Looking Back - Realising I needed coaching

Going back in time again, and following on from last weeks post:

I had been coaching people for a number of months. Its really strange. You can spend a lot of time with people who want to address their own issues. They know what they want to deal with but don’t know how to deal with it.

Sitting opposite them, exercising my listening skills, showing them support and encouragement is easy. It’s a fantastic experience watching them grow and learning to understand how deal with their issues.

But its very easy to associate with their issues and think – “that’s me”. I knew I had confidence issues, I knew I had to deal with them. I have all these new coaching skills – so why can I so easily help other people and yet not apply this skill-set to myself?

So that’s when I made the decision to get myself a coach......

Looking Back - Coaching People

Its been a while since I posted one of my looking back posts, so I thought you might like to see the next stage of my journey. Previously I talked about the Coaching for Success course

I loved coaching those few people. In all I coached 4 people. It seemed that although each one of them very different individuals, all four of them had deep routed confidence issues. But each one had to be handled differently.

M was in a new job and thrilled to be there. Yet she was coming up against people and situations that she didn’t know how to deal with. I expected that we needed to explore some confidence tricks. She shocked in one session. She stated she’d realised as a result of our sessions that the job wasn’t what she wanted and she was going to speak to her manager about going back to her old job.

OMG! I was horrified. Had I done this? Was her manager going to come after me with an axe?

Actually what happened was her manager was very sympathetic and listened to and helped resolve some of the issues she was facing, giving her the support she needed. She’s still in the job and very happy too. And she gave me some great feedback.

I guess what actually happened was that the coaching allowed her to explore what was in her control to deal with. And she dealt with it in the way she needed to which was having a very frank discussion with her manager. Without the coaching she might never have faced it.

It made me proud!

See previous looking back post