Practising mentors building their practice
One of the anchors of people’s sense of security is being able to trust their own eyes. That reassurance is fast fading as AI learns how to fake almost anything – even a conversation with what appears to be a close friend or family member. This worries just got worse with the publication of a...
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Once upon a time (not so long ago, really) there was no profession as a coach. Even coaching as we know it, did not exist as the theoretical concept in the business world until the late 1980s. We had mentoring, which was and still is in most cultures a non-directive approach to helping someone with...
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Today is Opposite Day (25th January, 2024) The book Doing it Different, published in 1999, was the result of interviews I and a colleague, Sue Kernaghan carried out with companies around the world that we identified on the basis that they were radically different form everyone else in their industry sector. Many were prime examples...
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A couple of decades ago, when I was advising the UK National School of Government on board development, we had an impromptu, informal competition to find the image that best represented the relationship of Boards to the organisations they led. The winner by a large margin was a ghost carrying its severed head under an...
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When I reflect on what I am grateful for, high on the list is having a son with Down Syndrome. Today (21st March, 2024) is World Down Syndrome Day – an annual event to celebrate the benefits that people with learning difficulties can bring to the world. A few weeks ago, my son Jonathan competed...
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When I first heard of coaching sessions, where both coach and client talk as they knit, my first thought was someone was trying to pull the wool over my eyes. There’s enough clack clack going on in many coaching conversations as it is. However, a recent paper from the Serbian Institute of Applied Coaching Psychology (more…)
Read More Tied up in knots? Does knitting therapy bind the coach-client relationship?
Dialogue in mentoring, and in related disciplines such as coaching, can be regarded as having seven layers of increasing depth and impact. This short paper provides some guidelines on how to develop the skills of dialogue at each level. Transactional conversations are not really dialogue at all. They are, for example, the kind of conversation (more…)
Creating a personal balance between the work-related and non-work-related parts of our lives is becoming increasingly difficult. There are fewer and fewer places I can go, where no-one one can reach me by text, email or telephone. And while I enjoy some solitude, I want to stay connected to my family, so I’m reluctant to (more…)
Imagine coming to work each day and putting on an act, in order to fit in. Smiling at jokes that seem unfunny, putting up with background noise that interferes with our concentration, yet pretending it’s OK, because no-one else seems to find it a problem, nodding as if you understand exactly what’s required, when you (more…)
Read More How coaches and mentors can help clients on the autistic spectrum be authentic
A study from Oxford Brookes University found 40 topics that occurred frequently in coaching assignments. In order of frequency at first meetings, they were: Notably absent from this list is systemic thinking, which may represent the lack of relevant skills among the coaches surveyed. The survey also did not address how the coaches responded – (more…)
Read More What do executive coaches and their clients talk about?
