The Concise Coaching Handbook

Elizabeth Dickinson

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781948580786
• eBook ISBN: 9781948580793
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Utilizing a 'coach approach' with oneself and others enables quicker and more effective progress towards goals. This book identifies the crucial coaching qualities and actions to increase motivation, engagement, and performance. Through exercises and examples, the author demonstrates how to ask compelling questions, how to create effective action by constructing SMART goals, and how to hold yourself and others accountable. Additionally, she illustrates how presence and attitude, active listening, compelling questions, setting goals and accountabilities, and encouragement and feedback function in a coaching relationship. Drawing from neuroscience, case studies and personal experience, she shows how to use these specific techniques to create more fulfilling relationships and results. The Concise Coaching Handbook ends with three brief case studies of for-profit and non-profit organizations who have committed to creating a 'coaching culture' and the benefits they've received.

CHAPTER 1

Why Cultivating Coach-Like Qualities Is Important

You’ve been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.

—Louise L. Hay

Your Inner Coach

What new challenges might you tackle if you had a non-judgmental, curious, and insightful coach? How much more could you accomplish if you had support and encouragement from an advocate and witness?

An effective coach welcomes all parts of you, listens actively and asks mind-opening questions. The support, accountability, and perspective of a discerning guide can help you eliminate old limiting beliefs and behaviors, and identify strengths you can leverage to create the life you want.

What are characteristics of a great coach?

1. Welcoming
2. Friendly
3. Actively listens
4. Non-judgmental and curious
5. Asks great questions
6. Supports you to create effective action and to be accountable to your goals and dreams

In the next chapter, I will ask you to make a contract with yourself to embody these qualities inside you and to utilize the skills of a great coach.

First, I’ll explain why these qualities and skills are important.

How to Be Your Own Best Friend Instead of Your Own Worst Enemy

Neuroscience research suggests a welcoming, friendly, and non-­judgmental attitude promotes positive learning and behavioral change. Case ­Western Reserve University research conducted by Professor Boyzatis using MRI scans reveals enhanced activity in the brain areas associated with learning and behavioral changes in clients whose coach demonstrates those ­qualities and helps the client focus on a positive future.

Treating yourself the way a great coach would treat you is not babying yourself—it’s the best way to engage your creativity, to motivate ­yourself and to initiate lasting change. Yelling at yourself and judging yourself harshly will not activate the learning and behavioral parts of your brain. In short, it’s harder to change when you adopt a hostile attitude toward yourself.

You are always listening to what you tell yourself. When your mind constantly focuses on criticizing yourself and identifying how you’re screwing up, the brain only notices the flaws and that criticizing yourself and screwing up is a big priority. Sometimes people unwittingly focus on what they don’t want over and over—and then unwittingly bring it about.

“I can’t screw up, I can’t screw up, I can’t screw up…. oops, I just screwed up…”

Pay attention to what you want. Express it in positive terms. “I want to do x. I want x to happen.” Reinforce in yourself what you do want, not what you don’t want.

If You Only Listen to One Person, Listen to Yourself

Active listening may be the trickiest piece to do without an external coach or partner. However, the principles behind listening are the same as you would extend to someone else.

Active listening to yourself means giving yourself your own undivided attention. It means slowing down, turning off electronic devices, and ­taking regular time to focus on yourself. Active listening with a “self-focus” may mean going to a different part of your home or re-locating outside your home, and alerting loved ones you are not to be ­disturbed for a specific time.

Active listening means taking time everyday to treat your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and intuitions as important—and as important reflections of your mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

When you have a strong intuition related to something you could do, it’s also important to honor that intuition by taking action.

How do I listen to myself?

The form you adopt to actively listen to yourself may vary. It can include journaling/writing down your thoughts/feelings; talking into a recorder; talking to a trusted partner who uses active listening skills, or something else that allows you to hear what you are saying to yourself.

Writing down your thoughts or feelings or talking into a tape is a great way to debrief with yourself and to gain perspective, particularly on troubling events.

Over 20 years of research, Professor James Pennebaker at the ­University of Austin demonstrated how writing down your thoughts or feelings might be one of the best ways to cope with challenges. It can even strengthen your immune system, particularly if your writing focuses on extracting meaning from a situation. This can be especially effective if you suffer from chronic anxiety or worry.

Speaking your thoughts into a recorder and playing them back is another way to get perspective. It gives you the sense of talking to ­someone—and that someone is you. Many cognitive behavior ­psychologists recommend setting aside specific worry time every day for a specified amount of time where you give free reign to anxious thoughts. Doing this is a way to forestall worrying all the time AND allows you to go back and hear and review what’s worries you.

Doing the exercises in this book and finding your own ways to ­listen to yourself are a great way to start listening to yourself. Your goal is to develop a great relationship with the only person you live with every ­single minute of the day—yourself.

Use Coaching Questions to Give Your Brain a Frame

Great questions are important because the way you frame a question or situation is the way your brain will frame the answer.

Great questions pre-suppose a positive future. Great questions assume there are specific actions that will get you to what you want.

Great questions empower you. They never assume you can’t have something. They never assume limitations. They never assume that two or more things you want are mutually exclusive.

If there are realities that must be respected (like past failures or time limits), they are inc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• halftitle
• title
• Copyrights
• Abstract
• Endro
• contents
• Preface
• Intro
• part1
• 01_Chapter 1
• 02_Chapter 2
• 03_Chapter 3
• 04_Chapter 4
• 05_Chapter 5
• 06_Chapter 6
• 07_Chapter 7
• 08_Chapter 8
• 09_Chapter 9
• 10_Chapter 10
• 11_Part II
• part2
• chapter_Parts
• 12_Epilogue
• 13_Reading
• 14_Testimonials
• 15_Bios
• 16_Index
• 17_Adpage