WOW. I attended a two day coaching seminar at a school called New Ventures West in the city. The content was rigorous mentally AND emotionally, made deep connections immediately with the caring folks there, and personally became aware of my own deep, personal blind spots. Discovering these spots drained me, but afterwards I felt amazing how I had several body sensations that represented long-time subdued emotions.

Anyways, I think I’ll be forking over $8K to take the year long, coaching certification course next year!

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Selfishly, I’ll document my own personal learnings here … and not reviewing the general methodology they practice. Simply, they try to accept the current state the client is coming to you as and try to improve upon it. They take an approach that leaves the client empowered to self-correct and self-improve.

  1. You are what you practice.
  2. Use the five elements model (immediate concerns, commitments, future possibilities, mood, personal/cultural history) to quickly get-to-know people.
  3. During coaching intake or assessment, try to avoid fleshing out a hierarchy of information or understanding of a client. Instead take on words or phrases that you don’t understand their meaning of, and find the links necessary to gain their interpretations.
  4. To build rapport for first-time relationships with clients, consider sharing how your body is feeling at the moment and open them up to share as well.
  5. Imagine people as seeing the sky through a straw. Coaching helps find a new point in the sky to look at and helping them move & grow the straw.
  6. Coaching can be as simple as dropping a drop of red dye in water. Help someone see one thing differently can change their life.
  7. Don’t flood clients with information or advice. Try to ask “is this useful?” as a filter.
  8. If you dig too deep into trying to understand the “why”, you may find yourself wasting time on discovering a nice-to-have. You might be a shy person that doesn’t want to be one anymore and trying to understand why the heck you are a shy person might be a waste of your time. Instead, you might want to accept that you’re a shy person and take actions towards changing it.
  9. Putting yourself in another person’s shoes is good, but don’t forget your own state and power that you can bring to the relationship.
  10. What domains of competence are you trying to solve a problem? If you choose the wrong domain, your solution will be ineffective. The domains are self-management (“I”), group (“We”), or things (“It”) domain? Look for gaps or strengths in these realms.
  11. If you’re procrastinating, what are you pretending not to know.
  12. Words that come out of people’s mouth generally tell less than 10% of the story. Look for body language, energy, gestures, tone, etc.