Coaching news
Overcoming perfectionism in the business world
Perfectionism in business can be a double-edged sword. While striving for excellence can lead to high-quality work, it can also create stress, delay progress, and stifle creativity. Coaching often involves helping individuals and teams find a balance between high standards and practical productivity.
Here’s a structured approach step by step to address perfectionism in your coaching practice:
STEP 1 : Understanding Perfectionism
STEP 2 : Recognising the Impact
STEP 3 : Setting Realistic Standards
STEP 4 : Embracing Imperfection
STEP 5 : Time Management and Prioritisation
STEP 6 : Continuous Improvement
Three tools to expand your coaching skills
A good coach possesses a combination of personal attributes, coaching skills and knowledge that combine to provide effective guidance and support to clients.
Personal traits:
Ability to empathise with the feelings and experiences of others. Patience to give clients time to grow and achieve their goals. Honesty and reliability to gain and maintain clients’ trust.
Professional skills:
Active and attentive listening. Asking the right questions for deeper insights and promoting self-reflection on the part of the coachee. A good coach can help clients identify problems and find effective solutions
Knowledge and expertise:
A good coach has a solid foundation in the theories and techniques of coaching. Experience helps a coach to recognise and deal effectively with a wide range of situations. A good coach is committed to continuous professional development through courses, workshops and literature.
Emotional Intelligence : a challenge for coaches
Coaches have heard for years about emotional intelligence (EI). As coaches we want to have an impact and connect more deeply with our clients and provide more impactful and meaningful coaching experiences.
Emotional intelligence is the basis of coaching for both parties. If both the coach and the client are fully aware and in control of their emotions, their communication is smooth and effective.
Being aware of our emotions is essential to bring the right coaching presence to the session and handle anything that can happen skillfully and effectively.
But what makes it challenging for coaches to apply Emotional Intelligence?
Identifying and overcoming the challenges presented by the Imposter Syndrome
The Imposter Syndrome, the persistent feeling of inadequacy despite evident success, is a common challenge among coachees as well as coaches. This psychological pattern leads individuals to doubt their abilities and fear being exposed as a “fraud,” even when they are highly competent and accomplished.
The Imposter syndrome often manifests through:
Perfectionism
Setting extremely high standards and feeling inadequate when these standards are not met.
Attribution of Success to External Factors
Believing success is due to luck or other external factors rather than one’s own abilities.
Fear of Failure
Avoiding challenges due to the fear of being exposed as incompetent.
Downplaying Accomplishments
Dismissing praise and undervaluing one’s achievements.
It’s interesting to observe how Coaches, whether in the context of executive, career, life, or performance coaching, play a pivotal role in addressing and balancing the effects of imposter syndrome.
Resilience and neuroscience…What do they have in common?
Resilience is one of the latest buzzwords. But what exactly are we talking about?
What is resilience?
Resilience is a psychological phenomenon in which an individual affected by trauma (difficult or stressful situations) acknowledges the traumatic event and adapts by overcoming the obstacles to recover better and bounce back. Hence, the individual can rebuild his or her life in a way that is socially acceptable to him or herself and to others.
Research also shows that resilience is linked to what neuroscientists call cerebral plasticity or neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to reorganise and remodel itself in response to changes in the environment. This cerebral plasticity can itself be stimulated by regular training and the repetition of new behaviours. Neuroscience therefore helps us to better understand the underlying mechanisms of resilience by examining how the brain processes and regulates stress and emotion.
I am great !
A couple of years ago, I had a coaching session that ended up being deeply moving for us both. We were meeting for the second time. The coachee started out by chattering about a number of things that seemed unrelated to any goal, and I found myself getting impatient. After a few minutes, I interrupted and said something like :
« I am still not clear about what you would like to get out of this conversation. We don’t have many sessions together, and I want to make sure that we have a discussion today that you consider very, very important. How can we do that ?»
