Is life coaching for you?

I just saw this headline on the Google ads below.

Hmm... If I'm paying you for it then, guess what? It IS for me! Isn't that a coincidence?

Sales daze

In the old days, sales people used to talk about features and benefits. In fact, old dazed sales people still talk about features and benefits. This is a technique devised by marketing people to avoid the need to hire intelligent sales people. Here's how it works.

I have a product and I want it to be sold in a certain way by sales people who I don't pay much, so since staff turnover will be high and I don't want to keep retraining them, I'll just write a feature/benefit script for them to read out. If they read out enough features, a few are bound to stick. Unfortunately, this is not the case. And it's lazy too.

Feature: Modular training program

Benefit: Fit training around your work commitments

What happens is this; by the time I get round to telling you the benefit, you already decide what the benefit is to you (e.g. not too many nights away from home in one go) so when you hear my benefit statement, we lose rapport because I am contradicting your interpretation.

If you must talk in features and benefits, then at least use 'benefit because feature'. You get to manage your normal workload more easily because our modular training program breaks up the training time.

Just thought I would share that with the world...

Getting to the heart of it

A number of people have asked me recently "in coaching, how do you get right to the heart or root of a client's issue?" and my honest answer was... I don't know! So at last night's Leamington NLP practice group, I took the opportunity to find out.

I set up an exercise where someone would present me with something, and I would get to the heart of it, and then the rest of the group would model, in real time, what I was doing. I thought you would be interested to find out, because the model they came up with was really great!

First, the client will tell you everything you need to know in the first sentence or at least the first minute, so you really have to pay attention at this time. Sue, my client for the demonstration, told me everything about the issue before she even started speaking - she enacted the behaviour that leads some other people to lable her as 'quiet'.

Second, that initial clue led me to form a hypothesis about the root of the issue, so I set off in that direction. What they noticed was that I tried anything and everything, coming at it from different angles to narrow it down. The key points seemed to be:

• Getting multiple examples in different times and contexts to cross reference
• Coming from different angles to bypass the normal defences
• Periodically breaking state, changing the subject, asking if the client is happy to continue
• Testing the hypothesis and either continuing to be led by it or discarding it if it is disproven
• Using sorting techniques to create greater distinctions between parts of the issue, like getting into its crevices and levering it open
• Being guided by my own feelings that I am picking up from the client

Third, I kept going until I felt we were at the heart of the issue, and this was the really big thing. At a point where we had a glimpse of the root issue but were still focussing on the stated work situation, I stopped and asked the four modellers if we had reached the root yet. Two said no, two said yes. The two who said yes went on to say 'no, but I think you've gone far enough'

And this raised, for me, the most important observation of the whole process. When we get close to the root of the client's issue, we are faced with their fears, and fears are...well, scary. So one of two things often happens - either the client employs all of their normal defence or avoidance strategies to avoid going into the fear, or the coach feels the fear, doesn't like it and backs off.

In short, the discovery was that the coach doesn't get to the heart of the issue, not because of any lack of skill, but because he or she backs off from the uncomfortable feeling of being there.

Richard asked me how I overcome the feeling, and I said that it's the client's fear, not mine, so why should I be scared of it? Also, I guess a few years ago I was in exactly the same place. In fact, I don't guess, I know. I can remember times with clients when I avoided telling them what I really thought because it was uncomfortable, and I bought their excuses and diversions because that was easier than pushing ahead.

Finally, when we had explored the root of the issue, I formulated a statement of the process that generates the behaviour and tried it on to check if it resonated with the client. At this stage, it's as useful to be right as it is to be wrong, because if the client is still uncertain, then making an obviously wrong statement will throw more light on the right answer.

The process statement was "when you were younger, someone who wanted you to not have to learn from life the hard way, and who wanted to stop you from making the mistakes that they did, would criticise you when you said or did something wrong, and that made you feel bad, so to avoid feeling bad you would wait and prepare yourself so that when you did speak up or act you got it right, so it was more comfortable to stay quiet and let someone else speak up. At work, this means that while you're thinking about the right answer, three quicker, louder people have already jumped in". And her answer... "yes".

