All our ethics training will now be available free on our podcast The Coaching Inn. Find our first recording on iTunes, TuneIn and Stitcher. You can also listen through the website
Claire writes: “A couple of weeks ago I was in my favourite coffee shop. It was the final day of writing my chapter on partnership and power and I was feeling seriously disempowered. On the phone, one of my coaching buddies said ‘Maybe this is about rightsizing?’. That’s a new word to me. So I rightsized my anxiety, by screwing up a sticky note to represent it – and popped it in a convenient hole in the brick next to my table. What had felt enormous was, when rightsized, quite a manageable thing to overcome. If I may invent a new word, my overthinking had wrongsized it!
Now I am back on the road training, I notice that contracting in conversations is an opportunity to rightsize the question. Which means that you can do good thinking around a situation – as long as the question we are exploring is the right size for the time we have.
We use these questions to rightsize. The first letters form the word STOKeRS:
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Claire writes: “Alex and I were running some online mentor training last week. The group was talking about taking off and landing conversations where people move forward in their thinking. The insight was that the pilot on a plane is most noticeable during take off and landing.
During the flight the pilot is fully there… and will be silent most of the time, and speak when it’s useful.
Whether speaking or silent, they are doing what is necessary to enable us get from A to B.”
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May be distributed freely. Please retain contact details: www.3dcoaching.com and send a copy/ link to info@3dcoaching.com If you would like to get this by email every week, you can do that here!
It’s interesting to notice how much work we are doing teaching some simple coaching principles in organisations – to mentors – and also to managers doing appraisal/review. It makes a difference. Claire is off to Prague this week to share some of the learning at the ICF Global Conference. This weeks blog comes from Dora Carlos who attended Transforming Conversations i
n Cape Town in June.
Dora writes: “How can you advocate for coaching in a continent wide mentoring launch event of your organisation when you are only given 4 sessions during the whole week (and are not very experienced either)?
With trembling, Joy and I started with an Active Listening exercise we had learned from Claire. Session two was Powerful Questions where we already started practising in triads – mentor, mentee and observer. Then a short introduction to STOKeRS and feedback in session 3 and from there more practice in triads with the Noticer as third person. If I still had doubts about the Noticer as a useful tool for teaching the art of Active Listening, those disappeared into thin air. The participants were fascinated that it actually worked to observe when someone is thinking and how different everyone’s body language is. Thank you, Claire, for this simple, but powerful tool for learning! We won over the majority of the participants in the short time we were given. I hope, you will find a few of them, who want more, in one of your courses soon.”
It only takes a few tweaks to what we do to change everything. Create a container for a conversation, don’t start doing the work until you know what you’re doing, and notice don’t diagnose. Simple not simplistic. #transformational!
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Claire writes: “Partnership is the area where I am doing most learning this year. There will be a whole chapter about it in the book (Simplifying Coaching [McGraw Hill] – coming out December 2020).
In a one to one, the concept of partnership brings great insights into who does the work in the room. If I do all the work and lead the conversation my way, why would you do much? Moving to a coaching style that’s in partnership means that the thinker will need to go and process in a coffee shop afterwards. Although deep listening takes energy, I’d love you to be skipping off down the corridor! That learning can be applied in any kind of one to one – even review and appraisal!
The first step? Contract together in every conversation – what are we doing? how shall we do it? how will we know we have done it? If your colleague is reluctant to be there – how will we know at the end that this has been a productive use of our time? Or even – how will we know at the end that this hasn’t been a waste of time.
Making the conversation work is a shared responsibility!”
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It’s brilliant, when we are out and about, to hear feedback from people who are applying some of what they have learned with us. I met Cara Moore at the UK ICF conference and we had an interesting conversation about the e in STOKeRS. There was a blog about it in 2015.
Cara writes: “I have been using STOKeRS for a while now for my contracting at the start of a coaching session, and found it to be immensely useful as a reminder about what to include. However the STOKeRS questions didn’t cover a couple of questions that I also like to ask at the contracting stage. Furthermore it always niggled me that there was no ‘E’!
So the additional questions I like to ask to expand a bit on the Subject and Outcome that the client brings are:
So to remind me of these questions, and to resolve the niggle I have about there not being an ‘E’, my suggestion is that ‘E’ is for Emphasis!!
What do you think?”
© 2019 Cara Moore cara@caramoore.co.uk. May be distributed freely. Please retain contact details: www.3dcoaching.com and send a copy/ link to info@3dcoaching.com If you would like to get this by email every week, you can do that here!
