The Softer Side of Psychological Safety
And me? I am a product of a very different time and way of working. I’ve done (and still do) my time in a therapist’s chair, I read studies and self-help books and practice practice practice, I let my clients and teams see my emotions. I’m an open book. Part of my strength as a coach is my willingness to be soft with those I serve. My willingness to be open started us off on equal footing. Because I had also stepped into vulnerability, it made it easier for them to wade into those troubled waters.
Cleaning Up Your Questions
Clean language is worthy of a deep dive all its own, and one day, I’ll get there. But today is not that day. This is the day to focus on how Clean language can help you to clean up the questions you use in coaching and mentoring sessions, in organizational retrospectives, and in any conversation with clients. Here is the question that drives this blog post: As coaches, how do we clean up our questions?
The Right Headspace for Coaching
Coaching is for you, not to you. It’s time to let go of thinking that there is a single, perfect time to do the work because there is no such time. The right headspace for coaching is the headspace you’re in. Let’s use that as our starting point and work from there.
Finding My Blindspots, or the Painful Truth of Admitting My Own Biases
I’m human, fallible and imperfect, and therefore I have biases. But how I handle—not carry, not hide, but handle—these biases is up to me. As I mull this over, I come back to curiosity, to good questions, to starting with heart. I handle my biases by being genuinely curious about another person, to asking great questions that allow them to open up, and double-checking that my own heart is in a good place. Amy Cuddy calls this social bravery, and says that it “something we do first so that we can respect ourselves, not so that others can respect us.” When I handle my biases, forcing myself into social bravery, that is how I come to self-respect.
Three Reasons to Make Metaphors a Coaching Habit
This is all well and good, but why do I want to use metaphors when coaching, be it with organizations, teams, or individuals? Because of this: metaphor doesn’t just help us to describe, it helps us to understand.
Five Powerful Questions for Every Coaching Conversation
There is no shortcut, no formula, for good coaching conversations. Every conversation and session are unique, and as a coach, it is my job to go where the client takes me. These five questions I’ve given here are simply a starting point to help you make your own coaching conversations more impactful and less awful than my first coaching sessions.
Kindness as an Engine for Personal Growth, or Practicing What I Preach
It wasn’t until I got home that I remembered a question I’d posed to an audience last year while speaking at a conference: What if kindness was an engine for personal growth? Essentially, isn’t that what we were talking about? Weren’t we demonstrating kindness for the other person by caring so much that we would be willing to have the hard conversation, and wasn’t that demonstrated kindness fueling our own growth in return? I cannot help but think yes, to both halves of the equation.
Unraveling with Questions...
And that got me to thinking: are good questions a way to add space around a knot?