To determine whether coaching is for you, it is important to know what coaching is and what it is not.

What Is Coaching?

First and foremost coaching is a collaborative, co-creative partnership that helps people get from where they are to where they want to be.

The definition of coaching according to the International Coach Federation is as follows:

“Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.

Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.

Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.”

What Coaching is not?

Coaching’s methodology draws from a range of traditional professions such as psychology, business consulting and mentoring YET it is not any of these.  Coaching is a unique process and there are significant differences between the above listed professions. Specifically:

• Coaches are typically not a trained psychologists, counselors, family counselors, behavioral counselors, or therapists, where the focus of these professions is to help the client resolve a disease, dysfunction or disorder via some remedial, rehabilitating, or curative process.
• Mentoring is a relationship that is established between a more senior individual (mentor) and a lesser skilled or experienced individual (mentee). It is a collaborative, mutually beneficial partnership aimed at promoting the personal and professional development of both the mentee and mentor.

Although coaching and mentoring are processes that enable individuals to achieve their full potential and share many things in common, there is a distinct difference.

• The focus of coaching is to improve performance and skills. It is collaborative and starts from the client’s strengths.
• Coaches do not give advice; they provide encouragement and urge continuous improvement.
• Coaches hold the client accountable for trying new things and using his or her strengths to get results.
• Using a driving a car analogy, the coach will seat you in the car, place herself in the passenger seat and encourage, endorse, acknowledge and support you until you develop your own driving style and feel comfortable enough to go it alone. The mentor will share his experiences of driving cars and the wisdom and lessons he has learned in his rich experience with them.

Bottom Line: If you need someone to assist you in enhancing your performance and “unlocking your potential” with you in the drivers seat, hire a coach.

At Foursight, our coaches have coaching experience and currently undergoing certification, as a Certified Professional Coach, through the International Coaching Academy (www.icoachacademy.com).  Contact us at info@foursightconsulting.com for more information.

1. Listen, Listen, Listen – Listen to not only understand, but to hear the feelings below the surface.
2. Respect – Show respect to your client and to yourself at all times. Respect boundaries and time.
3. Acknowledge – Acknowledge both the small and big wins. Be the faithful mirror of your client’s wins.
4. Culturally sensitive – Understand your own culture and that of your client. Let viva la difference be your motto!
5. W.A.I.T. – Ask on a regular basis “why am I talking?” As an extravert, this is an ongoing development opportunity for me.
6. Commitment – Maintain commitment to the client. Partner with them to maintain the commitments they make to themselves as they work towards achieving their goals and dreams.
7. Power of the Pause – Use the pause button to give space for the client to think and reflect. Also use it to allow you, as the coach, to stay out of reaction mode. Remember the phrase, “silence is golden,” it was created for a reason.
8. “It’s not about you?” – Its all about the client – their agenda, their pace and progress, achieving their goals, etc. Remember, they are driving the car and you are their trusted passenger (partner).
9. Be Curious – Being curious at all times allows you to help the client go deeper. Use powerful questions and direct communication to allow your client to tap into their own curiosity.
10. Reframe Perspectives – Help your client in seeing multiple perspectives to their situation / problem. Invite them to “walk around” a situation / problem, looking at it from different angles.

As a coach or coaching client, how does this list resonate with you? What would you add it?

The reality is, innovation is hard – it takes time. Getting innovations to market can take years of investing, researching, and trying to get the innovation to work. For example, it took Chris Griffiths, CEO of Garrison Guitars, six minutes to sketch out his idea for a new guitar on the back of a napkin, and six years to get working prototypes, etc. Organizations, and the people who work for them, need passion, belief in their idea, and perseverance to go the distance in the pursuit of innovation.

Innovation also requires discipline and focus. Innovative companies focus their R&D efforts on customer-or market-driven solutions, and see the importance of setting R&D targets and monitoring them to ensure that pre-determined milestones have been met. The question asked repeatedly by shareholders and/or the board, and that needs to be answered is, “What did you do with the last bunch of money we invested?”