Claire writes: “We know, rationally, that trying to talk well to two different people about two different things at the same time means that we don’t have either conversation well. The privilege I have of listening to people having conversations, is that I have noticed that’s also true when we are talking to one person.
It’s not unusual to have someone come who is angry, or upset, or overwhelmed, someone where we need to do some arriving or greetings before we can do the work. So one day I came up with the idea of a pre-conversation, and drew it on the flipchart
If you’re the facilitator of the conversation, what’s useful about being clear that this is separate means that you can give good attention to the bit that needs to be done before we start doing the work of the conversation. I am noticing more and more that putting a time boundary around that can make it even more effective.
That might sound like moving from
‘I’m going to tell you how much I have going on for so long that we never get any thinking done here and I get even more overwhelmed’ to ‘would it be useful to download for 5/10 minutes and then we will work out what we need to do today?’
or
‘Let me catch up on everything that’s happened since we last met that there is almost no time to move forward today’ to ‘would it be useful to take 5 minutes to talk about the actions you have taken/what you have thought about/ insights you have had since we last met?’
When we put time boundaries in, people still talk about feeling heard – and they know to give the ten minute version, and not the two hour version. So there is plenty of time remaining to look forwards”
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Clare T and Ruth are offering low cost coaching to young people who are at transition points. They work from the office, on the phone and online. If you know young people who would value this, email info@3dcoaching.com to find out more.
Clare writes: ‘It’s that time of year when 17 year olds trek off to massive exhibition halls to do “university shopping”. Ahead of such a trip, my son and I had a conversation. I was keen to understand what he wanted to be different at the end of his time at the exhibition, what would he be focusing on? He really hadn’t given it much thought and jokingly admitted he might end up coming home clearer about which Uni offered the best free pens and not much else.
Covey said “Begin with the end in mind… begin each task, project with a clear vision of your desired direction or destination”. Being clear at the outset of an exhibition, or meeting, or conversation what the desired outcome needs to be and what we will see to know that’s happened will ensure it is time well spent.
My son came home more focused, excited and energized to learn more about his possible course options and what to do next and as it happens – penless!’
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Claire writes: “I was sharing with Nicky this morning how useful it is to think of a plane journey as a metaphor for a great conversation.
And we know that there is always more to learn – as we discovered. We were imagining how frustrated we would be if invited on a magical mystery flight that guaranteed we would go to a new destination. Only to find that we had landed in a place we have been many times before.
That’s why it is so important to co-create the process for a conversation and work out together what we are doing before we start. Whether what we are doing is coaching, or something else, a great contract for today increases the likelihood of getting to new thinking.”
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Claire writes: “We have learned that if we want to increase the likelihood of having transformational conversations – where someone knows something about their own stuff at the end they didn’t know at the beginning – then we must have boundaries. Just before Christmas someone looked at the coaching container I had drawn on the flip chart and said that it looks like a plane journey. Some metaphors have depth and insight. This one does.
They are right. A conversation is like a plane journey. And if it’s a conversation facilitated by one person about the other, we need to have agreed where we are going … even if that agreement is that we aren’t sure. Otherwise you think we are flying to Prague. And I take us to Southampton because that’s where I always fly – and because it’s worked for others I think it’s a great route.
Great conversations are co-created which is why it’s so useful to create the container for the conversation in partnership.”
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Claire writes: “Continuing professional development (CPD) is useful, and in some organisations ongoing training is mandatory. In the coaching world, we are required to evidence 40 hours CPD every 3 years in order to retain our credentials. As people progress through organisations, management and leadership development programmes and other training are available. Some even include coaching. This can easily become a tick box exercise coming out of appraisals – ‘what training would you like to go on?‘
The results of the training can be more transformational when we stretch the frame. Instead of ‘this would be good to do‘, a longer time frame and a co-created contract can make a significant difference. ‘Begin with the end in mind‘, said Covey. We expand that by asking questions like – What’s the training for? How will you (and the organisation) know it has been useful?
Think a year beyond the end of the programme and have a co-created conversation:
This stretched frame is also useful for probation or training agreements:
Not only is this useful because it looks beyond the obvious end point – it also makes revisiting the contract much more normal. ‘We are three months into… how are you getting on towards [that end point]. What do we need to explore to make sure you get to that [original goal for the training/probation]’.
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