Beginner Coaching Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

Building a Coaching Culture - #74: Beginner Coaching Mistakes & How to Avoid Them === Lucas Flatter: if you. Are manipulating whether intentionally or not, and then the person recognizes they're being manipulated in some way, then you cut into that trust and safety that we're always talking about. So I think the Hey everybody. Welcome back. JR Flatter here with my co-host Lucas. Hello. J.R. Flatter: I thought it would take some time in the day, if you don't mind. just talking about new coaches. I was gonna say young coaches, but you don't necessarily have to be young [00:01:00] to be a new coach, but people new to coaching. what are some of the challenges? What are some of the lessons learned? You have some of the lessons learned. I have, Lucas Flatter: I mean the first thing that I think of is a problem that I personally have where, you are trying to actively listen and come up with a powerful question. I. but maybe not giving yourself quite enough time that that pregnant pause and then your question ends up being a little more drawn out and, or maybe you're stacking two or three questions in there instead of one. I don't know if you have that problem. You seem to be in control of the pause. J.R. Flatter: only because I have practiced it a lot. yeah, definitely we could talk about that. and I think the root of your question goes back to what I think might be the root of the challenge when you first start coaching. And that is, It can appear a bit unnatural. I keep forgetting you're in your thirties already [00:02:00] and I probably will for my entire life. Even when you're 75 years old, I'm gonna think you're still a kid. But that's part of being a parent, right? you've been coaching a couple years now. Lucas Flatter: Yeah, maybe almost three years. J.R. Flatter: Yeah. Wow. So when we first start coaching, wherever you're at in your life journey, in your leadership journey, management journey, for a lot of us, it's all about the technical journey in the beginning, You're a computer scientist. How well did you know computer systems? I'm not sure how many languages you coached in or you, coded in when you first started out, but, and being very technical and even then, first few times it's just unnatural because it's just not, you don't have muscle memory, you don't have neural pathways, so a lot of that's just very normal because it's different. Not right, [00:03:00] wrong or indifferent, just different. And so when we first start teaching coaching, which you and I are starting a new cohort in a couple days, we talk a lot about that. A lot of comparisons are made, mentoring, training, a lot of common. Comparisons people make or therapy to coaching. But that's really not part of the learning journey really. It's when I'm presented a challenge by whomever, an individual or group, what do I do about it? And for most of us, early in your career, you give us technical response like, well, here's the three things you need to do to fix this, or here's three different. Languages you might use to approach this. And for leaders we're the same way. If we've, in our journey gotten into this cognitive and emotional intelligence space, [00:04:00] we're still the answer People, Lucas asked me a question. Lucas expects a response. He expects a solution. But now in coaching, Saying, you know, slow that role. don't be that quick to answer. Take your time and let the person you're talking to discover the answer. And that's very unnatural cuz your mind you, one of the things you and I teach is conscious and unconscious bias. The mind says things that might not be appropriate and might not be the best thing to say. wherever we are on a journey, we have to give ourself grace for that reality. Your mind's gonna do what Your mind's gonna do. It's what do you do with what your mind tells you, and if you are teaching. you're Probably gonna give lessons. If you're mentoring, you're probably gonna tell a story. And what we're telling you in [00:05:00] coaching is don't tell the story. Just listen and start asking questions. Lucas Flatter: Whether we, you know, acknowledge it or not, you feel like, oh, I'm in competition with other people. And, so the way that I portray my story, my skills, my traits, my personality, like that's all very important. And, you know, 90% of situations, how am I portraying myself, you know? And like you were just saying it's, it's not about portraying yourself, it's just about getting another piece of information or getting more context. Asking that question where, you know, yeah, you probably have this long list of things, like all these experiences, all these stories that you could bring up, oh, this is just like how I just had this experience with my child. You know? But you have to process all of that and then, you know, throw it away and. yeah, throw out the powerful question. I was also thinking, um, you were [00:06:00] talking about like the technical skills and I think the more that you coach, you kind of find out like there's some ancillary technical skills or, or just things that you can work on outside of coaching. Like maybe for me, As an introverted person, I'm not necessarily, you know, going to say like a 500 word essay all day. Maybe, maybe I'll only say like 200 words to people. so something that I've noticed is just like reading out loud, reading with my son or my wife out loud. That's one thing I can work on. Like, oh, I'm just practicing speaking in general right now because that's not my personality, you know? J.R. Flatter: I love that. And you've reminded me of this common theme, to prove your worth. Not you and I, but in general, humans want to tell you how good they are at something.