A deeper, more courageous approach to coaching
In this vlog, we ask Stephen Mitchell, participant on our Coaching with Head, Heart & Soul programme what it’s like being on the programme.
A transcript of this film is below.
I liked the robustness of the interviewing process, since I felt there was a good, if you like, philosophical, psychological fit. But I also felt that I was going to learn a lot and be challenged in a good way.
I would describe it as challenging - in a good way. It's challenging and it makes you ask yourself questions that perhaps you wouldn't ask. And that comes from the facilitation, but also your peer group.
It's enlightening. It's exciting. It's a lot of fun. It's serious fun, but it's a lot of fun. And it, if you like, it stimulates curiosity.
It's much more profound than the silver bullets that are available out there in the ether, I think.
It's profound. So I guess that's how I would describe it firstly. And it's relational. It helps you focus on you. So if you're trying to help other people, you need to be aware that you must help yourself. So depending on the environment in which you currently work - I work in a corporate environment -the vulnerability that you need to come with is perhaps uncommon or unusual, given the masks we have to wear in the corporate world on occasion.
So it helps you face into that and manage that, so you actually come out stronger, even though you paradoxically shown your weaknesses or vulnerabilities during the program itself.
Coaching can help people in many ways, but I guess my primary focus is to - when I use coaching - there’s the old cliché meeting people where they are. Very often what people don't realise, is that the answer is within rather than without. So if you accept that - the way coaching can help is for people to discover that actually they do have the talent and the skillset within. It's just a question of finding it and breaking away from so-called life scripts and historical patterns and helping people find that by themselves so that when the coach disappears from the conversation, and coachees are set free, they are autonomous. So it's not replacing one crutch with another crutch.
It helps you understand, if you like, patterns that you have, or habits that you have that have brought you to some extent success thus far. But if you want to go forward, those are actually blockers to success, which is kind of counterintuitive.
I think that's really where you get a sense that there's nowhere to hide. So you really get a sense of how you perform. You can't act. You can't pretend because 30 minutes is a long time and within 5 minutes you are yourself. So you get an awful lot of insight from multiple perspectives.
The choice, then, of course, is what you do with that. So some of it you might sort of choicefully ignore. What haven't you done? Why is that? What are your choices? And so on. So it's there's a wonderful, if you like, play-through over the over the sessions you start.
It's made me a lot more conscious and mindful about choices that I make in the moment, which can be a millisecond. I don't feel that I'm on a default setting, so it's made me much more reflective.
Wholeheartedly. I did have a number of people from my organization lined up, but unfortunately there were no spaces left. But I have at least three people on standby for when enrolments open this year, one of whom is in my team, and two of the others are my coachees, historical coachees, from the organization where I work now, who, when I've described the program to them and talked through how it works, they're very excited to potentially join.
More details on our Coaching with Head, Heart & Soul programme can be found HERE
Stephen Mitchell