Email is the way to get hold of us now that we are working differently. Remote has been a part of how we do what we do since the beginning of 3D. It was phone work at the beginning and Claire is mid way through a live online coaching training for senior leaders across the world. We have the technology! If you’re not sure how to use Zoom for training, Claire recorded a quick video hint last week.
Claire writes: “What strange times. Every day welcomes something odd that will become our new normal. We are learning how to slow down. Much of this is unknown. How long will it last? What will it be like?
The battle in the supermarket is a less appealing part of change. I walk round the block three times a day in the spring sunshine savouring different. On my walks I have been thinking. Last summer – when my daughter was here from New Zealand – we were having cold white wine every evening. I recognised that this was a habit I needed to change. Having never quite successfully completed dry January, a dry month felt impossible. Too many reasons to bend the rules. Counter-intuitively I decided to stop for longer and see whether that worked. This avoided the countdown of how many days were left. I found an online tribe called One Year No Beer. I didn’t sign up and just read their blog posts. It wasn’t easy for the first few days… but my app says I am now on Day 209 and I have no intention of drinking alcohol at the moment, although we have a plentiful supply. I don’t know if I have given up forever. That doesn’t matter. I am enjoying the benefit of what life brings when I live a different way.
Amongst all the confusing emotions, I am inspired a little when we are asked to live a different way for an unknown amount of time. Knowing that I have survived with no wine – and thrived on its absence for an unknown time period… it’s good to know that this slowlyness is also for a season. And who knows what we will learn?”
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Claire writes: “I was with a group of NHS Managers the other day and we were thinking about colleagues who have worked in the same way for many years and ‘have always done it this way’ and see no need to change. It reminds me of the words of Marshall McLuhan (born over 100 years ago): “Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.”Claire writes: ‘The world and the workplace don’t need coaches. We simply need people who can think and think creatively. Some of us can get there more easily is we are in the company of another.
I always think that the most value in conversations I have with people is what happens in the hour (or week) after they have left… when the flow of their thinking starts making the most difference.
The real coaching happens after the session is over!’
© 2015 3D Coaching Ltd
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Congratulations to Kirsty who has been awarded the Associate Certified Coach credential from the ICF! We are hoping to hear results back soon from a bunch of internal NHS coaches who have been through the credentialling process to add value to the coaching they do at work.
Claire writes: “There are 5642 books on Amazon about mastery. The dictionary talks about mastery either as expertise or as domination. I have to say I prefer the former.
Mastery as ‘knowing it all’ is quite a disabling belief for those of us who don’t feel that we know it all. I’m a Master coach, and in conversation with a colleague with the same qualification this week, we were noticing that mastery is quite definitely a journey and certainly not a destination.
This week I have been observing some people in a charity who are trying to develop using coaching at work. They were facilitating great conversations far more effectively than I observed last time we met. They are masters. They don’t know it all, but they are getting enough confidence in what they are doing to be able to be effective.
It’s the same with the end of term music events for those of you with school age children. Mastery comes from the developing of inner confidence – not just from knowing the right notes.”
© 2014 3D Coaching Ltd
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Claire writes: “Have you ever read The Water Babies? I can remember Mrs Do-as-you-would-be-done-by and Mrs Be-done-by-as-you-did.
It’s worth thinking about whether I manage my own time? Can I manage a meeting? If I can’t, how can I expect anyone else to? Noticing others struggling to do things that we too find difficult can be a good learning.”
© 2014 3D Coaching Ltd
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Claire writes: “My daughter is learning to drive. I’m sure that she would love it if, one day, the instructor just told her that he had changed roles and become the examiner, and that she had passed her test without even knowing it was happening. At work, we change roles all the time without saying anything. We flip from manager to mentor, supervisor to friend, non directive to directive.
When we take responsibility to change roles, without asking, we take the power. If I am doing an appraisal or review and decide that what you really need in response to what you are saying is some deep listening around a specific issue, and I do that without asking, I have sabotaged your review. I may be right. But I need to ask or I deny you your review of the last year. Working out between us what we need to do today and how we will do it is harder work that just doing what we normally do takes more time. And it is more transformational for all parties. If you agree with this, and find it hard not to change roles, try sitting in a seat where you don’t normally sit. It’s amazing how that can help us stay in role!”
© 2014 3D Coaching Ltd
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Claire writes: “The more we listen in organisations, the more we hear how much people are passing responsibility to others, taking too much of it for themselves or refusing to pick it up. It’s as though organisations and businesses are full of bouncing balls. When people catch them, they pass them on really fast to someone else. And then the music stops, the ball turns into a bomb and explodes, and everyone else steps back while the one left holding it carries the can. One organisation we work in describes it as throwing cats over walls.
And yet, if we work in a team, it’s not about MY responsibility or YOURS anyway, it is about OURS. Consistently changing the language of conversations can really help to begin to change a culture.
That means a shift to we language from
Shifting from I/You to we can stop there being quite so many unexploded bombs. It’s part of the coaching toolkit”
© 2014 3D Coaching Ltd
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Here’s an interview Claire did with Val Hastings MCC – about creating awareness. It’s for clergy but is relevant across sectors.
More about goals in coaching in this afternoon’s telephone Masterclass at 5pm – call the office on 01462 483798 to register.
Claire writes: “Some people love to set goals for home and life and everything. Some don’t. Of those that do, I notice that some people or organisations measure goals, make mini goals and work towards them and others simply make them and abandon them. We are all different. David Megginson has a book coming out shortly called ‘Beyond Goals‘. He says that fixed mindsets favour SMART measurable goals and others prefer more scruffy outcomes. David Clutterbuck’s research has found that people are more likely to change their behaviour if they think they might do something that determine that they will. Interesting.
None of this is rocket science but a helpful reminder that when we are working with people we need to make space for them to do what they need to do – whether that is to regoal or degoal.
I’m not a great one for goals for myself, but as I restart the 5:2 eating plan today it’s more about feeling more energetic than targets and milestones – although I hope that some of those might emerge on the way. So taking advice from Clutterbuck, I might have two fasting days a week!
A great way, of course, of finding what’s helpful for someone is to ask them!’
© 2013 3D Coaching Ltd
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Claire writes: “There’s a great story in Alex Grimley’s Vital Conversations about a businesswoman who picked up some cookies as a treat at an airport. She sat down at a table to eat them, have a cup of tea and read a magazine. The airport was busy and so she shared the table with a Japanese businessman. As she read, he helped himself to a cookie. She got increasingly frustrated especially when he then took the last cookie, broke it in half and gave her one piece and ate the other. As he left the table, she went to chase him in fury. And noticed her packet of cookies, unopened, in her bag.
It’s all about perception. And we jump to conclusions like that all the time. The only reliable data is what we might see through a video – not what we interpret. Yet we often, like the businesswoman, give feedback based on what we interpret. Next time you feel your hackles rising, it might be worth asking – what did I notice? And say what you see without without adding the voiceover commentary!
If you want to understand more, have a look at the Ladder of Inference
© 2013 3D Coaching Ltd
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