So here's the process, one more time:

1. Pay 100% attention to ALL verbal and non verbal communication in the first minute
2. From the initial statement, form a theory about the root process (remembering positive intention: the process is not the problem, the output is the problem. The process is trying to do something useful)
3. Dig around the issue (PROCESS not content), getting cross references and multiple examples to test your theory
4. When you feel the fear, you are almost there - keep going
5. Form a process statement and test it with the client
6. If you get a 'yes' response, stop. Anything else, refine the process statement until you get a 'yes'

And there you are - at the heart of it.

Wave functions

Do you know what this is?

It's a wave. A wave is a construct used in physics to represent the flow of energy. If you were to look closely at a violin string, you would see it taking up this kind of shape when vibrating at a certain frequency - producing a tone that we can hear. So a wave is a physical position of a medium at a moment in time. The violin string appears in that position at a single instant in time, but a microsecond later it will be somewhere else. We know that the string's position is limited by it's flexibility, so at any moment in time we can't predict exactly where the string will be, we can only know the area that it will be in, and that area is a wave function.

For years, physicists talked about elementary particles like protons, neutrons and electrons. They behaved like particles. You could fire one electron at a phosphor screen and see a brief flash of light. But then, in other experiements, they behaved like waves. So are they particles or waves?

Advances in our ability to observe on a smaller scale show that the assertion that an electron is a particle is true, or false, and saying that it is a wave is also true and false. A bit like saying that an elephant is big or small. Both true, depending on whether you're an ant or a blue whale.

Quantum physics sees an electron as a probablity cloud, meaning that it's component parts are somewhere within a space defined by its physical properties, but we can't say where they are exactly at a given moment in time. So an electron has a wave function. If we look at its wave function, we could treat it like a particle. If we want to treat it like a wave, we could pick an arbitrary path through the space that it occupies.

Why am I telling you this? Because on leaving my meeting with Kevin yesterday I had a flash of inspiration. All the coach schools that tell you that you have to stick to their proven method, all the people that say you have to stick to the agenda, that you have to use GROW, or GONAD, or whatever their model is, are talking about wave functions.

I have always said that we can guarantee the end point or the route, not both. And in coaching, that means we can guarantee the outcome or the process, not both. I can guarantee to get the client the result they want, but I don't how I'll get there until I'm there. Or I can guarantee to use GROW, but I don't know what the result of that will be.

If you look back at the sine wave, the points where the line crosses the zero axis are the points that we can predict given the frequency of the wave. These are called nodes. But once we have left the node, we have no idea where the energy will be until it reaches the next node.

So all these people who rant on about GROW, FLANGE, co-active coaching and all that nonsense are claiming that they can predict the route the energy will take. Absolute rubbish. I always knew that - sensible people the world over always knew that - but it's only since yesterday that I could articulate why.

The funny thing is that these are the same people who jump on quantum physics as 'scientific proof' as to why sticking candles in your ears relieves your career anxiety.

So at the start of a coaching session, we are sitting at a node, a fixed reference point. The client sets the frequency and we're then off on a journey until we get to the next node and can say with certainty where we are. Coaching models, like all models, are just models - scaled down representations. Like the diagram at the top of the simple sine wave, a violin string will never actually look like that because it's a 3 dimensional physical medium, and the waves can flow any way they like. It will look like the wave function, and our brains interpolate a simple sine wave because that's what we always saw on Tomorrow's World.

We can create a probability cloud, a wave function for the coaching session, where it is more likely that we will do some things rather than others, but we can't predict exactly what will happen until it does.

So, sell people certificates based on them following a strictly dictated process, and still call that good coaching? Nonsense!

Organisational structures - a revolution?

I had a very interesting conversation with Kevin Watson yesterday.

You see, I'm not convinced that coaching isn't a fad. Certainly in the way it is being packaged and sold by people like ICF, CA etc. Coaches who are selling coaching programs into companies are no further forward than selling training programs, as if one off learning is all the company needs.

We thought that constant, iterative learning is the future, not artificial, isolated programs delivered by external experts. And then this morning I was reading Change Magic, thinking about updating it, and I realised something whilst looking at the chapter on organisational structures.

