Ian Dodds Consulting’s (IDC) Monthly Best Practice: July 2016

By Ian Dodds – The Inclusion Builder

Coaching that delivers success

My coaching work and experience stretches over 30 years. In that time I have coached hundreds of people from many different backgrounds and a wide age range with:

Performance Coaching: which is designed to improve performance against current objectives, and often focuses on where a person is ‘falling short’, or on helping them acquire a capability they do not yet have. Performance coaching takes place in a context of ‘what has been’ and ‘what is’. It is improvement-oriented rather than transformational. In a sense, it is about ‘fixing’, rather than creating.

Transition Coaching: which is designed to assist people to deal with both the emotional and practical consequences of change which impacts on them significantly. Its aim is to enable people to move through the transition experience more skilfully and with fewer problems than they would experience if left to their own devices.

Transformational Coaching: which is designed to help people achieve breakthroughs in performance by changing who they are being. A breakthrough would be something that currently appears extremely challenging or impossible.

Life coaching: which enables coachees to envision how they want the main areas of their life to be in 10 years’ time and develop an action plan for achieving them.

In my coaching I sometimes use positive psychology methods to enable the coachee to build confidence. This involves them generating with my help 4 positive affirmations about themselves. They then repeat these to themselves morning and evening and imagine themselves: doing the action in the affirmation well; being admired by people for doing it well; feeling good for doing it well. I also get them to stop all negative self-talk. This creates new self-belief and neural wiring through repetition. This technique has proved effective in helping coachees build confidence before important job interviews. It has also proved powerful when I’m coaching clients to build their presentation skills and confidence prior to their being the keynote speaker at a major conference.

Another technique I use is to get coachees to envision what they want success to look like for themselves in, say, 3 years’ time. I then help them plan how they are going to get from where they are now to their vision of future success. This in turn leads to coaching them on overcoming barriers which they perceive they will need to overcome. This has proved powerful in coaching owners of new start-up businesses.

As well as being a qualified coach I am a qualified counsellor and, sometimes, when I’m coaching the coachee raises something which requires me to warp into counselling mode with them. This proved particularly useful in 2 cases where I was coaching directors who had been abused as children and wanted to talk about it as it was now tens of years later and they had not been able to talk about it to anyone. It also proved powerful with a gay client who needed to work on being disowned by his parents when he was a teenager as this was still, 15 years on, damaging his confidence.

If you would like to know more about my approach to coaching please contact me to have a discussion.

Dr Ian Dodds,

iandodds@iandoddsconsulting.com,

www.iandoddsconsulting.com,

29 June 2016

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