Thinking Out Loud
When coaching isn’t the answer
It’s been a while since I shared anything or wrote anything — or worked, for that matter. Three months in fact. There’s been a period of absence from social media and a period of absence more generally. There was a reason for that. I went through several days of complete and total darkness. I was […]
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Coaching
Coaching Supervision
Mentor Coaching
Notes
Teams
Thinking Out Loud
October Notes: Give It Time
Some thoughts on silence, storming, supervision — and why our urge to be useful might be worth paying attention to. I’ve been noticing time lately. Meandering your mid-forties has a way of inviting such reflection! Not in the productivity sense — I’m not about to recommend a new morning routine, a better diary system or […]
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Thinking Out Loud
What My Dog Taught Me About Love and Loss – and Life
I didn’t expect my dog to become one of my greatest teachers. Certainly not in the messy, chaotic way he lived. And definitely not in the way he left. Simba was an absolute rascal.If his brother was the zen of zen dogs (with one exception: electric scooters), Simba was everything else. Full of life. Full […]
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Mentor Coaching
Thinking Out Loud
Becoming a better coach has made me less certain.
When I received my PCC credential, I was enormously proud of it. I still am. There are hours of coaching behind those three letters, along with training, mentor coaching, feedback, recordings, assessments and a fairly substantial amount of wondering whether I was actually getting any better. You would imagine, therefore, that becoming more experienced as […]
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Thinking Out Loud
I wrote a book. That still feels slightly ridiculous.
For more than sixteen years, I wanted to write a book. Sixteen years. I’m not entirely sure what qualifies something as a goal after that length of time because, at some point, presumably it stops being a goal and becomes part of the furniture: something you carry around with you, occasionally point at and say, yes, […]
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Thinking Out Loud
When the diary goes quiet!
“Resilience isn’t just about surviving adversity. It’s about embracing change.”
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Coaching Supervision
When the client gets under your skin
There are coaching sessions that stay with you for all the right reasons. Something shifts. The client sees something differently. You leave the conversation curious about what happened and perhaps even slightly surprised by it. And then there are the other ones. The sessions you continue having long after the client has gone. You replay […]
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Leadership
Coachable Moments…
Not every conversation needs to become a coaching conversation. I probably ought to start there, because once people become interested in coaching — particularly leaders who are learning to use coaching skills — there can be an understandable temptation to coach absolutely everything. Someone asks a relatively straightforward question and suddenly they’re being invited to […]
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Leadership
Coaching. It’s not exactly what you think…
A photograph of me recently prompted an interesting question: What exactly is coaching? I’m in a forest, working with a group of coaches. No training room and certainly none of the imagery we tend to associate with coaching: two people sitting opposite each other in carefully positioned chairs, one leaning forward attentively while the other apparently […]
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Leadership
Thinking Out Loud
16 marathons in 16 weeks…
In the sixteen weeks leading up to the London Marathon, I ran roughly 42 kilometres a week. I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms while I was training; there were long runs, short runs, recovery runs, faster runs and plenty of runs that didn’t particularly resemble whatever was written in the training plan. […]
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Coaching Supervision
Mentor Coaching
What happens when the coach doesn’t know?
There is a moment in coaching that I suspect most coaches know rather well. The client stops talking. Perhaps they have said something unexpected, perhaps the conversation has suddenly gone somewhere you hadn’t anticipated, or perhaps the beautifully formed question that was waiting patiently in your head has become completely irrelevant. Whatever has happened, you […]
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