Part of the coach’s role is to help clients think through the actions that appeal to them, to make sure that they don’t overcommit themselves or squander their resources of time, energy, or budget on impulsive decisions. But how do we do that, without imposing our own ideas and beliefs on our clients? They are
I’m proud to share that the November 2024 edition of AI Practitioner magazine includes a rave review of my book Practical Appreciative Inquiry: How to Use This Leading-Edge Coaching Method Confidently with Teams and Small Groups! The review, by registered psychologist and Appreciative Dialogue practitioner Keith Storace, is full of praise for the book: You
Note: I hope you’ll find these questions useful, whatever kind of coaching you’re doing – even if Appreciative Inquiry isn’t part of your preferred repertoire yet. Also, apologies that this newsletter hasn’t appeared for a month or so. I’ve had my head down working on the audiobook version of the Practical Appreciative Inquiry book, which
The questions you ask, and the way you ask them, will have a big impact on your coaching client’s sense of agency and ability to come up with new ideas In the Design stage of appreciative coaching, we are encouraging the client to come up with new ideas and choices for achieving their Dream vision
A simple idea generation method that you can use in any kind of one-to-one coaching In the Design stage of appreciative coaching, we are looking for the client to come up with choices and possible actions that will help them move closer to the vision they imagined in the preceding Dream stage – either new
Last week I was interviewed on the ‘Cracking Addiction’ podcast with Dr Ferghal Armstrong. It was a tight 20 minutes (I was just getting started by the end) but we managed to cover quite a bit of ground, including: … and lots more! If you work in addiction treatment, it’s well worth subscribing to the
It’s a ‘Champlain Supernova’* this week as we share some blazing insights from the Cooperrider Center’s podcast episode with Fran Stoddard! On the rare occasions that I find myself running low on enthusiasm or ideas for my work with Appreciative Inquiry, I can usually revitalise my thinking by listening to the Inspiring Impacts podcast from
The further round the 4-D cycle we go, the closer we’re getting to practical action in the real world. But at the Design stage, in one-to-one coaching at least, we’re not quite out of ‘possibility land’ yet. We still want our coaching client’s ‘Default Mode’ or empathic brain network to be lit up, because this
In his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell proposes that the hero myths of pretty much all the world’s cultures follow a similar structure, that he called the ‘monomyth’ or the ‘Hero’s Journey’. The hero is typically someone who goes out into the unknown and achieves great things for their tribe, their
What the Dream Stage is For The purpose of the Dream stage in Appreciative Inquiry’s 5-D format is to enable us to think beyond our normal parameters, so we can form a vision of the desired future that’s not constrained by what we think is possible. As Einstein (possibly) said, “You cannot solve a problem
Just as in regular Appreciative Inquiry for organisational development, when we use Appreciative Inquiry in one-to-one coaching the Discovery stage is about finding what’s already working and what has worked in the past. We’ve already looked at appreciative interviews and scaling questions as ways of uncovering resources and strategies that have worked in the past,
Using Appreciative Inquiry in coaching: how to use scaling questions in the Discovery stage
