Coaching
If you have engaged a professional coach in the past, you might know a lot about how coaching works and can be effective. But if you haven’t worked with a coach before, there are a couple of things I’d like to share about how I work.
A typical coaching engagement consists video calls, usually once every couple of weeks for about an hour, and lasts for a predetermined period of time.
Coaching is confidential. What we discuss in private stays in private. I will not discuss your coaching engagement with your supervisor, employer, spouse, parent, or anyone else without your specific, prior written consent.
A good coaching engagement has goals and is designed to be supportive of you, personally, in your own growth and development. You own the process, you direct where we go and what we talk about.
Coaching is entirely voluntary, and you should never feel pressured into a coaching engagement when the time might not be right.
You should be able to speak with your coach at a time and place that maximize your trust and sense of confidentiality. I am happy to take scheduled calls in the early morning and late evenings to fit your cadence and schedule.
If you are interested, we should arrange a call at your convenience, and talk a little more about you and what a coaching engagement might look like. To set up a call, feel free to write me at john.b.brown@gmail.com.
What People Talk About in Coaching...
I had built a network of trusting professional relationships in healthcare and education that naturally evolved in the direction of contemporary coaching, and today, I’ve met with amazing people from around the world. Along the way I’ve observed some patterns about what people bring to coaching.
People who seek out coaching tend overwhelmingly to be high achievers. They come to coaching as an act of introspection and self-improvement, to try and get it right, just like the high self-expectations seen in elite athletes.
Even then, people start safe. They’ll talk about their careers or school, about challenging situations at work, or their upcoming performance evaluation, but they’ll stay with emotionally safe topics. And they’ll watch you. Coaches who give advice guarantee that their clients will stay in the safe zone, and that the coaching engagement will be short lived. Once you give advice, you’ve assumed that you know better than the person you’re giving the advice to, and they feel that agenda. But when you listen, and only ask questions to clarify your own understanding, trust begins to build. In subsequent sessions, people begin to reveal more about themselves, particularly things that make them feel isolated and vulnerable. There are very few places where you can explore an idea or a set of thoughts that make you feel vulnerable without having some consequence or agenda for having explored it. Confidentiality and careful listening is where it's just like elite athletes. People let you in their heads and work on their own inner barriers with you. Shame and embarrassment fall away, and your natural motivation to feel better, to think clearly and objectively, to be better and to do better.
It doesn’t take long. Successful coaching engagements don't have to take forever. A number of researchers have demonstrated significant ROI on making coaching available to executives, while others have shown coaching to be effective at every level of an organization, and particularly with those who are direct supervisors or charged with leading people. Even more research has shown coaching to be effective for anyone navigating change, like going to college, leaving treatment, changing jobs and growing up.
A confidential space with no agenda is rare: everybody wants something from you. Coaching brings careful listening and exploring complex, nuanced ideas, particularly those that cause ambivalence, discomfort and vulnerability, that allow you to sort out thoughts, find the salient themes, and decide what’s most important for you. These conversations are frequently about family, children, debt, loss, grief, resentment, failure, expectations, health, and fear. It’s not therapy, people are functioning just fine. It’s the weight of life, of responsibility, of developing wisdom and sensibility around change and growth.
Am I the right coach for you?
The best way to decide that is for us to meet and chat. If you are reading this, you were probably referred to me by someone with whom we are both connected. Let's have an initial phone call (always a courtesy and always free; you should expect that from a coach), and if I'm not the right person, I may be able to direct you to information, resources, and people who are experts in the specific areas that are important to you. That's my commitment to the person who referred you and why I receive repeat referrals.