[00:07:00] actually there's, somebody wrote a book about that Brene Brown Dare to Lead. There's a, a type of person that she calls the teller, and the teller always wants to tell you how smart they are. They want to tell you how clearly they understand the solution, and now suddenly you and I and others are telling you not to do that. you and I talked about the the house of leadership. And that house of leadership stands on a foundation of courage. And so do you have the courage not to be the answer person? Do you have the courage to just nod your head and say, that sounds like a real interesting challenge. Lucas Flatter: Yeah, and then like the empowering aspect of that is that, if you're not the answer person, You don't need to compete with all those other people or you know, the internet or AI or a library. Like we kind of [00:08:00] mentioned when we were talking about the difference between coaching and mentoring, like you're not that information source and therefore I can coach a general, even though I have no domain knowledge, you know? J.R. Flatter: Yeah, it's hard to imagine until you've successfully been coached by someone who knows nothing about you. Nothing about what you do. You mentioned very high level leaders that we coach and we purposefully coach them with someone who knows little or nothing about their profession. they first do it, they're like, eh, I don't know. And when the leader goes, you're gonna do what? Uh, what is Brigadier General? What's a c e O? Uh, but it works out magnificently because they're not the answer people and they don't even pretend to be the answer people. And when that senior leader's talking, they're explaining things in such a way that they've never explained for [00:09:00] probably decades. And they're connecting dots in their own minds because they're going through that. So I think the other category of hesitancy probably is when you're first starting to coach, don't be afraid to be formalistic. And so you have this thing that's very unnatural. And we have a framework. We help you build an approach template. How do you approach coaching? How do you get ready? How do you start? What is the middle? What is the end? How do you prepare for the next session? What does the arc of the relationship look like? You have all that available to you, so don't be afraid to lean on it. don't think that you have to wing it. when we first start teaching coaching, one of the analogies we have is to get your feet wet, jump off the 10 meter tower into the pool, get your feet wet, [00:10:00] and we do that early, but we do it in short durations. So your folks coaching session might be five minutes just so you don't have to struggle. What do I say next? What's the next powerful question? Uh, but then you get longer and longer reps where by the end of your training we have you coach the entire arc of a session across an entire hour. But even after all this time, even as I'm doing this podcast this morning, I have my approach template here. I have a, a two page word document. All, I have all of the competencies of coaching in the markers, and I lean on those even after all this time. I'm not overly formalistic, but I lean on the formula. I was teaching last week and telling a story about coaching a very senior executive, and [00:11:00] I knew absolutely nothing about their profession. I knew absolutely nothing about their background like any other human being. I get this idea of like, who do you think you are coaching? This person who's infinitely more capable than you are infinitely more successful than you are? And what brought me back was I just went back to the formula. I said, the process works. Lucas Flatter: Yeah, I mean, you run into this in, in hobbies and, and other skills where you want to. Or at least for me, I wanna figure out these lessons on my own. And, but then if you look at, like, for example, with art, if you look at an expert or a professional, they have more books and more tools and more references. Like they're only so good because they're using, you know, well trodden patterns and, and techniques. And so I think the actual like [00:12:00] where you're going to customize and personalize. Is maybe you have a hundred different, you know, templates and models and you're doing this one and then this one, and then this one. But you're probably never going to just be completely off the cuff. And, like even thinking about like, great movies, great books, like think about Star Wars, that's based on Buck Rogers, Indiana Jones is based on, you know, so everything that like we perceive to be as like great art, there's always some. Source for where they used, you know, down all the way to like Da Vinci. J.R. Flatter: