If You Only Had Time

What You'd Learn from an Executive Coach

Duncan Aldred

• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781528979856
• eBook ISBN: 9781398406759
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This book isn't about what you produce for your boss or your client, it's about how you pilot yourself through your career, pick your way through the challenges that come your way and squeeze the most out of the chances you get to learn and develop.
Spending time (and money) with the right executive coach could be the best investment you'd ever make. Maybe that doesn't fit into your programme today. But if you could be sitting with your coach right now, here's what you'd be likely to learn.

Part 1: What Is Coaching?

This book doesn’t set out what a coach would tell you. A good coach would rarely tell you anything, as I’ll explain below.

Coaching is not the same as mentoring.

When Odysseus went to fight in the Trojan War, he appointed Mentor as teacher and overseer to his son, Telemachus. That arrangement worked well, apparently. Mentor had far greater experience than the young Telemachus, and Mentor used that experience to positive effect; schooling and instructing the young boy.

Coaching doesn’t work like that. The coach doesn’t give instruction, the coach opens up ways of thinking.

That’s not a cop-out. If you think about it, it makes sense. Mentor had such knowledge and wisdom that if he could impart just a fraction of what he knew to young Telemachus, the boy stood to be well prepared for life. You might think it follows that if you could just find your own Mentor, someone with detailed knowledge of the kind of work you do, you would hit the bull’s eye. But pause for a few seconds and you’ll see that that approach would miss a couple of important points. If all your mentor was capable of doing was to tell you how they’d done things when they did a job like yours, you’d see the limits to that kind of help straightaway. Is that knowledge up to date, or do you face new and different challenges?

And you’d miss out on a bit of sneaky psychology, too.

It’s well established that, unless we’re young children or we’re in the army, we’re much more likely to do things that we ourselves have suggested than we are to get on and do what someone else tells us we should do. If I told you smoking is bad for your health and you should give it up, the chances of you following that advice would be about zero. When you wake up one day and resolve for yourself that you’re going to kick the habit, that’s when you might get somewhere.

A decent coach will coax your thinking out of you with a ‘non-directive’ approach. If your coach uses language like ‘What you should do is…’, they’re going way off track. If they’ve got a conscience, they’ll have alarm bells ringing in their mind, warning them to stop telling and start asking.

The coach knows they need to respond to warnings like that straightaway. It’s simply not possible to coach properly with a mind that’s buzzing with any other ‘noise’.

Coaches are trained to clear their minds so that all their thinking is focused on the client, and to ‘Listen’ (with a capital ‘L’). There are two aspects to that. Before a coaching session, the coach will try to empty their mind of current clutter that’s not relevant for you; and, through the session, they’ll be avoiding the ‘Ping-Pong’ of normal conversation. That second point is about the ‘queuing to talk’ that we all do in usual conversation, not taking in the whole of what someone else is saying, but timing when we’re going to cut in to respond. And somewhere in the same family is the Park Run question, asked only because the questioner has their own story to tell. “Have you been on one of these Park Runs?”’

“No?”

“I went on one yesterday…I find my times improve every week…”

You shouldn’t get any of that ‘Let me tell you about me!’ from a coach. Far from promoting themselves, they’ll be focusing on you and where you want to get to. They might take part in lots of Park Runs, but you’re unlikely to find out unless the coach thinks it would somehow be useful to you to know about it.

You can see from this that a coach offers you something different from a chat. Your coach will be listening to you more carefully than most other people in your life ever do, and their focus will be on you. The pace of the dialogue will be slower than you’re used to in a business meeting or a social conversation. And if the coach is doing their job properly, you’ll feel free to say what comes to mind, confident you’re not going to be judged and confident the coach won’t share what you talk about with anyone else.

The slower pace is important. In the rest of our lives, we spend most of our time in a hurry. Maybe a lot of the stuff we get on with day-to-day can be done without much thought, but your coach isn’t operating in that superficial First Brain territory that Daniel Kahneman wrote about in, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Penguin Books, 2012) where motorway driving is so easy the car seems to drive itself. Your coach is encouraging you to engage your ‘Second Brain’ and do some real thinking. That can’t be done in a rush.

