or similarly to motivate, enable and improve their capacity for sustained and progressive personal development.

Clearly, as we explained in the Introduction, there are two purposes of coaching here: for performance and for development. Performance coaching is highly specific, whereas coaching for development, or what might better be called developmental coaching, is more general and of wider import. The former is more results driven, and the latter more process; the former is more about achievement within a role, and the latter more about actualising potential and bringing out latent capabilities. The former then, in one sense is easier; but the latter is more – to use a Lord of the Rings’ word ‘tricksy’, though deeply rewarding when done effectively, for both client and coach.

It is worth mentioning here the two continuums of coaching along which all of its skills ultimately derive.⁴ The perfect coach would be entirely balanced, but nobody is perfect and so we all have our predilections, or biases, that can give us greater strengths in some areas but less in others.

These continuums or elements are the fact that the coach, on the one hand, has to tread a fine line between supporting their client and challenging them (see Figure 1.1). If they become too supportive – too friendly as it were – they may fail to challenge them sufficiently. But if they challenge them too much without providing adequate support, like some oppressive parent or manager, they may set them up to fail because the challenge is too much. Like yin and yang, then, the coach has to have a balance between these two elements and find the right approach at the right time.

Figure 1.1 Support versus challenge

Activity 1.1

Analyse your own style of coaching or, if you are not a coach, then of helping people. Do you tend to be more supportive or more challenging? Do you tend to say, ‘How can I help you?’ (supportive) or do you say ‘How are you going to do this?’ (challenging)? What are the implications of this for your practice? How do your clients or friends react to your approach to their issues? On reflection, what could be done better or differently in future?

Figure 1.2 Empathy versus objectivity

And, on the other hand, we also have the two related elements of empathy and objectivity (see Figure 1.2). It is important that we practise empathy in order to fully understand the client’s position; just understanding it in an intellectual way is invariably to misunderstand it. When we empathise we effectively ‘walk in their shoes’, so that we can feel the problem as well as cognitively recognising it. But the danger in feeling it as well is that we too get caught up in it and become unable to see the wood for the trees. The antidote to this is being objective; in other words, seeing the reality for what it really is. This is an important quality, but taken too far we treat the client as an accountant would treat the numbers in our business: routinely, matter-of-factly, and without any real regard for what is truly driving behaviours – our motivators in fact. This, too, can be fatal to successful coaching.

Activity 1.2

Again, review your own style of coaching or even of helping people. Do you tend to be more empathic or more objective? Do you tend to say, ‘How do you feel?’ (empathic) or do you say ‘What happened when …?’ (objective)? What are the implications of this for your practice? How do your clients or friends react to your approach to their issues? On reflection, what could be modified or improved in your approach? And ask yourself this: do you feel any of your client’s emotions, or remain detached when working with them?

If we now combine these two elements into one graph (see Figure 1.3), we find there are four dominant options that present themselves.

These titles – Motivator, Goal-setter, Friend, and Observer – are four important ‘roles’ that the coach plays within the process of coaching. Each coach will be different, and with a different emphasis, but to coach at all effectively they will have to negotiate between all of these roles if they are to be effective; and they will need to be careful that none of the four roles becomes a chronic weakness which lets down the effectiveness of the other strong areas. Challenging without support is destined to fail; empathy without objectivity is bound to be blind; support without challenge is bound to underperform; and objectivity without empathy will lead to revulsion. Finally, it may well be that the great coach uses these four dimensions rather like a master pianist might use certain notes on a piano – depending on the audience (the client), certain elements might be more appropriate at any given moment in the client’s developmental cycle. In practice, as the client–coach relationship deepens, there is often a movement from being supportive and empathetic towards being more challenging and objective.

Figure 1.3 Four dimensions of coaching

Activity 1.3

Study the scales in Figure 1.4 and give yourself a score out of 10 in each of the four dimensions. A score of 1 means that you barely have that element whereas a 10 indicates that you have a superabundance of it. Do this quick...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Summary of Motivational Maps: What you need to know in a nutshell!
• 1 Coaching questions
• 2 Coaching for higher performance
• 3 Pareto, performance, and Motivational Maps
• 4 Coaching, NLP, and Motivational Maps
• 5 Unblocking two barriers to success: Time and Money
• 6 Unblocking one more barrier to success: People
• 7 Coaching, mapping motivation, and changing values
• 8 Career coaching
• Conclusion
• Resources
• Index