Something new is starting here, and I want to explain what it is before diving in.
For a while now, I have been thinking about the best way to share what comes up in my mentor coaching and supervision work. A lot of it ends up on LinkedIn, but things get missed there, and the format does not always allow for the kind of reflection these topics deserve. So I am bringing it here instead, in a new monthly blog with a clear shape to it.
The shape comes from a distinction I drew in “Mentor Coaching: A Practical Guide“: mentor coaching keeps us sharp; supervision keeps us safe and sane. They are different disciplines, and they ask different things of us, yet they are deeply complementary. Both exist in service of our thinkers.
So each month, this blog will offer something across three areas:
Staying Sharp: practical skills, techniques, and insights that sharpen your coaching competence.
Staying Safe: ethics, boundaries, professional standards, and risk management.
Staying Sane: self-care, sustainability, emotional resilience, and keeping perspective.
For those less familiar with the distinction, mentor coaching involves observed coaching, either live or recorded, with objective, evidence-based feedback against a competency framework. Supervision is a space to talk about your coaching, your relationships with your thinkers, ethical dilemmas you are sitting with, and to re-resource yourself. Different in form, aligned in purpose.
This month’s three reflections are below.
Staying Sharp: Practical skills, techniques and insights that enhance coaching competence.
You know that feeling when someone asks how you do something, and it’s so ingrained you must think hard to articulate it? That’s been happening to me lately in mentor coaching: how do I spot which experiments might suit a thinker based on their thinking preferences? So I sat down to work it out, and maybe it’ll be a useful reminder for you too.
Listen for sensory cues in how your thinker speaks at the start of a session.
Visual indicators:
“I want to see a way forward,”
“I’d like a clearer picture,”
“I want to get some perspective.”
These suggest drawing, mark making, constellations, visual timelines, maps, colours, shapes.
Auditory indicators:
“I need to hear myself say it out loud,”
“I’ll know when it sounds right,”
“I want to tune into what’s really going on.”
Here, I might ask what they notice about their tone or rhythm or ask about a piece of music that gets to the heart of the matter, or simply give primacy to dialogue.
Kinaesthetic indicators:
“I want to feel more grounded,”
“I need to get unstuck,”
“I want to walk away feeling lighter.”
These are signs that embodied work might help: a grounding exercise, an invitation to stand or move, walking coaching.
Three things worth remembering.
- First, use their metaphors. If something “rings a bell,” explore that.
- Second, it’s all invitational: ask whether they’d find the experiment useful rather than leading them there.
- Third, sometimes it’s worth accessing a different intelligence than their default preference, to offer wisdom they wouldn’t normally reach.
I learned the basics of this on an NLP for Trainers course many moons ago. Hadn’t clocked how innate it had become until I couldn’t explain it without sitting down to reflect.
Staying Safe: ethics, boundaries, professional standards, risk management.
If you believe that you have choices in your coaching, your choiceful energy will give your clients access to more choice.
If, on the other hand, you feel restrained in some way, for example by a competency framework, then that’s the energy your client will catch.
There are always multiple paths you could take, even within a competency framework. There is no one right competency marker to use.
Trust that you have choice, thereby freeing your clients up to have choice.
How do you get out of your own and your client’s way by letting go of the mindset that you are restrained by the competencies?
Staying Sane: Self-care, sustainability, emotional resilience, perspective.
Here’s something that came up in a group supervision session recently, when I asked the coach:
What’s important to you about that?
And what’s important to you about that?
And what’s important to you about that?
And what’s important to you about that?
And what’s important to you about that?
This got to the heart of the matter for the supervisee. To the core of what was to be explored. To the beliefs and values and vitality of the thing. It helped them to refind their personal sanity in the situation.
Coaches don’t always appreciate the impact that this question can have at the start of and throughout a coaching session.
Some coaches think they have heard what is important to the client already, in the way that the client has explained what they want to talk about. But coaches are making so many assumptions in that regard, when asking specifically about the importance to the client can get to something much deeper. This leads the client to be really motivated to do the hard work of thinking, once they know what’s at risk for them.
This maps to the ICF PCC marker: 3.3 Coach inquires about or explores what is important or meaningful to the client about what they want to accomplish in this session. An exploration (vs an inquiry) means asking multiple times, just like the five why’s framework, developed by Sakichi Toyoda at Toyota.
That is it for this month. I hope there is something here that sparks a reflection, a conversation with a peer, or a small experiment in your next session.
If you would like this delivered directly to your inbox each month, along with a few personal updates and upcoming events, you can sign up for the newsletter via Mailchimp using the link below. It is the same content, with a little extra warmth around the edges, and you will not have to rely on the LinkedIn algorithm to find it.
Until next time,
Clare
