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4 Things They Don’t Teach You in Coaching School

October 20, 2020

This article was originally published in November 2016 and updated on October 20, 2020.

Do you know the book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? It’s a marvelous book written by a Seattle-area author, Robert Fulghum. I wish I could write the same book about coaching school: All I Really Need to Know About Coaching I Learned in Coaching School

However, after 15 plus years of coaching, I’m realizing how much I didn’t learn about coaching in either of the two certified coaching programs I completed.

While I really could write a whole book about what I didn’t learn about coaching in school, I’m focusing this article on four key insights I’ve gained from thousands of coaching hours, much of which has felt like trial and error. I’m hoping these four key concepts that most coaching schools don’t emphasize will help make your learning curve steeper than mine was!

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Posted in: Business of Coaching|Coaching

A Coach’s Guide to Common Client Blindspots

August 27, 2020

As coaches, we are always creating awareness in our clients. While all the ICF Core Competencies are important, creating awareness is perhaps the most central competency to coaching. 

Our clients hire us because they want something to change, about themselves, their lives, their careers, their leadership, and/or their relationships. If they could change it themselves, they would. And often our clients can’t change what they are wanting to change because they can’t see what’s getting in their way.  

Oftentimes, what’s in their way —the obstacle lying between where, how, and who they are and where, how, and who they want to be — is some aspect of themselves.

Our clients typically can’t see what’s getting in the way of their change. The obstacle to their growth is so ingrained, so conflated with the frame and lens through which they see others, themselves and the world, that they can’t see it. It’s in their blindspot.

After thousands of coaching sessions working with hundreds of clients, I’ve learned to spot a few common blindspots that create obstacles to a client’s growth. It was only after seeing these blindspots over and over through the lens of attachment theory and relational intelligence, that I began to see some obvious patterns emerge. 

Here are three of the most common client blindspots:

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Posted in: Business of Coaching|Coaching

Common Coaching BlindSpots: What You Need to Know

August 11, 2020

We all have blindspots. Even us coaches. It’s part of how we humans have learned to survive – narrowing down what we focus on, labeling our experience to reduce energy drain, projecting our past onto the present to increase predictability.  It’s normal.

Part of our role as coaches is to be doing our own work constantly – identifying our own blindspots, understanding our habituated patterns, expanding what’s above the line and shrinking what’s below the line of our conscious awareness. We do this work in coach training. We do this so that our blindspots, our patterns, our conditioning don’t get in the way of our coaching.  

And yet, they do. We can’t rid ourselves of all of our blindspots. Because we’re human. All we can do is to keep looking for them. 

After having worked with and trained coaches for many years, we’ve identified three common coaching blindspots – coaching choices made by coaches that reflect the patterning of the coach and negatively impact the coaching. (more…)

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Posted in: Business of Coaching|Coaching

How to Fill Your Unused Coaching Capacity

October 11, 2018

Last week, we at Learning in Action, turned our attention to what we could do to help you fill your unused coaching capacity. (That time when you could be and would want to be coaching, if you had the coachees to fill it.) We are passionate about helping coaches thrive in their chosen profession.  

And we believe that both coachees and coaches can languish because of the challenges in finding each other. Marketing, sales and promotion are not necessarily a strong suit for many coaches. And most coachees don’t know the first thing about coaching, coaches, what they are looking for or where to find them.

That’s why we hosted our monthly podinar, Coaching At Capacity: How to Fill Your Calendar with Paid Coaching Time. We invited Chip Carter, Senior Advisor with LeaderJam and the Institute of Coaching, to talk with us about platforms that match coaches to coachees. If you’d like to watch and/or listen to our 90 minute conversation, you can tune in here.

Note: We’re grateful to Chip Carter for providing all the platform information in our podinar, and for verifying the information. This blog is based on that information.

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Posted in: Business of Coaching

FREE PODINAR: Coaching at Capacity with Guest Chip Carter

August 3, 2018

SEPTEMBER PODINAR: COACHING AT CAPACITY

Learning in Action’s Live Monthly Podinar for Executive Coaches

FRI. SEPT. 28, 2018. 7:30-9:00 am PT / 10:30-12:00 noon ET

REGISTER HERE

COACHING AT CAPACITY
with guest Chip Carter, MTS
Senior Advisor at LeaderJam and Institute of Coaching

Join Chip Carter and Alison Whitmire, president of Learning in Action, for discussion and Q&A around how to think about your coaching capacity, how coaches can fill their capacity in a number of ways, how coaches can think about coaching at different price points.

In this presentation, we’ll cover questions like these:
– Should I reduce my rates to get more clients?
– Would I get more clients if I reduced my rate?
– How much time should I be spending on my existing clients versus finding new ones?
– What are all of the options for finding new clients?
– What would optimize my financial and other goals?
– How much coaching per week do I want to do and how can I fill my calendar to my chosen capacity?

Attendees will leave with their own answers to these questions, and more, so they can best coach to their own capacity.

*** Ask your questions when you register or during the live event. We’ll get to as many as we can! ***

REGISTER HERE

ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Chip Carter is a Senior Advisor, Strategy & Expert Network at LeaderJam. His expertise includes coaching, technology, business process, marketing.

ABOUT OUR PODINARS:
Learning in Action’s monthly podinars are moderated by Alison Whitmire, president of Learning in Action.
The intent of our podinars is to support executive coaches:
• To provide the best coaching possible for their clients
• To make a thriving, successful living as professional coaches

ABOUT LEARNING IN ACTION:
We offer individuals, teams, and organizations effective tools and methods for enhancing Emotional Intelligence in relationship, in conflict, in real-time. Serving leadership development professionals and executive coaches worldwide.

– THIS PODINAR WILL BE RECORDED. REGISTRANTS RECEIVE RECORDING and notice of future podinars.

REGISTER HERE

 

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Posted in: Business of Coaching|Coaching|Podinar Series