Yeah, there was a very senior leader, from my background in the military many years ago upon his retirement, at his speech. I. And he did. He had been in the military for 30 something years at that time, and part of his speech was that he hadn't had an original thought in 32 years. [00:13:00] Part of the reason that we quote Shakespeare or that we quote Socrates or, tell stories of John Don Kte or whatever, there was so much relevance even from, from way back, I don't think a day goes by that I don't quote Winston Churchill just to, to get under your skin a little bit. so you mentioned very early on in our conversation, silence again, this is part of the formula. You look at our approach template. it has, the pause, the powerful pause. And there's many reasons for that, and I think very worthwhile pointing out, as we're having a conversation about people new in their coaching journey, we are very uncomfortable as human beings, as imagine as an introvert. you're uncomfortable in silence, even though you don't want to be the person filling that silence. Even extroverts are uncomfortable in silence. That's. Why they volunteered to fill [00:14:00] that silence. But there's several things, several very good things going on in periods of silence, and let's talk through a few of them. the first, and this is from the coach to the leader, is me giving you the opportunity to think uninterrupted. Me giving you the opportunity to continue speaking, to continue exploring, to connect dots that you might not have connected otherwise. So going to the other side of silence, and that's the silence on the coach's behalf. So there's silence on the leader that you're coaching and their behalf, but there's also silence on the coach's behalf, and there's several underlying reasons and values and silence. One of those is, are you in fact listening? We're not supposed to lead people in any given direction, [00:15:00] and therefore, we're not supposed to presuppose what our next question would be, because if I presuppose the next question I'm gonna ask you, that means I'm not gonna listen to your response because I already have a question. Why would I listen if I already know what I'm gonna ask you? So if I'm watching you and evaluating you as a coach, Which I often do in my mentoring role, in our performance evaluation role. I'm gonna watch and see if you're being silent if I see you ask a sequence of questions, I know you had a pre preconceived notion. You had a preconceived outcome of where the conversation was going, and that's an absolute violation, of coaching. We talked earlier about you can coach anyone anywhere on any topic, and the reason is you don't preconceive to know who they are. You don't preconceive to know where they're [00:16:00] going or what their challenges would be. So that's the relationship writ large, but it's also the session and how the session unfolds. And even at any moment, I'm allowed as the leader to pivot and go anywhere I want. that's my role, that's my right as the person being coached. So that's one thing I'm looking for in silence. Another thing that we're looking for in silence is for you to quite literally ask yourself and the silence of your own mind. What is the next powerful question that I should ask? Or is this an opportunity to make an observation or is this an opportunity to recap of what I think I've heard? So this all kinds, on any given moment, in any given session, you could go in multiple [00:17:00] directions and where you're making that decision is in the silence after the leaders stop talking. Because if you've made that decision before they're done, again, you're not listening and you wanna listen to everything they have to say. You wanna watch every emotion, every body movement, cuz there's information you should be receiving. And the only way to do that is to be completely silent. Keep your mind as clear as you can and wait. If I see you ask a question the very second the leader, your coaching stopped talking. I know you weren't listening. Even if it's relevant, even if it's powerful. cuz you have to stop, you have to give your mind time to process. Lucas Flatter: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like it's one step further than those leading questions like, Oh, I'm gonna ask this question and then I [00:18:00] expect them to say this. So then I'll ask them this question that like you were touching on, you're kinda leading and, also it can be transparent to the person you're asking the questions. to Like they can be thinking, oh, he just asked me this question and now he is asking me this. He is trying to get to this conclusion. And if you. Are manipulating whether intentionally or not, and then the person recognizes they're being manipulated in some way, then you cut into that trust and safety that we're always talking about. So I think the silence, it kind of helps you curb that a little bit. maybe you can evaluate the last question you asked again to see, oh, am I going somewhere with this? Is it going to be perceived in a negative way? That kind of thing. J.R. Flatter: Yeah, I love that. Hopefully this doesn't sound counterintuitive because we've just talked about being [00:19:00] silent. but I think