Coaching Changes Everything™

When I started coaching 18 years ago I was surprised to find that, regardless of the nature of the coaching engagement, I was teaching people how to integrate coaching approaches into their day-to-day interactions. It wasn’t intentional; it just made sense.

The challenges that my clients faced, such as providing difficult feedback, inviting colleagues to embrace a different perspective or sharing a compelling possibility with a larger audience, were more quickly and easily resolved when my clients took a coaching approach to these situations. That is, when they focused on creating insight for others, rather than telling them what to do. These managers were not acting as “full fledged” coaches, setting goals and holding people accountable, they were simply using coaching approaches to create insight and move situations into effective action more quickly.

What was really interesting was how very small changes made such a huge difference. Asking a question instead of giving the answer created unexpected openings. Getting curious about how someone viewed a situation and starting the conversation from there, rather than arguing one’s point, became the foundation for more collaborative relationships. In retrospect I recognized theses as Coaching Moments – times when taking a different approach changed the trajectory of situation, often in significant ways. When people wove coaching approaches into their day-to-day interactions potentially contentious exchanges turned into opportunities for people to learn with and from each other.

What was even more fascinating was how shifting to a coaching perspective changed everything – the people, the situation, their relationships, their willingness to take on new challenges.  People became more engaged and change happened more quickly and smoothly. It was exciting to see!

The challenge became how to get real, effective coaching tools into the hands of as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Our workshop, Coaching in the Moment, was our initial approach to provide larger numbers of people with the tools and perspective needed to create genuine insight and real action. The success of Coaching in the Moment accelerated the demand to scale coaching even faster. So we created the Coaching Moments® app (available on Apple and Android platforms) to get coaching capabilities into the hands of anyone who was interested in learning them.

Our Coaching Moments app gives anyone, anywhere a support tool for conducting successful coaching conversations, regardless of whether they’ve gone through coaching skills training.

• The Coach-the-Coach section provides step-by-step guidelines for recognizing opportunities for coaching and conducting Coaching Moments conversations.
• The audio recording of a Coaching Moments conversation brings the concept to life.
• Coaching Question sets provide “in the moment” guidance for conducting coaching conversations in a variety of setting including;
  • Coaching colleagues
  • Coaching up
  • Empowering others
  • Addressing difficult behavior
  • Dealing with complex situations
  • Getting yourself unstuck

Our hope and intention is to provide people everywhere with the tools and perspectives needed to ignite very different dialogues, anywhere they choose to.  So they can create the changes that are meaningful to them.  I hope you’ll check it out!