Thought Exchange: The Blog of Jonathan Reitz

Why Some Coaches Almost Always Encourage Their Clients

In a recent training, I had one of those moments where you could almost see the lightbulb turn on over the other person’s head.

The group had been working on listening skills, and the student was trying out their new skills on me. “What I think you’re saying is that one of the prime jobs of a coach is to encourage the person you’re coaching.”

Encouraging words — photo credit: Key Foster via photopin cc

Yep. They were getting it. The lightbulb was on, but I could also see that this realization was troubling.

And then they dropped the bomb.

“But what if the coach themselves is feeling discouraged…even about their own coaching? What do I do then?”

Mirroring a client’s comments/posture/behavior is a powerful way to build relationship or develop direct communication. That same mirroring–intentional or not–can also share less-than-positive outcomes/mindsets between coach and client.

A coach’s behavior/posture is contagious to the client. This is all good when the coach is a positive, upbeat place, but when life gets the better of a coach, what do you do?

[Tweet “”One of the prime jobs of a coach is to encourage the person you’re coaching.” –@jonathanreitz”]Every coach bumps up against this at some point. You know the client needs an encouraging word or question, and there’s just nothing in the tank for you to offer.

Usually, a lack of self care causes this Empty Tank Syndrome, but there are strategies a coach can use to manage the disconnect between the difference in your levels of optimism or encouragement.

Here are seven things you can do to put yourself in the gap beween coach and client:

Reflect on what is causing your discouragement. Sometimes just admitting what has gotten you down takes care of it.

Talk to your coach. Coaches are encouragers, and that is one of the main things a client receives from their coach. You should be tapping into this source as well. Every coach should HAVE a coach!

Evaluate your calendar. Personally, the most common source of discouragement for me is when I have too much going on and not enough space between commitments. One of the most encouraging moments I face is when I wrap up and remove projects from my calendar/To Do list. The freedom that comes with that clean up is exhilarating!

Pray. Coaching is a calling. Getting in touch (or back in touch) with the source of that calling is like taking a drink of cold water on a hot day.

Get some continuing education. Often discouragement comes when a coach feels like their skills have fallen into a rut. Attend a training event or coach’s gathering to add new energy to your practice.

Exercise. If I’m really honest about it, this is the one I do the least of…and it’s probably the one that makes the most difference. Your mood can change dramatically with just 10–20 minutes of movement. And that is contagious.

Engage the practice of gratitude. For most Americans in general and most coaches in particular, there are many more reasons to be thankful than to focus on where we’re left wanting or missing something else. Investing in a practice of gratitude can help you focus on what you have and not what you’re missing.

So what are your thoughts? What do you do as a coach to put yourself in a position to be as helpful as possible to your clients, even when your personal outlook is less-than-inspiring? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Do You Recognize the 7 Early Warning Signs of A Coach in Trouble?

Every coach gets it when the coaching conversation is going well. Every question builds on the last, and your client makes more progress than you could have imagined!

But what about when it’s not going well? Do you recoginize The 7 Early Warning Signs of A Coach in Trouble?

Are you a coach in trouble? — Does this look like your coaching practice?

Sign #1: The coach doesn’t notice when they or their client isn’t being real. Coaches in Trouble often have an authenticity problem. Whether there just isn’t enough relational connection or there’s something flat out deceptive going on, the coach has to be able to assess whether their client is being 100% transparent.
Sign #2: The client isn’t cutting through the surface stuff and dealing with the causative issues. I think about a slide in an old version of Natural Church Development coach training that talked about the Emotional Toll Booth. Bob Logan used to talk about how you have to pay the emotional price BEFORE you can move on to the root causes. A Coach in Trouble doesn’t want to deal with the emotions that come with deep change.
Sign #3: The coach misses opportunities to tailor their language to the client’s language. Coaches in Trouble talk past their clients by sticking to coaching jargon and other verbiage that the client doesn’t understand. Rather than insist the client your lingo, an effective coach tailors their word choice to match the client’s vocabulary.
Sign #4: The coach’s brand doesn’t match who they really are. This is CRUCIAL for coaches, because the most effective coaching relationships have to flow out of who you are and how you are. Cultivating an inaccurate professional image is the fastest way to ensure that your coaching relationships are ineffective.
Sign #5: The coach doesn’t know their own gifts. A lack of knowledge about your own giftedness lays the foundation for a mismatched professional brand and accelerates trouble for the coach. Let me coach you a bit, here in the blog: What gifts do you have for coaching? How do you communicate those gifts? Maybe a harder question is “What gifts for coaching do you WISH you had?” The language you use must describe your actual gifts and not your ideal gifts so your clients know what they can expect from you.
Sign #6: The coach misses opportunities to help the client understand THEIR gifts. A lack of personal clarity travels from person to person. Learning to be aware of your own giftedness makes you aware of the gifts of the people around you. Coaches in Trouble need massive doses of this–STAT!
Sign #7: The coach only focuses on results, and ignores growth. Coach skills transfer very easily when you have a focused set of outcomes to achieve. But the International Coach Federation prioritizes coaching to facilitate learning over coaching for results. How can you resist the temptation to just check things off your client’s To Do list and to dig beneath the surface into growth areas?