Why are teams organised by function? I keep seeing companies paying to train their line managers as coaches, to try and move their managers away from a task focus and towards a people focus. And yet the organisational structure is still based around work flow - if you won't do your job properly I can escalate it to your boss, and your boss's boss, and so on.

So what we have is an organisational hierarchy based on task management, yet we're telling managers to be people managers not task managers. Does that make any sense?

So here's the revolutionary idea.

Organise teams and organisations in some other way. Favourite colour. Like mindedness. Favourite football team. Anything other than work. Otherwise, what happens? You have a 'team meeting' and spend the whole time talking about tasks, who is doing what, where you are on targets. Anything but people stuff.

What would it be like if you had a team meeting revolving around support, development, that kind of thing?

Scary.

Quality and certification

I had a conversation with Chantal today about certification and quality, again she wanted to know how we can guarantee quality. This is my thinking on the subject.

Coaching is not manufacturing. We are not churning out mass produced, identical products. As I always tell clients, we can guarantee the process or the result, not both.

Where a customer (buyer) wants to make a low risk decision and provision a mediocre service, it's best to guarantee the process. Then the customer can see what they are getting for their money, even though the result will be less than ideal. Since the customer's buying criteria is not getting into trouble for making the wrong decision, the result doesn't matter. It's the same as fleet managers buying Ford Escorts. No-one liked driving them, but who could question the decision to buy Ford?

Where a customer cares about the result that the client (end user) gets, the process is no longer a relevant decision criteria - what matters is the ability to get the result, no matter what.

Some of you will disagree, you will say that to ensure quality you have to follow a defined process and that is true. It's just that quality does not mean good, it means mass producable. If by quality you mean 'the best coaching' then no, you cannot follow a rigid process.

"But you have to follow some process" and of course, yes, you do. You have to find out what the client wants, form a relationship, set some ground rules, explore the situation and so on, until you get to the end result. But how long exploring the situation? And will there be any barriers? How many? And will the client come up with the optimal solution first time? These are the things that cannot be predicted, so coaches who stick to a rigid process always fail to get deep enough into the situation to be of any real benefit to the client.

So, if the customer wants to provision a coaching service that looks good on paper, go for quality, certification, a defined process.

If the customer wants to deliver a coaching service that actually gets measurable business and personal results, focus on outcome, on those measurable results. And then let the coach get on with it.

Certificates do not define quality for one very, very simple reason. The certificates for coaching are issued by coach training schools who make money out of issuing certificates. You work out the ethics of that one.

Oh - and the difference between provision and delivery? A HR department can provide a coaching service but that doesn't mean anyone has to use it. They can simply make it available for employees to use if they want to. Since few people will, it doesn't matter if it's any good. It's the same basis as legal helpines etc. The number of people who actually use them is tiny, but the perceived benefit is high.

To deliver a coaching service means to actually have it running, live, coaching people, getting results, evaluating. That's where coaches prove their worth, not in their certificates.

But - there will always be people who just find it easier to believe a piece of paper from a company that they don't really know anything about. At school, we took O and A levels certified by, for example, JMB. I'm sure that JMB are a very reputable and credible body, but I really have no idea who they are, all I know is that schools and univerisites recognise them. I think that probably the single most important sign that a certification body is credible is its willingness to fail people. I know that lots of people failed their O and A levels.

How many coaches fail to get a certificate at the end of the course?

Update

excellerate is still ticking along with a few new things happening after the summer holiday lull.

Within the next month, excellerate will have (hopefully) some new exec and non exec directors and a business plan.

Chris has created an opportunity for us to speak at an industry networking event tomorrow which is another great opportunity to develop the excellerate message.

This month, we have 4 meetings in the diary with new blue chip prospects, one workshop for a past client and we're waiting to confirm meeting dates with another 4 blue chip prospects.

So overall, things are looking good!

Update

excellerate is still ticking along with a few new things happening after the summer holiday lull.

Within the next month, excellerate will have (hopefully) some new exec and non exec directors and a business plan.

Chris has created an opportunity for us to speak at an industry networking event tomorrow which is another great opportunity to develop the excellerate message.

This month, we have 4 meetings in the diary with new blue chip prospects, one workshop for a past client and we're waiting to confirm meeting dates with another 4 blue chip prospects.

So overall, things are looking good!