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6 steps for executive coaching

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Peter J Webb quotes Arlin (1990)’s 6 features of wisdom which make a neat and snappy heuristic for coaching executives and any one else for that matter.

 

Approach a situation by asking questions

1. What do we all agree about?

2. What really matters here?

3. What in our present situation is relevant and different from what we expected?

4. What would be a more interesting way of looking at the world than we did yesterday?

5. How would that perspective expand our agreement and our relationship with the world?

and

6. What could we experiment with and try out right now?

This list is also so useful for personal coaching when some one is in a jam. The “we” in step one simply becomes what is working well in the person’s life.

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“we” and “they” in psychology

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A good way to test a psychological theory is to ask: does it “do something to you” or does it help you to find “your place in the family of things” (Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese)?

UPDATE:  I saw today a post on what we type into Google.  It seems that when we type “is it wrong to”, we are making a personal decision.
When we type “is it unethical to”, we are talking about nothing in particular.  Or at best, what other people should be doing!

Today I wrote a post about your psychologist being 100% on you side.  Make sure they are!

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How do you know you understand your client during coaching?

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What do coaches do?

Some coaches tell you what do.

Hey, who is living this life?

Some coaches say hmmm,  haw, what do you think?

What are they contributing here that the cat couldn’t do just as well?

A good coach encourages wisdom

We are all wise, at least a little.  But in our impatience to make a decision, sometimes we rush to conclusions.

A good coach helps us do our thinking.

Dialogic thinking:  how would other people see this problem?

We could talk to lots of other people, and our coach might ask us to.  They will check that we have done so.

They’ll also suggest reading novels and watching movies. They’ll get you to take a “cloud journey” and fly around the world looking down on different cultures and imagine what they are doing right now.  It frees up the mind and welcomes in what you know but have pushed aside.

And a good coach will suggest techniques described by Paolo Coelho in The Warrior of Light.  Imagine fighting against yourself!  That helps you flesh out what you are doing and what you are taking for granted!

Dialectical thinking: how our questions and answers change over time

The difficulty with being a noobe, is that we have no idea how we will see an issue when we’ve had a little more experience!

A coach has seen many people go through the same process of noobe to expert and they know how you will change.

Importantly, they know you will change.  They’ll help you approach an issue in an experimental way.   Test, redefine, test, redefine!

A good coach shares your journey

A good coach is not only there for you when times are hard.  A good coach understands that their wisdom grows from their relationship with you.  They too used dialogic and dialectical thinking.

They need to understand your point-of-view about your predicament and your point-of-view about their relationship with you.  They too need to see their questions and answers change as as result of working with you.

A good coach is not expert who gives answers or pretends to know behind a hmm, haw, and what do you think?

A good coach is challenged by your views and changes their own mind as they learn about yours.


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Useful coaching technique: a cloud journey

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Are you wise, sometimes?

Have you ever kicked yourself for making a dumb decision?  Have you ever sat there thinking, why did I do that?

Turn on your wisdom

There is a way to turn on wisdom.  Peter K Webbs describes the research evidence for promoting wisdom.

#1  Talk a decision over with someone else.  They don’t give you answers.  The talking brings a wider range of facts and figures to your conscious decision making processes.

#2 Go on a cloud journey.  Imagine traveling around the world.  Think of different places and cultures.  Then make you decision! This is Staudinger’s and Baltes (1996) ‘cloud’ journey.

Complexity in organizatons

Peter K Webbs summarized complexity theory in organizations and psycholoogy very well.

For a poetic account, read Paolo Coelho, The Warrior of Light & Strategy.  I particular like the ideas of accepting defeat as what they it is: defeat.  I like the idea of preparing to fight by imagining fighting oneself.  I like the idea that friends remain with you through good and bad times.  They share the journey and the ups-and-downs of the journey.

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After a trying week at work, try this . . .

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soothing, relaxing, protective,  safe, thank you!  NEAVE

Weeks later, I had forgotten about this.  Fantastic.  You could draw.  I just scribble like a frustrated three year old.

UPDATE:  Interactive art from London.  Fantastically refreshing.