What other signs have you seen? What advice would you give to coaches to stay on track?

Who Else Wants to Ask Coaching Questions That Hit Home? (Part 2 of 2)

In the last blog post, we explored a helpful application of why questions for coaches, called the 5 Whys.

The 5 Whys can be a powerful coaching technique that digs beneath a presenting issue or situation and discovers underlying reasons/causes. The 5 Whys are especially effective at discovering cause-and-effect relationships.

The Danger of Why — photo credit: mbshane via photopin cc

But for coaches, ‘why?’ questions open a myriad of challenges. They put us at risk of stopping forward momentum, getting into counseling situations, and getting caught up in details that don’t focus on the “bottom line” of the coaching situation.

An old friend of mine who is a football coach says “The details make you dangerous.” I think that’s true for coaches, especially if we get focused on the wrong details! And that’s exactly the unhelpful risk why questions set us up to take.

The danger of why questions is something that gets covered on the first day of coach training! We need another way forward!

What questions are more effective for coaching. Let’s try to apply What questions to the cause-and-effect structure of the 5 Whys.

The key insight that has to drive this approach is to facilitate learning for the client first, then go after results. This is the gateway to masterful coaching.

Here’s a coaching strategy I use to pair the structure of the 5 Whys with the power of What questions. This strategy really builds on the trust and intimacy you have with a client.

In my coaching practice, this strategy has been most effective when I have some history with the client (6 or more sessions), but it can be used in the first few sessions of a coaching relationship as well.

Start by asking the client to pick an emotional challenge or moment that has happened recently. Invite the client to go back to the moment and remember what the thoughts, feelings and emotions they were having at that time.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure the client can feel the emotion of the moment. The emotions of the moment provide the roadmap to deeper awareness.

Once the client has this moment in mind, start with the 7 Whats. These questions are strategically ordered to start with the issue, go beneath the surface, identify the cause of the emotion and then explore actions the client might be able to take to address the issue.

Let’s look at the 7 Whats. With the emotion in mind, ask these questions:

1. What’s causing the emotion? This question invites the client to start from a deeper place than just feeling the emotion.

2. What is positive about it? Negative? Now the client is evaluating the impact of the emotion. This question adds context.

3. What’s behind that reaction? With a little context, the client can then look a little more deeply at what is actually going on. Faith-driven coaches may stop for a moment of clarifying prayer with this question.

4. What’s at the root of your reaction/situation? Now we’re at the real cause. You may need to repeat questions 1–4 a couple times to really get at the root.

5. What does that tell you about yourself? We’ve gone now into facilitating learning. The client has a chance to make assessments about themselves and to embrace the things they are realizing about themselves. NEVER insist that a client realize a particular thing about themselves or embrace an opinion of yours.

6. What action(s) can you take to grow? What can you do to make this growth a habit? Question 6 is where the hard work begins. You are inviting the client to not only talk about the root issue, but also to name the change they want to make and to lay out a plan for bringing it to life.

7. What can you do to stay accountable and on track with this change? The key here is to help the client find their own accountability plan and to not build dependence on the coach.

A simple question structure like this will help you go deeper with each client AND to draw out of the client action steps that they are willing to take to make a change that will last.

When you repeat a process like this with a client, you can move into a coached prevention mode. With a few repetitions, clients will anticipate the line of questioning and begin to diagnose key issues on-the-fly and in-the-moment. You’ll start farther into the process and your coaching will become more effective!

What strategies do you use to dig beneath the surface in coaching?

Who Else Wants to Ask Coaching Questions That Hit Home? (Part 1 of 2)

At a coaching conference a few years ago, I agreed to be coached in a public demo by a very well known coach and author. My mind was clear on what we were going to talk about and I was really looking forward to the experience.

The coach didn’t do much in the demo, other than ask me why questions–which is a practice that often leaves the coach in me cold. (My coaching bias is against coaching questions that start with why because they force the client to look backwards instead of guiding the action forward.)

Over the ten or 15 minutes of the demo, this well known coach got me to look at an issue I was facing from about 5 different sides.

He was quiet and focused on drilling deeper into the issue, and encouraged me to look under the surface with every “Why?”.

photo credit: patrick wilken via photopin cc

Before too long, I had come to a realization about what was really going on with me. Then he shifted into action mode, and we made a plan for how I woul address the issue.

In the group debrief, this coach unpacked that he was using a specific coaching technique called The 5 Whys. I was shocked.

Not only was this high profile coach using why questions…on purpose…but it worked!

