A child is usually born with almost a plain slate of thoughts, bias, perceptions lacks self-awareness.
As the child gets out of the womb, inputs begin to flooding in and the child responds with an output, the baby begins to processes complex visual stimuli and attends to sounds and sights in its world.
Over the first year, there is a lot of development that that is already shaping the ways they see the world around them and their own self.
During my teenage years, I strongly believed that is a unhealthy to be going from one place to another, visiting people from city to city, just because my dad didn’t really support the idea of travels.
I shut my mind off travels. If I go somewhere, I usually return the same day, just based on that mindset and grooming.
As coaches, we want to help our coachee (and even ourselves) to develop a mindset that is open, flexible, curious, and centered.
This doesn’t mean, losing one’s mind – accepting all forms of thoughts, perceptive and then taking on new ones, without filtering and seeing how it helps us to achieve our goals
The coaching mindset is to withhold judgment.
Yes, we all have previous experiences that we usually want to share, express and leverage on to help our coachee navigate their ways, but, we need to be able to pause, and not give the answer.
While as a coach we want to be open and curious, what if the coachee ask “if you were in my shoes, what would you do? Then, it is okay to give your opinion.
A good way to do this is to ask the Coachee: ‘Can I share with you a story (not yours, use allegory etc)? Then, ask, what do you think? Is it possible to add this to one of your options of solutions?’
5 Coaching Mindset To Embody
Full Body Listening – allow your 5 senses to be at attention, be alert to capture nonverbal cues.
Radical Curiosity (Powerful Questions) – there is no hiding place, questions are still some of powerful ways to help your coachee explore the paths to their success.
Practical Empathy (Balanced Head and Heart)
Possibility Focused (Future and Solution Paced)
Relationship First (Who over the What) – it is crucial to pay attention to the identity of the person. This is the question to reflect on, “Who I am serving, not what I can do for them via coaching?” It is important to coach oneself as a coach exploring this question, “What is your why, what are you trying to become?”
Here are strategies that we can deploy to help our coachee develop a coaching mindset:
Before the Session
-Mentally and Emotional Prepared for sessions – like stage preparation. This is a must! I was going to do share a 10-minutes dream speech at a leadership institute (kanthari) India, in 2015. I was shocked that the facilitator coached us for almost 1 month for that purpose.
Initially, it felt like, ‘why take us through such a drill?’ At the end of it all, I realized that the power of preparation can’t be overstated in anything.
In coaching, preparing before the session is like gathering all the best and right sauce to make an excellent soup.
Some of the things to think about are: what will be your mindfulness prep before the session as a Coach? What will you tell your Coachee to help them prepare for the session?
The Coach needs to acknowledge that the Coachee is responsible for their choices. One way to explore this during the session is to:
– be aware of and open to the context and culture of self and clients.
– develops and maintains the ability to manage emotions (for example, allow them to take the time to finish the crying, etc. So, ask, “let me know when you want us to move forward)” Or say, “do you need a few minutes to gather your thoughts?”
– use awareness of self and one’s intuition to benefit clients
At the end of the Session, some of the things that can help the coach and coachee move towards achieving the goal include:
– developing an ongoing reflective practice to enhance one’s coaching.
Some of the questions that can help achieve this are: “when you walk out of the door, what are walking into? When you finish this call, when are you calling into? When you finish this program, what are you finishing and starting?”
-engages in lifelong learning as a coach.
-seeks help from outside when necessary. It is possible that sometimes we may suddenly realize, as a coachee, that we cannot continue as the coachee issue is more than we can handle.
Afteralll, we need self care too. You can take a break. Recalibration, refresh and go away on holiday. Go on a walk. Know what your cap level is, to pause and refresh.
My Takeaway:
Coach yourself and lean on being coached (as a lifelong practice), then it is easier to practice the same with your coachee.
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