3 Basics of coaching you can apply every day
You don’t necesarily need to be a professional coach to use some coaching skills. Acquiring a set of tools helping you, your team and potentially anybody from your network to reflect and share their journey and even supporting their reflections into “what’s next” is actually a real strenght. Those skills are accessible to anyone in most of our daily life’s situations and, once again, can be extremely beneficial for the people around you…and also for yourself.
Here are 3 simple coaching skills I learnt during my first module at Co-active Coaching Training I would like to share with you.
Active listening
Don’t be like The Dude in Big Lebowski
Picture the scene - something happened during your day and it moved you. Something important at work, maybe a comment made from one of your colleague, a meeting with your manager that did not go well, or a situation that went wrong with a client.
You decide to share this story to a friend, to your spouse or to a colleague later on, that same day. You notice that the person doesn’t really listen to you. Body language is disengaged or off (e.g. looking at the phone or simply holding it…). Usually, the best way to notice that the person is not fully listening to your story is when they reply to you sharing… their story. Not the most pleasant feeling, isn’t it ?
“Sharing your heartfelt moment with someone who’s not really listening is like trying to throw a surprise party for a friend who keeps checking their watch and dropping hints about their own upcoming celebration”
According to Co-Active, There are three different stages of listening:
Level One listening, is “listening primarily to yourself, or your own thoughts or agenda. You could be focusing on any number of things. Maybe you’re thinking what to say next in the conversation, and so only half-hearing what the other person’s saying. Maybe you’re wondering what to have for lunch, or if you left the gas on. The key thing is that in this Level One listening, you’re not really fully hearing the other person.”
In Level Two listening “you are intensely focused on what the other person is saying. Nothing’s distracting you. Thoughts about the past or the future don’t intrude. Even your own ideas don’t get in the way of you hearing the other person.”
Level Three listening “is also completely directed towards the other person, but it has a wider focus. You hear more than just the words they’re saying. You pick up on all sorts of other things – body language, the inflections and tone of their voice, their pauses and hesitations. It’s like you can hear sound effects in their mind – the clink of a penny dropping, the thud as they hit a wall. You can feel them straining to avoid something, or pulling towards something – and you have a sense of what that might be.”
How do you reach reach that second and third level? Practice and preparation. Think about those 3 levels before entering into a discussion. You only want to listen to the other person, focus on the body language, the tone of the voice you’re hearing, “Be alert to anything that makes you think “Wow!”, “try to be aware of what this feels like to the other person”. And if (and you will) you are going back sometimes to your owns ideas and thoughts and not properly listening, try to catch yourself: “Hey! I’m not listening!”, and immediately come back to active listening mode.
Ask simple, open and non-judgmental questions
“What is it that you love about your job ?”
Be curious by asking simple, open and non-judgmental questions. Those questions typically start with “What…” and “How…”. Not so much with “Why” to avoid your counterparts having to justify themselves. However asking “Why…” questions in order to challenge their true belief and their purpose (to use Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle theory) is definitely valuable and a very good starting point for an open conversation.
When you talk to someone you do want to coach, empower and help to find her/his own path, ask those questions or similar ones :
Why is this important for you ?
What do you love about your job ?
How did you feel in that particular situation ?
What do you really want ?
What’s holding you back ?
What type of person do you want to become ?
What do you want to get out of this meeting ?
What else ?
How are you going to make it happen ?
What else can you do ?
To summarize, by being curious and asking open and powerfull question, you are putting the person in the driving seat instead of questionning their behaviour or giving them answers they won’t really listen to.
“Dance in this moment”
This connects with active listening and asking questions but it is still very important to keep in mind. Don’t come with an agenda or a script - leave this for a presentation, where you have a message to deliver, a point to make, etc. Here, you help the person reflect and make progress, so just be fully present.
“Every conversation creates tone, mood, nuance. There is as much information, sometimes more in how the words are said versus the words chosen; sometimes there is more information in what is not said than what is said. ...To “dance in this moment” is to be very present to what is happening right now and respond to that stimulus, not to a master plan.”
To conclude
At this stage, I don’t feel the need to provide more examples about the benefits of those 3 basics of coaching at work, at home, with your friends, with strangers…just to reiterate that this is surely something we don’t do enough collectively in our societies. And yes, those 3 skills are especially needed in the work environment where “Fifty-two percent of respondents to a survey said they found their company’s efforts to be empathetic towards employees are dishonest” according to this very interesting article recently published by Harvard Business Review. Further down in the article, “active listening, knowing that you don’t have all the answers, avoiding auto-pilot responses and always making the time” are highlighted as recommandations to reduce that perception.
I also wanted to share an example coming from a different context: medicine. Reading an article in Le Monde newspaper the other day, I came across this notion of “narrative medecine” first used and now teached by Professor Rita Charon, and described in Wikipedia as: “… the discipline of applying the skills used in analyzing literature to interviewing patients.[1] The premise of narrative medicine is that how a patient speaks about his or her illness or complaint is analogous to how literature offers a plot (an interconnected series of events) with characters (the patient and others) and is filled with metaphors (picturesque, emotional, and symbolic ways of speaking), and that becoming conversant with the elements of literature facilitates understanding the stories that patients bring.[2] Narrative Medicine is a diagnostic and comprehensive approach that utilizes patients' narratives in clinical practice, research, and education to promote healing. Beyond attempts to reach accurate diagnoses,[3] it aims to address the relational and psychological dimensions that occur in tandem with physical illness.[4] Narrative medicine aims not only to validate the experience of the patient, it also encourages creativity and self-reflection in the physician.”
Doctors and carers learn to actively listen, openly question and really “be” with their patients in order to fully understand their patients' stories, their pain and their feelings, in order to improve the care relationship.