I thought to myself “There is NO WAY I’m ready to ask Why questions in my coaching the way he did. NO WAY. I can never make them work.”

But I was missing his key strategy: he never let me lapse back into talking about my childhood or some kind of baggage I was bringing into the coaching. He only let me explore connections between things that were happening NOW.

It was all cause-and-effect. And root causes are powerful. Finding and addressing the root cause of a particular situation or instance is probably the thing that coaching does best.

But you can’t address a root cause if you don’t know what it is. So how do you identify what’s really going on?

The 5 Whys is a great coaching strategy. Researching The 5 Whys uncovers roots in the Toyota Motor Company’s Continuous Improvement Culture and the start up world. But the lessons apply to all of us.

Take any key issue, for example a church who’s late service always starts 2–5 minutes late. Names and details have been omitted/changed to protect the innocent, but this is a real coaching issue from my practice a few years ago.

Start with why questions, looking for cause and effect.

Issue: Worship starts 2–5 minutes late every week.
– 1st Why: Attendees come into the worship area slowly.
– 2nd Why: They are in conversation in the outer area.
– 3rd Why: Groups get congested in the coffee area and people bump into their friends.
– 4th Why: The coffee area is too crowded, because the urns are in a corner and there is additional furniture taking up useful space.
– 5th Why: The orginal thinking was that people might sit down and have a conversation, but no one does.

So this series of Whys has gotten to the root issue that the sitting area is not being used for it’s intended purpose. And that issue had NOTHING to do with anything going on in worship.

The cause-and-effect exploration got beneath the obvious issues, and nailed what was actually going on.

Here’s a great video from Eric Ries (author of The Lean Start Up about the process behind the 5 whys. It’s a little more process or product development oriented than the coaching that CoachNet-trained coaches do, but I think you’ll see how digging beneath the surface can be very powerful.

So how do you dig beneath the surface to the key issue in your coaching? I’d love it if you shared your knowledge in the comments.

Tomorrow on the blog, I’ll walk you through a twist on the 5 Whys that takes you down a different path to explore the cause-and-effect of presenting issues and key issues.

How to Gain Confidence in Your Coaching and Get More Coaching Relationships–Do you need a personal brand?

At a recent conference, a notable–and high profile–Christian leader was heard to comment that he would have to evaluate whether a particular idea would work with the “brand this denomination is trying to create.”

When you listen to any post-game press conference, it doesn’t take long for an athlete to connect their performance on the field to “brand I’m trying to build…”

Is it really about branding for Christian coaches? Not at the beginning!

No matter where you look branding is the hot topic of conversation. Here’s a recent blog post that offered 30 different definitions of the concept of branding.

How do you sort through all that? And what about a brand for coaches? How important is that, especially if you want to make a Kingdom impact with your coaching?

If you’re serious about a kingdom impact, I want to suggest it’s really about identity. Not just any identity…specifically your Christ-given identity.

We all take our identity from different places. I’m a little different guy when I’m a volleyball dad (my daughter plays 7th grade volleyball) than when I’m coaching or working with the FiveTwo Network.

That’s ok, I think, because the core of who Jesus made me to be doesn’t change. It just gets applied a little differently. To my eyes, this is the essence of a personal brand.

And that’s the key: How does your kingdom identity get applied in your various life situations?

How about a new definition of brand: Your brand is how you live from and clearly communicate who Jesus made you to be, so that your relationships and your results are built on a firm foundation.

[Tweet “If you’re serious about a kingdom impact, it’s really about identity not brand.”]

This is the house built on rock from Matthew 7:24–27

When you’re clear on your Christ-given identity, you can withstand anything. It won’t always be easy, but you’ll stand. You internalize who Jesus made you to be, and you stand strong and tall.

Isn’t that how you want to show up in your coaching relationships?

For coaches, how you are in your relationships is how you will be in your coaching. You need that firm foundation to be a representation of Jesus in the place where most coaches have the most influence–your coaching relationships!

Here’s one of the key distinctives about coaching with Kingdom impact in mind: everything you do as a coach points to Jesus. Yes, you facilitate learning and growth with your clients, but even more important is the fact that you might be the only person your client encounters who points to Jesus.

Take that seriously.

It’s the ultimate measure of your coaching effectiveness.

Oswald Chambers wrote:

If we believe in Jesus, it is not what we gain but what He pours through us that really counts.

That sounds like coaching to me.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t put effort and energy into determining a professional brand for your coaching, but if your brand doesn’t match your Christ-given identity, something is not right.

That needs your attention RIGHT NOW.

Brand has to start with identity. What’s yours? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Thought Exchange: The Blog of Jonathan Reitz

So, what is YOUR cause?

Let’s talk about getting you focused on the thing(s) that get you up in the morning…or what keeps you up at night!

Let’s talk about getting you focused on the thing(s) that get you up in the morning…
or what keeps you up at night!