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Renewing relationships

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“To attract good fortune, spend a new coin on an old friend, share an old pleasure with a new friend, and lift up the heart of a true friend by writing his name on the wings of a dragon. “

Chinese proverb

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Can we manage without managers?

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Quotations from Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management.

“My guess is that the most bruising skirmishes in the new millennium won’t be fought
along the battle lines that separate one competitor, ecosystem or economic bloc from
another. Rather, they will be fought along the lines that separate those who seek to
defend the prerogatives, power and prestige of their bureaucratic caste from those who
hope to build less structured, less tightly managed organizations that elicit and merit
the very best that human beings have to give.”

“Not surprisingly, most managers believe you can’t manage without managers. This is
the mother of all management orthodoxies”

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Priorities and goals

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Middle management sucks

I’ve always thought that one of the best kept secrets of management theory is that middle management sucks.  Have you every noticed that there are very few movies about middle management? And whenever there is a story about middle management, it is about a submarine or boat where the “business unit manager” is far enough away from the “strategic leaders” to do some leadership? Or we see the middle manager bailing out and rediscovering life as in Jerry Maguire.

Middle management sucks because it is all urgent and important

Middle management sucks because it is all management.  It is all about “to do” lists.  Being a housewife is similar.  “To do lists” take up too much of our attention.  It is a percentage thing.  While everything on the the list is important, we should never allow our lives to be overtaken by what is urgent and important.  Urgent and important should be allowed, how much do you think?  1%?  If you have a day of urgent and important tasks, don’t you think you really have another 99 days of tasks that you are not doing?

Can you live without a day of urgent and important tasks?

If we could live without urgent and important tasks, I wonder whether we would?

Isn’t it true, as David Whyte says, that we make another “to do list” because we are scared that we are nothing and nobody without one.

It becomes very interesting when our “to do” lists vanish.  If we are suddenly ill,  or when we change jobs and nobody knows who we are.  When we don’t get email and our phone doesn’t ring.  It is quite disconcerting.  We much prefer to be dominated by urgent and important tasks even if they are dreary. Don’t we prefer to have “to do” lists that are larger than ourselves and our dreams?

To do lists make us miserable

For the last 10 years, as a displaced person/migrant, I’ve oscillated between frenetic completion of lists of commercial tasks like residence permits, bank accounts, etc. etc. – things I hate to do at the best of times – and silence.  I think this is why migration is so miserable.  Not dealing with bankers and government officials – they are people too.  Not taking boring jobs.  The jobs are important in their own right.  Migration is miserable because we make the mistake of allowing the “to do list” and the silences that surround them be all that it is.

We have to allow the “to do” work and accompanying silences fit into space around our dreams, not be our only space.

We really have to resolve to re-engineer our lives around a dream, to live around what we love to do and to relax into doing what others love us to do because we do it so well.  We have to allow the “to do” work and silences fit in to that space, not be our only space. We are letting priorities become goals and constrict our spaces until we cannot breathe anymore – rather literally for some.

A hack to start the dreaming

Take a a piece of paper (or junk mail envelope).  Draw a little circle for our little life as a migrant, or as a housewife, or as a middle manager (those scare me more than being a migrant).  Around that little circle, draw a giant circle representing our horizons and dreams.  And stare at the empty space between the two.  Pretty scary.

I feel my chest constrict.  I want to walk away.  I mustn’t.   I must start defining the points on the horizon.  The points I love and I am drawn to.  And then start filling in any points between me and there, any point at all, useful or not.   I need to take the first step and to put down the first point.

Can we leave the tight center of tedium?

It is hard when immediate pressures are upon us.  We won’t start dreaming instantly.  We keep looking nervously at that tight center of tedium. How can we take our eye off all these pressures?

Crisscross over.  Promise yourself you will be back to watch that tight center like you watch a pot on the stove or a sick child.  But branch out in each direction to see how far you can see.  It is only a piece of paper after all. Just add a point.  See if you can.

See if you dare to live a full life even on the back of an envelope

See if you dare lie a life when priorities take up 1% of your existence and are priorities, not limits and constraints.

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