THE CASE FOR COACHING
Helping You to Achieve Your Personal Potential
If you are offered a chance to be coached or mentored this is an opportunity. It is a chance to have a personalised one-on-one development plan in much the same way as a top athlete might have a personal trainer to help them achieve their real potential.
Coaching helps build clarity of mind (purpose) and emotion (motivation) to create changes, which you want to make. Coaching might be undertaken where conventional training or other forms of learning are not the answer or it might be used to help implement learning gained through training.
- You have an agreed number of coaching conversations with the coach.
- You discuss your background, interests, personal and career goals and the workplace challenges that you and your manager have discussed. You work with the coach to prioritise your development needs and strategies.
- You achieve goals linked to agreed performance plans, to business success and to your personal life.
- You build a partnership with the coach who becomes someone you trust and learn with.
- You undertake to complete agreed actions between sessions. This might mean some reading, goal setting, planning strategies for change, implementing plans and experimenting with new behaviours.
- The coach becomes your personal guide, sounding board and motivator to bring out your best. You receive support without judgment.
- You build clarity of mind and are challenged to achieve more.
- You gain assistance to build your personal leadership, overcome procrastination and blockages and to commit to a results focus.
- You gain skills to coach or mentor your own or other staff.
What you need to do
In order to gain the most benefit from the coaching you need to:
- Be a volunteer and a ‘customer for change’ and make a number of commitments;
- Be proactive and drive the changes you want;
- Participate collaboratively in an equal and trusting partnership with the coach;
- Participate in negotiating the terms of the coaching, its goals and the coaching process;
- Commit to a coaching time frame;
- Undertake experiments in change and act on your commitments to do some follow-up actions between coaching sessions;
- Commit to being open and honest about identifying personal talents, challenges, blockages, and life/business goals;
- Commit to action strategies and a time frame to achieve agreed goals.
