Strengths Based Coaching
2006 Jack Ricchiuto
Who seeks coaching
The whole idea of people “working with a coach” is a relatively new trend. Historically, coaching was done by mentors. These days, with people, jobs, and careers being highly mobile, people seek coaches because of the flexibility of the relationship.
People come to coaching essentially because they want an objective, experienced guide to help them create some new kind of clarity, confidence, and competence in their work and their life.
In most cases, coaching addresses specific challenges and opportunities related to three core areas of focus:
- Defining priorities in the form of a goal or decision
- Creating an effective plan to support these goals and decisions
- Developing new levels of skill to support these plans
Some of the more common areas people address in coaching are: productivity and time management, relationship and trust building, leadership development, project management, career transitions, life balance, stress management, and communication.
The strengths based approach
I take a strengths based approach to coaching. This means that I help people discover and engage the best parts of themselves in achieving whatever they’re wanting to achieve.
A strengths based approach works from the self-fulfilling expectation that each of us has what it takes to achieve the next steps in the direction of what matters most to us.
A strengths based coach knows from experience that people succeed when they develop new ways of engaging the right strengths they already have, at the right time. The process is an inventive partnership where we’re continuously create new approaches and habits of action in areas of new challenges and opportunities.
The process
In a productive coaching process, the coach provides 3 kinds of value:
- New questions
- Context-specific practice
- Confidence-building feedback
New questions
When people make progress toward greater clarity, competence, and confidence, it's always because they start working from new kinds of questions. These are new questions about themselves, their world, and the possibilities.
In strengths based coaching, people learn to work from questions focused more on their strengths, opportunities, and successes than on their weaknesses, barriers, and disappointments.
New questions help people become conscious and creative in ways they wouldn’t have thought of before. New questions inspire passion that represents a courage and clarity beyond what people have experienced in the past.
Context-specific practice
Making progress toward any goal is a matter of well-timed and effective action - right within the actual contexts where people are hoping to do well. Strengths-based coaching teaches them new ways to engage these strengths. Through practicing in their everyday contexts, they develop new approaches to their goals and challenges.
The learning that happens in coaching is action learning rather than intellectual learning. That's why practice is key to more full engagement of the best parts of ourselves in what we're trying to achieve.
The practice we do in the coaching process is the same kind of practice in any other kind of skill domain, like learning to master sailing, play piano, or cooking. Real-time practice is essential to giving people new recipes for putting their strengths together in new and effective ways.
Confidence-building feedback
Strengths-based coaching helps people develop confidence in their ability to succeed in new ways. To this end, coaching focuses on their progress and success in the process.
It’s important also that people not only understand that they succeed, but also why they succeed. Understanding every step along the way to success helps people understand the strengths they have that can support next steps. When people experience disappointments and setbacks, effective feedback allows them to glean lessons learned for moving forward.
The basics and options in the process
We start the process by defining what the person in coaching wants to achieve and in what timeframe.
Early on, we get a snapshot of the person’s strengths, opportunities, and challenges in the areas of focus. We can do this through assessments, assigned readings, dialogue, and the coach’s live observations of how the person interacts in his/her lived environment.
Although weekly 1-2 hour meetings may be the norm, other arrangements are possible and valuable. Meetings can occur in person or by phone and email can support ongoing work, check-ins, and just-in-time coaching. It all depends on the convenience of the partners in the process.
In a strengths based coaching process, the person engaged in coaching shapes the direction and tempo. We move in the direction of their passions, interests, and goals. We move at the pace they want to move in.
The coach doesn’t presume to know better what the person want to know and achieve. The process is rooted in trust of the person’s wisdom. After all, the core of coaching is aimed at helping people discover more faith in themselves than they ever have before.
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