it's also a strong coaching technique to be very explicit. people ask all the time, can I coach partners? Can I coach spouses? Yeah, absolutely. If you're explicit about what's going on, And I like to be, and I teach people to be very explicit in their coaching. And so if I'm being quiet and I think the pause has become uncomfortable either on my side or the leader's side, I'll say, you know, I'm not being quiet just to be quiet. I'm being quiet because I'm trying to think of exactly the right next thing to do. And I might even say, I've got a couple different ways I could go. and then tell them both say which of those, or if, if neither, do you think is the direction we should head. so again, going back to don't be afraid to be overly formalistic. Don't be afraid to share the [00:20:00] formula. I don't say that we train the leaders that we work with, but we certainly educate them. I'll say out loud, Hey, you know, when I'm being quiet, there's a couple things that are going on. I'm being quiet cuz I need time to think, but I'm also being quiet on your behalf. Maybe you, you wanted to take a minute and think about this, or maybe you wanted to take a minute and expound upon what you were talking about without me interrupting you. which takes us back to the, the markers again. One of the markers, so there's eight competencies of coaching, but there are also 40 plus, sub competencies within those. And one of them is, did I interrupt on the rarest of occasions? I can interrupt you. because you're talking about the same topic for 20 minutes and I see that perhaps you're going in a circle, I might interrupt you [00:21:00] there. if you've made a promise to yourself or me or others time and time again, and you have made no effort, no demonstration that you're getting any closer to solving it, I might interrupt you. Rarely to be exceptional, that I would interrupt you on purpose. So there's an opportunity there for me to interrupt you. But if I'm evaluating your coaching and you're continually interrupting the leader, we're gonna talk about that in your feedback because you're not listening, you're not thinking you're preconceiving, even more fundamentally and even more. Strongly you're thinking what you have to say is more important than what I have to say. And if in fact that's true, the coaching relationship is upside down. We talk all the time, early on in coach training about the high hypotheses that [00:22:00] we have. So whatever you decide to do in your next action as a coach, It's a hypothesis, is a fancy way of saying what's my informed guess? And so each of us has an informed guess about what we should, could or should do next. And so you're thinking about what is that hypothesis? have I been listening? Uh, am I following? Am I responding? All of those coach-like things? if you interrupt me, I know you haven't done any of those, and so oftentimes that hypothesis, that beautiful next thing, if in my silence allowing you silence, you say something else, that hypothesis might disappear. I might just have to throw it away and your human brain is going, but it was such a beautiful question. But you have to throw it away cuz you're not in charge. You're in the, [00:23:00] you're in the passenger seat. The leader. Your coaching's in the driver's seat. Lucas Flatter: I also like, personally, technique wise, like I'll try to write those things down really quickly. Not necessarily so that, oh, I'm definitely gonna ask this next time, but it's like you're trying to fall asleep and you have all this stuff on your mind. You write it down and then it goes out of your mind kind of, I think, yeah, like if you are one of these people that, oh, now that it's in my head, I really need to get it out. Making a note might help you. Just let it go easier, and then you have this reassurance that if I really need it again, I'll be able to go back to it. J.R. Flatter: I love that technique, but it can also equally become a error of a newer coach. was just gonna talk, start talking about the different kinds of arcs that you and I teach. You notice you're getting towards the arc of your session and you look in your notes and there's that amazing question that you had [00:24:00] 15 minutes ago. And you know, do you have the courage to throw it away or is it really relevant now that you're getting towards the end? you and you alone will know. You know? And I guess that brings up another topic as we're getting ready to wind down. and I borrow this from one of our coaches, Lee Collier, from the uk. she says, coaching in the wild, which I love that phrase, because you are, when you're coaching. So first of all, you and I will teach people to coach, right? We have coach training, different styles, different ways, different methods. You don't need anybody's permission to coach. You don't need an accreditation. You don't need training. Be curious, ask open-ended who, what or how? Questions, don't ask judgmental questions, usually starting with a why. don't preconceive the outcome. You don't need any vice's permission to do any of those coaching like things. Um, but there are some, competencies that, you know, to have a good coaching [00:25:00] relationship. To have a good coaching practice. that