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January 2006

Optimizing Your Coaching Experience

By Rayona Sharpneck, Institute for Women's Leadership

Are you getting the absolute most out of your coaching experience? The coaching industry continues growing by leaps and bounds. It seems like everyone has a coach. Even coaches have coaches! Do you need a coach? If you have one, is she the right one for you? What should you talk about to get the best impact for your investment? Are you working well together?

Coaching means different things to different people—counseling, mentoring, problem resolution, or business or personal growth. Regardless of why you engage a coach, and what you’d like to gain, there is a way to make it an effective experience. How you approach it and your attitude towards it make a world of difference.

Consider your coach as your partner in not only accomplishing your goals and addressing your business challenges, but also in developing yourself to the next level of effectiveness. Your coach is 100 percent committed to your success. At the Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL), when we talk about coaching, fundamentally we’re talking about conversations that make a difference to your leadership. Just as an athlete performs different skills to win the game, a leader engages people in conversations to win the game. Your coaching sessions, e-mails, and voicemails will all be conversations between you and your coach focused on creating an impact. The more clarity you have about the desired impact, the more useful the coaching will be.

Some simple guidelines for optimizing your coaching conversations:

Prepare in advance for your coaching session. Think about the impact you want to have with another person in the organization or the business result that you’re intending to accomplish. Ask yourself, “Where am I stuck?” “What is causing me stress, confusion, or tension in my life?”

Be coachable. Some distinctions in coachability are:
- Uncoachable: Operating from a context that you already know and the other person can’t possibly give you any value.
- Conditionally coachable: Operating from a context that you are open to another person’s coaching, but only if she “packages” it just right or if it confirms what you already know.
- Circumstantially coachable: Operating from a context that, given that the circumstances are beyond your control and are threatening to your success, you’ll take whatever coaching will save you.
- Openly coachable: Operating from a context that you’re receptive to any coaching regardless of the circumstances or how it’s delivered.
- Voraciously coachable: Operating from the context that everything around you has potential to deliver powerful and relevant coaching.

Listen generously. Listen deeply for answers, clues, ideas, suggestions and insights into the way you see things or conclusions from which you may operate. Sometimes a coach’s feedback can be uncomfortable, but it may be necessary to hear in order to think or see new possibilities and opportunities.
Self-disclose. Err on the side of revealing too much versus too little. Nothing worthwhile is served by hiding your shortcomings or trying to look “good” to your coach when you have failed.
Talk straight. Resolve any “disconnects” —unfulfilled expectations or upsets with your coach——both as a way of keeping things clean between the two of you and as a way of practicing powerful leadership.
Register the value that your coach is providing. Give your coach specific examples of how a conversation made a difference in your effectiveness at work or in other areas of your life.
Coaching as a critical success factor. Consider the possibility that holding your coaching relationship as absolutely critical to your personal success and the success of your business makes a significant difference in who you’re being as a leader and your effectiveness with others.

An open, honest relationship with your coach is the best way to optimize the outcome of your partnership. If you feel you can’t achieve this type of relationship with your coach, move on to one with whom you feel more comfortable; one who will ultimately prepare you for your best life. You chose to be in this relationship; work to make the best of it and you will achieve the improvements you’re working for—and delightfully unexpected enhancements, as well.

Rayona Sharpnack, Founder and CEO of the Institute for Women's Leadership, has coached some of the most powerful women and men in Corporate America. She has delivered her award-winning leadership training throughout the U.S., Canada and Australia. She currently serves on the Women's Leadership Board at Harvard. Rayona can be reached at rayona@womensleadership.com http://www.womensleadership.com.