Can you imagine a conversation where, hand on heart, you don’t make any judgement in your own mind about the person who’s talking to you or about what they’re telling you? For a coach, that kind of judging would count as irrelevant ‘noise’ that’s going to get in the way, so their training is to avoid it.

And all this happens behind a screen of confidentiality. You’re free to tell anyone about what you discuss in your coaching sessions, but to benefit from coaching, you need to be able to speak freely and you can’t sensibly do that unless you trust your coach to keep what you discuss private between you.

A coach is on your side, but coaching is not about being nice. It can be at its most valuable when it challenges you. When a coach listens to you and then ‘asks for your permission’, with polite words such as “Can I question what you’ve just said?”, you’re on notice that you’re going to hear something very direct, and, if you deal with it in the right way, potentially of great use to you.

Having started with what’s not coaching, a quick word about what a coach can’t do. Your executive coach is not a medical adviser; and a coach won’t be able to help you achieve anything useful unless you’re prepared to engage with the process and contribute fully to it. But if you make that positive choice with a coach who’s right for you, you have lots to gain.

Part 2: Before You Start,
Understand Yourself

Before you dive into identifying what you want to change, and how you want things to be, you have some preliminary work to do.

Who are you? What are you like? And what situation do you find yourself in?

This bit’s important. As you set out on your mission to achieve your potential, it’s vital to have an understanding of what materials you’ll be working with.

On page twenty-eight, I suggest Practical Steps to help you understand yourself.

2.1: Personality Profiling (or Not!)

Are you naturally an extrovert or an introvert? A leader or a follower? A creator of ideas or an implementer of the ideas of others? The categories of personality types go on. If you have the opportunity to explore your own profile with one of the many tests that are available, the chances are you won’t be shocked by the results. Much more likely, the results will confirm what you already thought, or they’ll ring bells.

The most respected tool for assessing how you’re likely to behave in different situations is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Instrument (MBTI) (https://www.myersbriggs.org). The MBTI tool was first developed by Isabel Briggs Myers in the 1940s, building on Carl Jung’s (1920s) theory of psychological type. The Indicator was initially published in 1962, and millions of people around the world have made use of it since then.

To produce a useful result, the Myers-Briggs test has to be administered by someone with specific training, who is able to make a proper assessment of the answers to a long list of carefully crafted multiple choice questions.

Whatever verdict emerges from any test you take, don’t waste time and energy making judgements about yourself. Being one personality type rather than another doesn’t make you a better or worse person; it simply makes you more of a natural for some situations than others.

It’s important, anyway, that you see those tests for what they are. They’re a snapshot in time and, generally, the only person who’s contributed a view is you yourself, so they might not be objective.

If you memorise your profile and wear that as a badge for the rest of your life, you’re missing the point. At best, personality profiling helps you find your default inclinations. For example, you might learn that, left to your own devices, you’d be more comfortable sitting on your sofa at home than giving a presentation to a room full of people. As is so often the case, this information has no value by itself, it’s what you do with it that counts. If you decide to give yourself a nudge to get off the sofa, and maybe get training or guidance on how best to deliver a speech, then that’s when you’re getting somewhere. Once you’ve followed through on that decision, you’ll improve your skills, which will build your confidence and reduce your inclination to avoid public speaking. You’ll also have demonstrated to yourself that you have the ability to develop, that you’re not condemned to carry the same baggage forever.

Instead of navigating your way through personality tests, trying hard to spot the patterns so you can emerge with the most enviable profile for your particular world, I recommend you do something else. Take a few quiet minutes to think for yourself about the different situations you find yourself in. When are you at your most comfortable? When do you start to feel under pressure? And when do you see ‘red mist’? When are you bored, and when are you so wrapped up in what you’re doing that you don’t notice time going by? When do you feel you’ve achieved something worthwhile?

As well as listening to yourself, listen and watch for the signals others give you about the impact you’re having on them. Most of the time, those signals won’t be fully articulated, but they’ll be clues for you to read, if you care to do that. Don’t block out what people say about you, it might be information you can put to very good use.

2.2: An Honest CV

Objectively, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Copyright Information ©
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• Part 1: What Is Coaching?
• Part 2: Before You Start, Understand Yourself
• Part 3: The Typical Coaching Challenges
• Part 4: Tools for Tackling Change
• Sources