One of the foundation philosphies of coaching is the GROW model and it works really well however an experience coach will advise you that this is only one way of skinning a cat and how important it is not to allow your values and beliefs to become stifled by one way of thinking.

When I first started out as a coach I came armed with one model (GROW) with a set of principles I had adopted which reflected my own approach to coaching. After all I had to define myself as a coach and part and parcel of this was having an approach and set of principles which I could stand by. I liked to consider myself having a results focused bias helping my clients come to swift conclusions and take tangible actions, none of this woolly ‘let’s have a chat’ type scenario.

Unfortunately (or fortunately perhaps) I soon realised that mindset was really limiting…both to my progression as a coach and to the development of my clients. I found that I had several clients with whom I really gelled and with whom my approach worked really well, but all too often I was wondering what my clients were really getting from their sessions – and looking back I realise two things were happening. First, some clients were genuinely getting real benefit from the sessions, I just wasn’t realising it as I was measuring success in a different way to my coachees. Even if they said they found a session useful I didn’t truly believe it as they weren’t coming away with big visible actions. Secondly some clients weren’t getting a huge benefit as I was so focused on helping them move forward with actions when what they really wanted was to spend more time exploring their current reality and raising their awareness.

A turning point came for me when as part of a larger leadership programme I was ‘allocated’ some coachees. One of these coachees had not been coached before so he didn’t know what to expect and neither had he chosen me so were unaware of how I could help him. It was evident that he didn’t fit my normal preferred profile of coachee – he just wanted to talk about his problems rather than looking to find a way forward. How was I going to help him with the toolkit I had for my action-focused clients?

By this time I had begun to learn more about a solutions-focused approach to coaching and I believed I could help and in the early sessions persisted in taking a solutions-focused approach to help him. Whilst this worked wonderfully for one session it became increasingly evident that this person wasn’t really in a place to think about solutions. What they really needed was firstly someone to talk to and off-load everything on their mind. Whilst in the first session I starting panicking that I had only asked about two questions because all my coachee wanted to do was talk, by the time we had the fourth session I just followed the needs of my coachee and let him open up. During this session so much more was uncovered and I started to tune in to what he really wanted. I then realised that my earlier attempts to find solutions were fruitless and irrelevant as they didn’t address the real underlying issues.

Looking back I can see that a lack of listening by me and a lack of flexibility were the real issues here for me…if I had relaxed and truly listened to my client from the outset, and not been so intent on solutions so early on I would have understood early on and helped my client understand what they really needed. And an increased flexibility would have given me permission to deviate from my set approaches to coaching earlier on.

I would still probably argue that this coachee wasn’t ready for coaching in the conventional sense because in many ways they were not ready to look for solutions however I still had to help and support them and not to do so would have seriously let them down.

My conclusions are that sometimes coaching is just about helping and supporting your coachee and that ‘helping them move forward’ can be as much about helping them gain an awareness about themselves (which can be gained from just articulating their situation) as it is about hard and fast action.

So if you are a coach my advice to you is keep experiencing, keep learning and keep listening!

Author Bio: Louise Yates gives life coaching information to describe what is coaching and what you need to know when choosing a coach. Louise runs her own values based coaching business.

Category: Career
Keywords: coaching, grow coaching model,