Sometimes it’s easy to ‘flip’ a problem statement into an affirmative topic. But for some problems, perhaps vaguer or more complex ones, it can seem harder. Here’s a process you can use when none of your attempts at an affirmative…
Why It’s Better, And More Accurate, To Give Positive Feedback
Objective appraisal is impossible Although feedback is famously “the breakfast of champions”, nobody likes getting negative feedback. Now a new book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, by management researcher Marcus Buckingham and SVP…
Why Coaching With Compassion Works Better Than Coaching For Compliance – The Neuroscience Of Coaching
Coaching Works – But What Kind Of Coaching? It’s fairly well established that coaching works. For example, a meta-analysis of studies of workplace coaching in 2015 shows a strong positive effect on individual performance, and smaller but still positive effects on…
What Executives Get Wrong About Coaching
A study published in the Harvard Business Review by Leadership professor Julia Milner and management consultant Trenton Milner has revealed that most executives don’t really know what coaching is. It’s worth looking at what experts generally define as coaching. These descriptions…
Four Essential Questions For Coaching Yourself Or Others
Why some coaching questions can do more harm than good Coaching, if we follow Sir John Whitmore’s definition that it’s “helping people to learn rather than teaching them”, is about asking questions to help the ‘coachee’ find their own answers and…
How To Build Your Self-Belief
If you suffer from ‘impostor syndrome’, or your friends sometimes ask why you don’t have as much self-belief as you should have when you are so good at what you do, this article is for you. Belief in yourself comes…
10 Ways To Help Someone Close To You Loosen Up Their Limiting Beliefs
Even for experienced coaches and therapists, it’s not easy to help a person change when it’s someone close to you, because you’re emotionally involved yourself. If they’re stuck with a belief system that they know is holding them back, but they just…
Questions In Coaching (4): ‘Chunking’ Up Or Down
Note: This article follows on from these others in the series: Questions in Coaching (1): Solution-focused or problem focused? Questions in Coaching (2): Presuppositions Questions in Coaching (3): Open versus closed questions Another important distinction in coaching questions is whether…
Ask Yourself This: A Coaching Question You May Not Have Thought Of
Very often in books and articles about goal-setting, one of the questions the author suggests you ask yourself is “What would you have to give up to achieve your goal?” This is a great question, as it reconnects you with…
You can always make a difference
Recently I had some firewood delivered. I live in rural France and our main heat source is our woodburning stoves. Getting good quality firewood is a big deal out here. Last month, with winter getting started, we were running low.…