Coaching Lights Intro

The lights of coaching provide guidance for coaches. Coaching is not linear, so coaching and conversational navigation are important. The streetlights of coaching categorize questions and activities based on the coaching relationship. The learning project provides consistent frameworks for coaching conversations. The motivator section helps coaches understand what motivates their clients. Supplemental coaching strategies and resources are also provided. The lights of coaching are exactly what they sound like. It is shedding more light on what you can do as a coach. Now, one of the fatal flaws that a lot of people will exhibit when they start coaching is they're going to want, what's the right question for this scenario? What's the right activity? You know, what's the right way to present feedback in this situation? Coaching is not literal. It's not linear. You have to have what we call coaching and conversational navigation. The whole design of the lights of coaching is to give you that depth. Now, the first two sections, questions and activities, are presented in the streetlights of coaching. The green, yellow, and red streetlights. Green indicates we just started our coaching relationship. We just got started. The yellow means we've been at this a while. Something needs to improve. And the red light is we've been at this a while. Something really needs to improve in a short period of time. We've kept it a little open-ended, yet as you go down the colors from green to yellow to red, the tactics and strategies become more aggressive. And that's the general framework. The next section, which is going to be written in a very boring, very standard format, in the learning project, the L of PLOMS, is basically ties the coaching conversations together. So if you're coaching someone in accountability, you might say, Jill, next we come in with two examples of where you've successfully followed through and demonstrated great accountability, and maybe one where you felt a little bit hindered and why. The learning project, those suggested frameworks that are in that section are very boring, but they're meant to be that way. A learning project should be consistent and the same, typically throughout the coaching relationship, specific to the area that you're coaching. So if you're coaching someone to get better at accountability, that's going to take sometimes seven, eight, nine, 10, up to 12 to 15 coaching sessions to create that sustainable, predictable result. It's not going to be one conversation or two conversations. That's why the learning project is written in the format that you'll see. Next. Next section is the M, the motivator. And what we did in this section is we actually give you an illustration of how to bring in your understanding of what motivates someone into your coaching conversations. So when you tell somebody they need to get better at feedback, it's much different when you say you need to get better at feedback and assuming we get better, how will that help you become a future leader, assuming their goal is to become a future leader? When you can bring in somebody's motivator, their motivation, their width, what's in it for them into a conversation that you're coaching to another area or a specific area of development, their emotional attachment to change becomes much more readily accepted and becomes more plausible to accept the coaching and the insight where they need to improve. Last, supplemental coaching. This is probably one of the areas that people love the most. We're going to give you suggested strategies and then a little bit more aggressive suggested strategies and then we're going to give you some suggested resources and information in terms of books and articles and videos that you can use. Supplemental coaching does not take you any time. So much like a doctor, you're going to prescribe one, two, or three supplemental coaching strategies to support your direct coaching, which is the questions, activities, and learning project. If you have any questions, let us know.