Covid 19 – Support from the coaching community

Covid 19 special

We hope you and your loved ones are healthy and safe at this time, but know so many people will be feeling isolated or cut off from their normal lives. As a coach, this will also include our professional networks and clients, so we hope this blog will encourage you to reach out to the people around you and share some helpful tips and tricks from the coaching world.

Checking in

Many of us already make full use of video and telephone coaching, so we are in contact with some clients and can adapt our conversations with them and support progress towards their goals.

However, the current restrictions will impact on our ability to support all of our clients and we may also see some unable to continue with their sessions. It is therefore essential we all review our full client lists and check in with everybody, whether or not we have a scheduled meeting or phone call. Some will be feeling isolated and cut off, but through our coaching sessions with them, we will have valuable insight into how well they will be coping with the restrictions currently in place.

So, how can a professional coach help?

The way communities normally come together and provide support for each other is not possible right now because we need to stay physically separated, so let’s tap into the skills and experience we do have as professional coaches and share that knowledge.

Many of us have websites and social media accounts that can be used to post simple tips, tricks and techniques from the coaching world.

For example:

• You could share some tips on stress management or simple meditation
• Write a short blog post on the importance of staying calm and listening to our feelings
• Post a video talking about how to stay in control of the space around us
• Talk to friends and family about some of the ways they can measure the impact this is having on them

It is of course vital we ensure we all check the latest Government advice, but please make full use of the skills and knowledge you have, use your voice to stay connected and share anything that could be helpful.

Some practical ideas from MyCoachingToolkit

So, to kick things off and provide you with some simple ideas, we looked through our coaching manual to see what you could paste into your social media:

• Focus on key information relevant to the issue at hand – This will help you get a sense of distance and perspective, especially with 24 hr rolling news. It can all be really overwhelming, so our tip is to check the trusted news sources and avoid any that make you feel anxious. Switch off news alerts and only watch the news once a day to give you the head space needed to focus on other things.
• Create an atmosphere of trust and collaboration – This will help support the people around you, to identify and overcome any obstacles together. We are seeing great examples of communities finding ways to offer support, so this current crisis is also an opportunity to show just how much we really care for the people around us. It can also be really helpful to share some of the more positive stories you read or anything that made you smile, because it could do the same for somebody else.
• Explore new behaviour and find a solution together – This will help you listen to your emotions and make sense of how you feel about the current ‘stay home’ restrictions. Remember, it’s not what happens that counts, but how you process what is happening and more importantly how you feel about it. Take time out to listen to your own internal dialogue and then offer to listen to how the people around you are feeling. Encourage them to look for solutions and find a new approach because normal options may be limited.

Stay positive, stay healthy

We know how important a healthy body can be in supporting a healthy mind, so in addition to maintaining a healthy and balanced diet, we wanted to give you a couple of tips on keeping active, no matter how much space you have around you.

These can be good for us as coaches, but may also be something else you can paste into your social media:

• Laughter yoga – Stand with your feet shoulder -width apart and bend over at the waist with your arms hanging down. Shake out your arms as you slowly roll up and laugh out loud with every shake. Once standing upright with your arms above your head, shout “hurray, hurray, hurray” as loud as you can.
• Make like a Gorilla – With clenched fists, thump your chest and make monkey noises and animal grunts. If you have space to move around, jump as you do it and walk around with bent knees getting louder until you finish with a roar.

Try doing these with the people in your home for a positive start to each day or go out into your garden and encourage your neighbours to join in from over the fence.

And finally… Stay connected

We are a new resource centre and our vision is to support an international network of professional coaches like you, so we want to encourage you to:

• Reach out to your clients and other people around you to see how they are coping and if you can help them work through any worries or concerns they have
• Use your voice on social media to post some of the hints, tips and tricks we have suggested from our coaching manual
• Come together as a community of professional coaches to share your knowledge, experience and ideas to support each other through this global pandemic

We really hope you will find this blog post helpful and supportive as its the first in a short series of similar blogs that will focus on giving the professional coaching community ideas for how to use your skills and knowledge to support each other and your clients. The next will focus on resilience and then we will look at how we spot and manage stress in a time of crisis like this, plus some simple meditation techniques you can use or share.

Please feel free to get in touch and let us know if you do use any of these ideas, or just let us know what you are doing to support others as it may be something we can share across our network.

As we don’t know what the future holds, or how our family or businesses will cope, we plan to use this time to focus on staying positive and share that energy with the people around us.