Over the coming weeks, I’ll be posting extracts from my upcoming book, Mentor Coaching: A Practical Guide. If this piques your interest, you can pre-order here.
If you are not a coach, I hope you might still take this journey with us as you might still learn something about leadership in roundabout ways.
I love coaching. I love several things about it:
- the idea that everyone is resourceful, creative and whole (Kimsey-House, Sandahl, Whitworth, 1998).
- that it’s a partnership of equals, not an expert-apprentice relationship.
- that it helps people to express their needs – the world would be a better place if we were all able to do this better (me included).
- that my responsibility is for the process – and their responsibility is to change, in whatever way works for them.
- seeing them flourish as a result.
[If you prefer to listen to an audio version of this and the other 3 extracts from the book, you can listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/show/extracts-mentor-coaching-a-practical-gui]
What do you love about coaching?
I get huge fulfilment out of enabling coaches to be the best they can be for their thinkers and therefore, for the world. My motivation for mentor coaching is simple. I want to professionalise the coaching industry. There are so many people out there who call themselves coaches, who have had little to no training – and are probably not coaching anyway. That dilutes the value that real coaches bring to the world. That value is in coaching others to think for themselves.
I hope you will take away these three key messages:
- Mentor coaching is not just for coaches seeking a credential; it is for lifelong professional development for every coach, at every level in the profession.
- Mentor coaching enables us to improve the way we show up in the room.
- How we as coaches show up in the room is more important than how much we know about the theory of coaching.
That’s what mentor coaching and supervision do for us – they keep us sharp and fit for purpose.
Mentor coaching and supervision are different from each other though.
Mentor coaching focuses on skill building. Being at our sharpest. It involves being observed as we coach and then reflecting with a mentor coach (and other coaches if we are in a group) on the competencies that we displayed and those that we could draw on more to enable our thinker to think (and feel and sense and embody).
Supervision focuses on keeping us and our thinkers safe, from an ethical standpoint and in terms of our own resourcefulness. It is self-reported, so it relies on us to report what happened in our coaching. Sometimes, we are blind to our own competencies, which is why mentor coaching is so useful to fill that gap.
- Mentor coaching keeps us sharp.
- Supervision keeps us safe and sane.
Both are for the benefit of our thinkers.
I notice from my own practical experience that mentor coaching and supervision, in combination, are the most individually tailored and therefore the most high-impact continuous professional development opportunities for coaches. They are hard, they are active, they are relevant to the coach, and mentor coaching also involves practice and a striving for competence. They are personalised to our needs. They get to the heart of the matter, without any irrelevant information because they are all about us as an individual, and our own growth, supported by a reflective practitioner.
For these reasons, I recommend that both mentor coaching and supervision be endorsed, even mandated by the professional coaching bodies as part of coaches’ continuous professional development.
What are your thoughts on that?
If this piques your interest, you can pre-order the book here.
