Practising mentors building their practice
One of my fondest memories of my late colleague David Megginson was a day in Kathmandu, where a group of coaches and academics had gathered for a Himalayan trek. The tourists around us tried not to lock eyes with the colourful characters around us, sometimes appearing quite comical in their desire not to engage. David, (more…)
Read More The value of ad-hoc, unexpected learning conversations
Most people have some strong opinions, but these don’t normally prevent them from having rational discourse. However, some people present to coaching with deeply closed mindsets, by virtue of, for example, extreme religious or political views, or adherence to irrational conspiracy theories. What makes them so difficult to coach is their inability to accept the (more…)
A recent study* of 150 female university students provides strong evidence for the impact of same gender peer mentoring on mentees’ well-being, both during their studies and after graduation. The students involved, at the University of Amherst in Massachusetts, were in their first two years of study in engineering; the mentors, both male and female, (more…)
Many teams and organizations operate on the boundary between complexity and chaos. Managing the dance between those states can be time consuming, yet without devoting sufficient time to manage this boundary, they default – consciously or unconsciously – to the habit of multiple quick fixes. The more quick fixes they apply, the greater the propensity...
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Alan Turing’s famous test for machine intelligence was whether or not a conversation with the machine was indistinguishable from that with a human. I was introduced to the reverse Turing test by Kiersten Dierhof, one of the most perceptive observers of coaching that I know. It says, basically, that if a human (coach) cannot be...
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A Doodle survey of more than 6,500 European professionals and executives in 2019 calculated the cost of unnecessary meeting globally at $591 billion. That’s almost certainly a significant underestimate. On average, the respondents calculated that they spent 13 days a year in pointless meetings. Increased working from home will almost certainly have added to the...
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Read More Triage your meetings – a pragmatic approach to wasting time at pointless meetings
I’m hearing the word “coachability” a lot more recently in my supervision groups. For example, “I should have gone with my instinct and turned the client down – he’s not coachable.” There are two schools of thought around this. One is that no-one is uncoachable. The issue is whether this coach is the right coach...
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Human beings initiate change when they feel discomfort or dissatisfaction. So, in principle, a coaching or mentoring conversation that doesn’t involve some level of discomfort is likely to lead to less significant change than one that does. However, we also tend to avoid discomfort, especially if it is elevated to become pain. We also tend...
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Everyone has some beliefs that they hold onto, even when logic suggests that this is irrational. For the most part, these are harmless and are simply part of our identity. For example, the theories of reflexology and homeopathy have both been thoroughly debunked as nonsense. However, unless the practitioner puts the client in danger by (more…)
Read More What to do when a coaching client has strong beliefs that limit their thinking
Talking to oneself is both more common and more useful than we expect. Studies at the University of Nevada suggest that up to 80% of our mental experiences relate to conscious or unconscious, unspoken verbal conversations. Other research shows that the words we use have a substantial impact on what we observe. So much so...
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Read More It’s official – talking to yourself is good for you