Structure your Coaching with the Vital Questions Framework
The Vital Questions Framework is a simple, clear but extremely powerful means of structuring coaching sessions. It consists of a two by two matrix which looks at the task and the people aspects of any situation and then further divides the areas into those that are external to the person and those that are internal.
Coaching for individuals
To start, Coaching for individuals covers an infinite range of issues, especially as each person is unique in his or her being, experiences and projects.
Recurring themes in coaching requests from individuals: a better work-life balance, developing self-confidence or self-esteem, defining a new life project, resolving a relationship conflict, managing stress better, developing your interpersonal and communication skills, rediscovering motivation.
Why you should think of your personal brand as an Italian tomato
When we are surrounded by different cultures and experiences, we can gain valuable insights and perspective on our own lives. On a recent trip to the Amalfi coast in Italy, I was struck by the variety and quality of the produce available, especially the tomatoes. This made me think about personal branding and how we can learn from the humble Italian tomato.
Can parents and teenagers avoid communication issue ?
As a coach, you may be confronted with this issue. Your coachees may also be parents who are tired, worried and often powerless to cope with their teenagers’ unhappiness or explosive reactions. It’s your job to encourage them to explore the feelings they are experiencing: the loss of their young child (whom they understood so well), sadness at feeling rejected, anger at no longer being respected, feelings of uselessness or powerlessness, fear of the future…
The real cause of your procrastination in marketing
Are you an adept of procrastination ? Are you procrastinating on the activities you need to do to bring clients?
Does procrastination lead to experiencing shame, guilt, and disappointment as a result?
If this is a familiar scenario, you probably regularly beat yourself up for your laziness or lack of willpower and blame yourself for not trying hard enough
A Journey Through the Lens of the 3 Brains: Insights from a Transformative Experience
Christoffel Sneijders’s recent exploration into the concept of the 3 brains – the intellectual head, the empathetic heart, and the instinctual gut – has been nothing short of transformative. This journey, rooted in the fascinating interplay between these three aspects of our psyche, opened his eyes to a new realm of understanding human behavior and communication.
Deepen your coaching practice by reading Ralph Lewis
Ralph Lewis is a coach and author, trained as a physicist. He worked in Information Systems, and as a lecturer. He uses Jung’s typology in helping individuals and organisations.
How to use the “Bono Six Thinking Hats” technique in your coaching practice
This technique based on “6 Thinking Hats” is a communication and reasoning tool to see from new perspectives by applying lateral thinking. It is used in coaching to help individuals or teams change perspective, think more effectively and make more informed decisions.
Can deeper self-awareness help you reverse engineer your performance?
“The mystery of who you really are is hidden in your body, and only your body can reveal it to you.” … Said Dr. de Jager, founder of the Mind Dynamix ® Institute. This statement reinforces the idea that our bodies and brains hold the key to unlocking our true potential.
Enabling young people to play an active role for their studies and careers by making informed choices
At a time when employee commitment is waning due to remote working, enabling teams to work on a common project is a good way of strengthening team spirit. It is by being united around the same objective that a team can continue to be cohesive and motivated.
How can you help strengthen team spirit?
At a time when employee commitment is waning due to remote working, enabling teams to work on a common project is a good way of strengthening team spirit. It is by being united around the same objective that a team can continue to be cohesive and motivated.
Isn’t Gratitude a good topic to start the new Year?
Introducing Gratitude in the workplace means making a commitment to an environment where every employee feels valued for who they are and not just for what they do. Values as human qualities are put forward and not just values directly linked to the performance of tasks.
Why is an annual review important?
To know where you’re going, it’s important to know where you have come from. This is why an annual review is so important. Formal or informal, exhaustive, or not, the aim is for it to be relevant and, above all, useful to you. It will help you prepare for the coming year.
My coaching dashboard
Fantastic, simple and practical tool to use to fully monitor your coaching sessions and also in discussions with supervisors. Read more
How to Successfully Coach Emotions ?
As a coach, we can help our clients to manage their emotions more effectively, so that they can achieve their goals, feel more focused and aligned in their daily lives. Let’s look at six tips for coaching emotions.
