Coachability Activities

Coachability is an important aspect of receiving coaching and feedback. It involves listening, not emotionally reacting, self-regulation, and self-awareness. Feedback alone is not coachability, but it is a byproduct. When giving feedback, people tend to become emotional. To help develop coachability, activities can be done to encourage reflection and learning from feedback. Taking time to digest feedback before reacting can be helpful. Asking questions about what has been learned and how to improve going forward are also useful. Now, if you're accessing our audio lessons, this will become somewhat of a repetitive, tired message, and that's the following. When you think about coachability, and you think about receiving coaching, and you receive feedback or thoughts or observations, it takes practice. See, so often we do all this training, and when you think about a term called coachability, there are things such as listening, not emotionally reacting, self-regulation, self-awareness, two major tenets of emotional intelligence. In really reflecting and listening, see, here's the funny thing about, let's just use feedback. Now, feedback alone is not coachability, but it's a byproduct. It is certainly an attribute within the coaching realm of doing things. When you receive feedback, do people calm down, or do they emotionally get charged? Few will stay neutral, so if you give someone, let's say, constructive feedback, does that calm them down, or does it make them emotional? It typically makes people emotional, so activities could be, I'm going to give you some feedback, and I want you to just tell me how you feel in the moment, and that could be round one. Round two could be, I'm going to give you feedback, and then what I'm going to do is, I'm going to give us a 15-minute soda coffee break. Then let's come back 15 minutes later, and then tell me how you feel. What that typically does is it teaches people over time, don't react in the moment, digest what you've learned, and then you can use activities with questions, such as, now after reflecting, what have you learned? What have you learned about yourself you're positively committed to improving? What are you going to do going forward to reflect when you get coaching and feedback and mentoring?