Coaching

Creating the Conditions for Change

Coaching is often described as helping people achieve goals.

At Balanced Approach, we see it as something broader.

Good coaching helps people step outside familiar patterns, examine how they are thinking and discover possibilities that may be difficult to see while caught inside the problem.

The coach does not need to provide all the answers.

The skill is often in helping someone ask better questions.

Better Questions Create Different Possibilities

Questions direct attention.

Ask: “Why can't I do this?”

and the mind begins searching for explanations of failure.

Ask: “What would need to change for this to become possible?”

and a very different search begins.

Learning to recognise the assumptions hidden within our questions is one of the most useful coaching skills.

[Explore the Power of Questions]

Curiosity Before Judgement

Behaviour that appears unhelpful from the outside may make considerably more sense when we understand the person's experience of the situation.

What are they noticing?

What are they expecting?

What are they trying to achieve or avoid?

Coaching replaces the rush to judgement with curiosity.

And curiosity frequently reveals choices that were previously hidden.

[Explore Coaching & Behaviour Change]

From Advice to Capability

Advice has its place.

But if every problem results in someone else providing the answer, it can create dependency rather than development.

Good coaching helps people become better at thinking, noticing, experimenting and learning for themselves.

The aim is not simply to resolve today's problem.

It is to develop greater capability for dealing with tomorrow's.

Feedback, Learning and Flexibility

Not everything we try works.

The important question is what we do with that information.

Coaching helps turn experience into feedback:

What happened?

What did we learn?

What could we change?

What will we try next?

When people become less concerned with getting everything right and more capable of learning from what happens, greater flexibility becomes possible.

Coaching Training & Development

Balanced Approach provides coaching training for people who want to develop their professional coaching skills and for leaders, managers and professionals who want to incorporate coaching into their existing role.

Our approach draws upon coaching methodology, communication, NLP, behavioural understanding and systems thinking.

The objective is simple:

Help people become more capable, not more dependent.

[Explore Coaching Training]