Coaching Program
Fundamentals
- Introduction to Professional Coaching – an introduction to the essence of professional coaching: rapport building, determining session purpose, prioritization, goal setting, exploration, and planning. You will practice coaching and using coaching techniques in pairs with fellow participants in an exercise called “Cheat Sheet Coaching.”
- Professional Coaching Competencies – a tour of the ICF coaching competencies and the markers used to determine a coach’s level of coaching skill.
- Powerful Questions – the primary tool for exploration in Professional Coaching is asking questions, “powerful questions” in particular. Powerful questions inspire people to learn about themselves, find fresh perspectives, and imagine new possibilities. Discover seven characteristics of powerful questions and three anti-patterns. Learn the connection between the power of questions and how well you absorb what the coachee is expressing.
- Per-Session Coaching Agreement – the agreement to put in place within a given coaching session.
- Accountability, Personalizing, Prioritizing
- Accountability – how to work with coachee to create an accountability system of their own design.
- Personalizing – when the coachee is focusing on what others need to do, help them think about what they can do.
- Prioritizing – when the coachee seems to be having issues with taking specific actions, it may be that they have other priorities, they haven’t fully realized the significance of what they want to do, or there is something in their path. Prioritizing can shed light on which it is.
- Learning and Growth – Any aha moments that a coachee experiences, in addition to helping them get unstuck, can help them grow as a person and open up new possibilities in other areas of their work or personal life. Learn how to assist the coachee to “lock-in” what they learn about themself or the situation and how to think about applying it in other areas.
- Overall Coaching agreement – creating bilateral agreements between the coach and the organization, teams, and individuals they work with to set and manage expectations for the overall coaching engagement.
- Ethics & sensitive topics – coaching can raise confidential and sensitive topics. It is important for coaches to be aware of and uphold the professional coaching code of ethics.
Techniques
- Session Management
- Determining session purpose – making sure we understand what it is that the coachee would like to accomplish at the end of a particular interaction.
- Orienting to session purpose – working to focus the conversation on the coachee’s session purpose.
- Spectating – you may feel the need to ask the coachee to pause, slow down, or repeat information. Instead, just follow along with them wherever their problem solving thought process may lead.
- Acting as a Mirror
- Building Rapport– in order to have the coachee’s trust and for them to open up about their obstacles and goals, it is important to build a good relationship with the coachee.
- Emotional Intelligence (EQ) – learning about the four skills of emotional intelligence and practicing them to enhance your ability to navigate the muddy waters of human interaction.
- Active Listening – going beyond the typical “levels of listening”; learning about and practicing multi-spectrum awareness that utilizes presence, emotional intelligence, and the texture and context of a conversation to form a deep two-way connection with the coachee(s).
- Presence – our minds can distract us from what is happening in the moment. By noticing the “thought bubbles” that pop up while we are coaching, we can adjust our coaching as we are coaching.
- Focus
- Focusing – when you notice the conversation may benefit from more focus, invite the coachee to provide it.
- Splitting – ideas from splitting user stories applied to coaching.
- Summarizing – when things are clear, they can be easily summarized. Use summarizing as a tool to help the coachee determine if it is time to look for more clarity, move on to orienting, or prioritizing.
- Highlighting – very often, the coachee will express a potential solution without seeing it as such. If we are listening rather than trying to solve the coachee’s problem, we can identify and highlight these opportunities in order for the coachee to consider how they may contribute to the solution.
- Notifying and Reiterating – we all have mirrors where we live because we can’t see ourselves. We can’t fully experience other aspects of ourselves either. This is why we need other people to help us see ourselves. By skillfully notifying and reiterating, we can be like a mirror for the coachee.
- Notifying – we are not fully aware how our emotions and energy change as we interact with others. These changes offer clues that can help us better understand ourselves. Making the coachee aware of these changes provides them with deeper insights that can enable them to move forward more quickly.
- Reiterating – what we say, how we say it, or how we behave is often different from what we think it is. As a coach, when we see discrepancies between what we observe and the coachee’s description, simply reiterating what we are hearing and observing can help the coachee better see themselves.
- ADKAR – an exploration of ADKAR, a change management model based on individual change. What it is, the benefits, and how to leverage it in Professional Coaching for individuals, teams, and organizations. A useful tool for people to help them find impediments and opportunities for moving forward through facilitated group activities.
Coaching Competency Focus Areas Part 1 (3 sessions)
Instructor facilitated discussion of how to coach to the professional coaching competencies, within a specific focus area. Focus areas: coaching agreement, rapport building, coachee’s choice.
Alignment Part 1
- Professional Coaching Demos – learn what makes professional coaching special. Includes demonstrations of professional coaching with participants as coachees.
- Reverse Coaching Labs (2 sessions) – in each lab, the instructor will take on the role of a coach that sometimes makes coaching missteps such as not being fully present or asking leading questions. Participants will have the opportunity to pause the instructor if they think the coach has made such a coaching misstep and discuss what they see happening. If the misstep is not noticed, the instructor will pause the session themselves to discuss the misstep.
- Coaching with Feedback Level 1 – (5 sessions) – in each session there will be 2-3 participants acting as coach and receiving feedback. In each coaching session, the instructor will pause the session from time to time to provide quick verbal feedback on the coaching.
- Coaching with Feedback Level 2 – (5 sessions) – in each session there will be 2-3 participants acting as coach and receiving feedback. In level 2, the instructor will provide verbal feedback at the end of the coaching session in alignment with the International Coaching Federation assessment markers.