What does it take to ‘get the shift’. Coaching clients all to often show up for coaching with best intentions of making changes in their lives and relations, but somehow never making them. The change becomes overwelmingly difficult – “If it wasn’t for my difficult boss… I’m not the sort of person .. my unrelenting workload” – and the conversation stops being about bringing about change so much as justifying why any change is impossible.

Getting the client to the point where they make a real and sustainable change is therefore a challenge and a dilemma for a coach. Some coaches in their anxiety to make a difference, resort to using their personal energies to get the client over the line, forgetting that once they leave them they are likely to fall back to their habitual ways of being.

Dr David Drake  (Centre for Narrative Coaching) has an interesting technique that helps here. He talks about the notion of ‘pivot points’, effectively choice points in a clients life where they have to two possible course of of action – one aligned with their desires and one aligned with their status quo. Change is then about recognising and choosing a particular path in the moment . For example “I can give my opinion or I can keep quiet” when I’m faced with a threatening situation. What’s great about this approach is it reduces what might seem an overwelmingly impossible change into a series of small and simple in the moment choices… which is what life is composed of anyway.

I’ve been asked to speak at a conference this month in London on the topic of growing mastery in coaches, so have been reflecting on my own development as a coach and the work I do supporting coaches development as a coach supervisor.

In short, I find the topic of ‘mastery’ a slippery concept and difficult to pin down definitively. There is seems to be an assumption that mastery is achieved through accumulation – more experience, more tools,  more models … just more. However, as big a danger for me, are coaches who fail to inspect their practice regularly enough. Over time we all develop habits of practice and habits of mind and we settle into a way of working which is familiar for us but not necessarily bringing all we can to our clients.

Dr. David Drake (Center for Narrative Coaching) suggest that mastery comes from four ‘A’s:

• Awareness – expanding our capacity to be be aware of ourselves, our clients, our relationship and the wider systems and organisations they come from
• Attention – knowing what to focus on in the coaching session and why. This comes from experience and the ability to spot the emergent patterns
• Adaptability – too many coaches over rely on one model/theory/tool, adaptability implies a genuine openness to re-examine the basis of our practice and work with feedback
• Accountability – coaches have a duty of care to their clients and a duty of performance to their organisations. Accountability means developing ethical and practice maturity.

Join us at the Coaching Focus Knowledge Sharing event, 12th December 2014, at the Herbert Smith Freehills – City Gate House 39 – 45 Finsbury Square, London, 10.00-16.00. The booking link is here

Fascinating and very inspiring day yesterday. I spend it in the company of Dr David Drake, an expert on ‘Narrative Coaching’. David was speaking at an EMCC sponsored workshop held in the lovely surrounding of Regents Park College in central London.

The premise of ‘Narrative Coaching’ is very straight forward – we live our lives as and through stories. According to David, we construct narratives about our past (and our future) to help us make sense of a complex and confusing world. However our self stories are always part fiction in that we select and remember fragments of our experience, interpreting events so we can make sense of what is going on around us. We therefore get in to trouble when we confuse our self story with objective truth. We end up hanging on to our version of events even when it has stopped serving us – the narrative ‘grip’ as David calls it.

This perspective is helpful in coaching in that it allows for the possibility of  new stories to be told. Thus a client’s old/habitual story might be: “I am not the sort of person who is confident – I’ve never been able to present well”. This could be plausibly retold as “I once has a bad experience of giving presentations, but I’ve learnt a lot since” allowing the client the possibility of looking forward to and even enjoying their next speaking opportunity. From this perspective we are all work in progress – I find that thought reassuring rather than limiting.

Here’s a link to David’s Narrative Coaching website