Safe environment for testing my thinking

Today’s guest post is from Barbara Harvey.  It’s great to see how she’s developed her own coaching style, based on an experience of being coached herself.  

Barbara writes: My first experience of coaching came when I found myself, at very short notice and unexpectedly, rubbing the jet lag from my eyes in a hotel in Palo Alto. My boss had resigned, leaving me his air ticket and hotel reservation and a note to attend a  meeting he was due to go to. No briefing. No context. Late in the evening before the meeting, a Senior Executive I knew quite well from the UK came over. Over a beer, he started chatting about the coming meeting,  telling me about the attendees, asking questions about the agenda for the following day – what I might think of x and y, how I’d react to a and b, what did I most want to get out of the discussion and what I thought the others at the table might be looking for.

At the time, it felt like an interesting chat, but in the meeting the next day it slowly dawned on me that the SE had been preparing  me for the session. Without ever leading me or telling me what to think he’d created a safe environment for me to test my thinking, ask about things I didn’t understand, hear alternative few points and rehearse my arguments. He never once told me what to think and only rarely said what his own view was. I had been coached, wonderfully, for that meeting without even being aware that it was happening!

To me, coaching at its best is where you’re given room to explore your ideas, practice strategies, rehearse arguments and come up with solutions/actions that you, not someone else, have come up with – it’s a protected and nurturing environment that helps you perform well in the real world. Now a days, when I am coaching others I try hard to emulate that Palo Alto experience by asking lots of open questions, challenging with what ifs or pushing for alternative ideas, strengths and weaknesses. I love to get people to focus on the outcome and particularly what it will feel, look and smell like if it works – if you don’t know what success looks like, then it’s hard to aim for it and often people mistake process for result (how may objectives have you seen where the goal is to attend a training course, rather than to reach a new level of ability in the skill in question?).

Another favourite of mine (and my counselees are probably groaning as they read this) is to rate the status quo out of 10; “on a scale of 1-10 how confident do you feel handling a meeting like this at the moment” and then use that as the starting point for a discussion around what it would take to get to further up the scale.  If the issue is a tough one (and the toughest are often where it’s something intangible like confidence that is at the root of the problem) you can think about small steps – those that will take you one or two points further up the scale. These small steps, if measured, bring the reward of tangible progress and so inspiration for a bigger step to follow – the problem, once shifted even a little bit, is no longer the immovable object it once was.