you should know. and one of those is coaching's, the long game. you can coach in five minutes, but that's the arc of a session. Five minutes. You should really think about the growth of the individual over the long term and the arc of your relationship with them. so a lot of coaches try to. Cram, life changing change in every session and it, it's not possible, nor should it be expected. So be patient in your coaching. The eight competencies we talk about and the 40 plus sub competencies within those eight competencies, you're not gonna demonstrate every one of them in every session, nor should you try. You might not demonstrate all of them in an entire relationship and nor should you try, but across the arc of your practice, you should see all of those competencies in your [00:26:00] coaching, not within a session, maybe not even within a relationship. It crossed the arc of your practice, whether it's a coaching style of leadership. As practice or whether it's an actual coaching business as practice, or a combination of both of those, you should see all of those competencies in all of those sub competencies. Lucas Flatter: I mean, we do go back to this a lot, but just, um, you know, the arc of a session and the relationship. I think especially if you're not sticking to any sort of pattern or framework, you're going to kind of either hit against the timing wall, like, oh, we have only five minutes left, let's wrap this up. And so it's like, okay, we gotta wrap it up right now, or, Like you're kind of maybe 15 minutes before and trying to transition into that conversation about ending the session. So those things, if you're not practiced in it can feel kind of [00:27:00] fumbly, clumsy. I. J.R. Flatter: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And we teach all the time. Don't coach to the clock. but we also talk about the clock's, not our friend. And even the calendar's, not our friend. I love coaching relationships across six months. Uh, I always like a minimum of 12 sessions, and if you do 12 sessions every other week, it's six months. Very close to it. And so even though we know the arc of our relationship is six months and never has to exactly last that long or end exactly, but it kind of gives us a good timeframe. But so I always, um, bound the expectation of how long we're gonna be together, but I also bound every session and as normal planners, we probably blocked an hour. So I'll, I'll talk about that. Hey, I've blocked an hour. I don't have [00:28:00] anything on the other side, or I do, I have a hard stop at zero zero. You and I coach all over the world. We teach all over the world. So we don't talk about hours, we just talk about minutes. so we started zero zero and yeah, I've got something on the other side, so I need to stop probably 5 0 5 5. But then I also talk about where we're at in the ark while we're in the ark. We're at the beginning, got some time. Let's take some time to establish, you know, what's the best use of our time today. What might be some obstacles between us and that success. What is success? How do we know we got there today? what might be some obstacles in the way? And then we were somewhere near the apex. If we did have 60 minutes, you know, somewhere in the 30 minute mark, I'm gonna explicitly talk about that. You know, we're in the middle of our session. We're on the, just starting the downward slope. and then especially when we're get 10 to 15 minutes before we both have to go home. Couple [00:29:00] things. A, I'm not gonna open Pandora's box at 15 minutes, or even maybe even 20 minutes. Uh, if we've had some discovery, we might celebrate and go home right then and there. I'm careful not to start things that we're not gonna be able to finish or at least find some way, to wrap up. And then always, always, always teach this wherever you're at in the arc. Do not leave without saying What about our time together was valuable for you. It takes a lot of courage. You can ask it a hundred different ways. It's part of the way the brain works. It's a really strong coaching tool. adults learn by doing and adults learn by recall, and this is our way as coaches to help them recall what have I learned? Uh, one of my favorite ways is what do you know now that you didn't know 38 [00:30:00] minutes ago or whatever, wherever we're at in this session. So even though coaching's the long game and we don't coach to the clock, I'm very explicit about where we're at in the arc of any given session. And even in the relationship when we, if it's 12 sessions across, 26 weeks, I'll talk about, you know, we're in session four. We got plenty of time in front of us. We're in session eight. You know, not short of time, but we're, you know, up and over the apex. Hey, we're in session 11, and what does that mean? Lucas Flatter: It goes back to kind of sharing your own techniques and not being afraid to say like, you know, we've agreed to this certain format and, and me saying, we're halfway through, or, you know, that we're about to wrap up. That's not necessarily you imposing, you know, your will or your ideas on the session. It's just this is, that's like the objective truth of the matter, you know? J.R. Flatter: Yeah. All right. Good session.