After taking the whole month off for a variety of holidays (and variety is the word - the month started with a week of Tai Chi training and ended with a week in Ibiza) I am back and preparing for a number of coaching sessions later this week. So it struck me it would be good to write something about my learning around preparation - particularly for coaching, but equally applicable to any business meeting.
My approach mirrors the way I help clients to look at what is really going on by using three lenses. FIrst I pay attention to myself - how am I feeling, both physically and emotionally, what am I thinking about, what will I need to do to be able to be fully present (ie at my best)? Second I focus on the other person and wonder about what is going on for them. What do I know about who they are, their character style, preferences etc? I also notice how I am feeling about meeting up with them again. Finally, I think about the (coaching) context and the assumed roles we have taken in our previous (coaching) meetings. How helpful are they to achieving our mutual goals?
What I don't spend a lot of time on nowadays is thinking about my coachee's challenge. I maybe over-emphasise this point because I know that with my natural preference for problem solving and task achievement, I could easily become pre-occupied with it. And the purpose of coaching is not for me to work out my solution to the challenge, it's to help them work out theirs. Even in my consulting career, I learnt early on that content is only a small part of preparation. Some wise words from one of my early managers come back to me: "If you want to spend x% of the time on the client's agenda, only prepare (100-x)% of the content". I guess in coaching I now want to be virtually 100% on my client's agenda so I try to plan virtually 0% of the content.
A simple example from a while back will maybe bring this to life. Preparing for my third session with a client, I noticed I was working much too hard thinking about their challenge and how they could make progress on it. I realised this was because I was feeling anxious about whether I was really helping - not my best state for coaching. I then also remembered that my client was very introverted (vs my extraversion), so there might be a lot going on for them below the surface and my "pushing" to make "better" progress wasn't going to help it emerge. I could also see its potential for creating the wrong dynamic between us - me taking too much responsibility in my role and them taking too little. As a result of this preparation, I relaxed and (with a quieter mind) became more receptive, I created space to find out what was going on for them (by sharing my anxiety and listening to their perspective), and we actually had a great session exploring some areas they had been reflecting deeply upon following our previous session.
So even in preparation, the power to change comes from what you become aware of because of what you pay attention to.
