Updated Anniversary Quotes

Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance.

Coaching focuses on future possibilities, not past mistakes

As with any new skill, attitude, style, or belief, adopting a coaching ethos requires commitment, practice, and some time before it flows naturally and its effectiveness is optimized.

Whether we coach, advise, counsel, facilitate, or mentor, the effectiveness of what we do depends in large measure on our beliefs about human potential. The expressions “to get the best out of someone” and “your hidden potential” imply that more lies within the person waiting to be released.

To get the best out of people, we have to believe the best is in there – but how do we know it is, how much is there, and how do we get it out?

A manager must be experienced as a support, not as a threat Here

Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.

The blame culture that still prevails in the majority of businesses works against this, as it causes “false reality syndrome” or “I will tell you what I think you want to hear, or what will keep me out of trouble.

Unless the manager or coach believes that people possess more capability than they are currently expressing, he will not be able to help them express it. He must think of his people in terms of their potential, not their performance. The majority of appraisal systems are seriously flawed for this reason. People are put in performance boxes from which it is hard for them to escape, either in their own eyes or their manager’s.

The capacity is there, the crisis is the catalyst. But is crisis the only catalyst? And how long are we able to sustain extraordinary levels of performance? Some of this potential can be accessed by coaching, and performance can be sustainable, perhaps not at superhuman levels but certainly at levels far higher than we generally accept.

MENTORING Finally, since I am defining coaching, I should perhaps mention mentoring, another word that has crept into business parlance. The word originates from Greek mythology, in which it is reported that Odysseus, when setting out for Troy, entrusted his house and the education of his son Telemachus to his friend, Mentor. “Tell him all you know,” Odysseus said, and thus unwittingly set some limits to mentoring.

Mike Sprecklen was the coach and mentor to the famous all-conquering rowing pair Andy Holmes and Steve Redgrave. “I was stuck, I had taught them all I knew technically,” Sprecklen said on completion of a Performance Coaching course many years ago, “but this opens up the possibility of going further, for they can feel things that I can’t even see.” He had discovered a new way forward with them, working from their experience and perceptions rather than from his own. Good coaching, and good mentoring for that matter, can and should take a performer beyond the limitations of the coach or mentor’s own knowledge.

If there was only the “right” way to do something, Fosbury would never have flopped

You tend to get what you focus on. If you fear failure, you are focused on failure and that is what you get.

Traditional silo or linear thinking is no longer sufficient to cope with unpredictable emergencies. We need the capacity to take a whole-system approach that is a product of personal development, of moving from the old fear paradigm to one of trust and of recognizing that humankind is evolving both socially and spiritually. Individuals can evolve far faster than the collective if they decide to embark on a personal developmental journey. Given the leadership failures that are so apparent today, a little compulsory evolution would do our leaders no harm at all. In practice the coaching process fosters evolution at every stage, for evolution emerges from within and can never be taught in prescriptive ways.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the verb to coach as to “tutor, train, give hints to, prime with facts.” This does not help us much, for those things can be done in many ways, some of which bear no relationship to coaching. Coaching is as much about the way these things are done as about what is done. Coaching delivers results in large measure because of the supportive relationship between the coach and the coachee, and the means and style of communication used. The coachee does acquire the facts, not from the coach but from within himself, stimulated by the coach. Of course, the objective of improving performance is paramount, but how that is best achieved is what is in question.

In spite of the variety of definitions of mentoring (and the variety of names it is given, from coaching or counselling to sponsorship) all the experts and communicators appear to agree that it has its origins in the concept of apprenticeship, when an older, more experienced individual passed down his knowledge of how the task was done and how to operate in the commercial world. I’m afraid I disagree. The effect of coaching is not dependent on “an older, more experienced individual passing down his knowledge.” Coaching requires expertise in coaching but not in the subject at hand. That is one of its great strengths.

To use coaching successfully we have to adopt a far more optimistic view than usual of the dormant capability of all people. Pretending we are optimistic is insufficient because our genuine beliefs are conveyed in many subtle ways of which we are not aware.

EXPERIMENT That our beliefs about the capability of others have a direct impact on their performance has been adequately demonstrated in a number of experiments from the field of education. In these tests teachers are told, wrongly, that a group of average pupils are either scholarship candidates or have learning difficulties. They teach a set curriculum to the group for a period of time. Subsequent academic tests show that the pupils’ results invariably reflect the false beliefs of their teachers about their ability. It is equally true that the performance of employees will reflect the beliefs of their managers. For example, Fred sees himself as having limited potential. He feels safe only when he operates well within his prescribed limit. This is like his shell. His manager will only trust him with tasks within that shell. The manager will give him task A, because he trusts Fred to do it and Fred is able to do it. The manager will not give him task B, because he sees this as beyond Fred’s capability. He sees only Fred’s performance, not his potential. If he gives the task to the more experienced Jane instead, which is expedient and understandable, the manager reinforces or validates Fred’s shell and increases its strength and thickness. He needs to do the opposite, to help Fred venture outside his shell, to support or coach him to success with task B. To use coaching successfully we have to adopt a far more optimistic view than usual of the dormant capability of all people. Pretending we are optimistic is insufficient because our genuine beliefs are conveyed in many subtle ways of which we are not aware.

The healthiest fats are mono- and polyunsaturated fats, mainly found in plant and fish oils.

you shouldn’t make decisions based on the internal state of an object and then update that object.

Today, in 2020, I cannot see the future, but my instincts tell me that we are going to experience a replay of the first Great American Depression of the 1930’s, and that it will happen before the 100 year anniversary of that last one. (Keep in mind the uselessness of such personal premonitions) (Update September 2020 in light of record setting stock market valuations (for some companies) while economies were still under water) The above made so little sense, it became possible to imagine that certain companies had a pipeline to free Federal reserve cash.