Remember, organizations do not innovate. People do. And people need time to innovate. Provide employees with the time and space to innovate. Braden Kelly, of Innovation Excellence, suggests as an alternative to allowing people to spend up to a blanket 10% of their time on innovation projects, instead allow employees to accumulate that time and then schedule time off to pursue a specific innovation project, often doing so at the same time with 3-4 other employees so they can collaborate on the project idea and push it forward.

Looking for more ideas related to innovation, read past newsletters at http://www.foursightconsulting.com/ideas/newsletter_backissues.php

There have been many who have been identified as great thinkers including: philosophers such as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, Foucault, Locke, Machiavelli, Sartre, Proust, Beauvoir, Fayol, Confucius; scientist & inventors such as Faraday, Marie Curie, Einstein, Copernicus, Edison, Newton; writers & authors such as  Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Woolf, Maupassant, Tolstoy;  explorers & pioneers such as J. Cook, Lindbergh; composers - Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert; artists such as van Gogh, Matisse, Goya; innovators such as  Da Vinci, Freud, Jung; historians & teachers such as Boulanger, Montessori; impresario such as  Sergei Diaghilev, Cousteau; business & management gurus such as Drucker, Fayol; and world leaders.

With the recent passing of Steve Jobs, another great thinker, and my experience of workplaces, I question how many living great thinkers there are today. Thinking in itself seems to be lacking in workplaces today.

Reflection: If you are a great thinker, how are you contributing your “thinking” skills to make the world a better place? If you don’t think that you are, how might you improve your “thinking” skills?

1.  Creativity is a two-step. A leader’s first priority is to allow ideas to develop by keeping possibilities open – you have to suspend disbelief and avoid making judgments too soon. It might take the second, third, or even fiftieth idea before something clicks.
2. Use positive-speak to inspire confidence. Nothing shuts down creativity faster than a negative or judgmental tone. Fertilize creative ideas with supportive comments like, “I like it. Tell me more or can we explore one other option.”
3. Discover the gold nuggets in the muddy stream of ideas. Downplay negative feedback. Try to find the positive aspects in even the worst ideas. A bad idea could have elements that serve as starting points for excellent ideas.
4. Your schedules, timetables, and deadlines should harmonize disparate work styles. Recognize that creative people view time differently. A leader needs to acknowledge this reality and sometimes negotiate a mutually satisfactory agreement about time.
5. Well-set boundaries define extensive possibilities. Leaders need to set some boundaries. At times, you do need to be firm and keep creative people from going beyond time limits.
6. Ask questions that get to the essence of problems. Use a technique like the five “whys” to break through superficial understanding of a problem to reveal the fundamental truth. Practice genuine dialogue that leads to an explosion of ideas.
7. Remember that you are dealing with individuals, rather than interchangeable parts. A creative leader must be like a detective, using exploratory questions about “big” matters to gain a much-needed sense of employee’s personalities. Leaders need to treat each employee as an individual since each person has a unique set of skills, needs, and interests.

The survey involved 1,000 college-educated people aged 25 to 34, and it found that two-thirds of respondents decided where they wanted to live first, then went to that city and found a job afterward. “Diversity is the linchpin to it all,” Mr. Jones was quoted “Diversity of ideas seems to flow from diversity of people. One thing that defines economy now is diversity. If you say you can succeed without being diverse, you’re fighting a tidal wave.”

Diversity is innovation – What are you doing as an organization or a city to foster diversity?

For the complete Globe and Mail article, titled “Diversity now a key tool in the fight for the creative class,” September 21, 2011, go to http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/diversity-now-a-key-tool-in-the-fight-for-the-creative-class/article2173191/).

This was proven to me recently when attending my MBTI Certification where I discovered an Asian man whose Extroversion preference was higher than mine (a highly extraverted white female). What is the so-what of this? Don’t assume that all people from a certain culture have the same personality type. Treat people as individuals.

1. What Motivates Us? - http://tinyurl.com/4ncfp5w 

2. Caroline Casey: Looking Past Limits -http://www.ted.com/talks/caroline_casey_looking_past_limits.html