Announcing that about 30 of Angus McLeod’s coaching papers are now downloadable from this site including one written with Olympian, James Cracknell. If you want to know more about Emotional Intelligence, the use of Reflective-Silence, Mindsets or developing coaching in organisations, here is your resource. And there is much more! Take a look now.

Remember too that we have a lot of free video-shorts available for both coaches and managers – see  ‘Coach Smarter‘ and ‘Manage Smarter‘ (links also at the top of the page).

How Good is the Coach you Want to Hire? How do You Know. If they have video of them working, or you can watch them demonstrate, you will shortly know how to know for certain, watch the video!

Get FOUR FREE videos: ‘Tips for Managers’ and learn about leadership now. Simple sign-up, no catches, totally FREE!

Thank you so much for these videos – I’ve been able to concentrate on specifics to improve my skills right away. Brian E.

And, Get these FOUR FREE videos: ‘Tips for Coaches’ and learn about applying coaching skills for greater impact and performance. Simple sign-up, first name & email address – THAT is it! totally FREE now!:

The videos are SO good! Chrissie B.

Using the McLeod, ‘Human at Work’ (©AngusMcLeod2011) philosophy, I give you a ca. 7 minute video demonstrating how getting to the basics of human development (using ‘Human at Work’) can underpin executive training for stress and numerous performance issues. Free access with a simple sign-up.
My first video based on ‘Human at Work’ technology was a video on mindfulness. Here is the second in the series, called ‘Pain to Gain’. Just sign up and this video will be on your new dashboard. Existing ‘Human at Work ©’ members will find the video on their dashboard.Sign up for your FREE access to all ‘Human at Work’ © technology updates here!

But why ‘Human at Work’ and what does that do for organizations that L&D does not? Although good work is done within L&D we often see too many initiatives without adequate resources to accomplish the job. Naturally, what slips through are programmes that are not themed for corporate key learnings and we also then see an element of ‘tick box’ programmes where whole groups are put in training when in reality, some people should not be in the training room at all. They will get little or nothing from it – they are simply not ready, and their view of HR will be compromised.
Sign up for your FREE access to all ‘Human at Work’ technology updates here!

A COLLABORATIVE OFFER

I intend to add other inputs based upon my ‘Human at Work’ technology including short videos for L&D and HR staff, so if you want some challenges from this ‘Human at Work’ perspective to help you develop ideas and innovation in any given area of executive and leader development, then do please contact me – I shall be happy to engage and move things on with you. Angus.

Sign up for your FREE access to all ‘Human at Work’ technology updates here!

See a video about resourceful space showing how it is used in practice

Instructions for use

The coach can say something like,
You know the expression ‘take a step back’? Sometimes moving from where we are can help us to change how we experience things. From what you have been saying, it seems that you are in a space that I might call ‘stuck’ or ‘not-fully resouceful’ – what would you call it?

Imagine then that there is another space in this room that is more resourceful, where your perceptions of these issues is clinical, pragmatic and effective. And when you do that, where is that space and can you tell me where it is?

And so, in a moment, when you choose, I invite you to move to that ‘success’ space and as you move, leaving behind the experience you have here and towards taking on the success experience that is fully in that space over there, okay?’

If you wish to move someone away from an ‘unresourceful space’ covertly, you can take a break and move the chairs on the way out or up on your return, saying, ‘do you mind if we move nearer the window?’ for example. Couple this with a more energetic demeanour as you move to the new seating positions.

Where do you go from here?

Within the tool:

Where someone has been unresourceful in their chair and you have already moved to facilitate a sensory Journey or Perceptual Positions, think about inviting them back to take another seat in the room, rather than the one that was unresourceful after that tool has finished.

Using other tools to follow on from this

You could invite thoughts about how this tool can be used in other situations. At work for example or in regard to more effective sleeping patterns. See Pace and Lead to enhance this tool further.

This is adapted from the book by Angus McLeod & Will Thomas. Buy the book.

We can gauge the level at which a coach is working (and their professional versatility, or lack of it) by simply looking at the evidential data in their coachees. In this video compilation you can see all four levels. The introductory video is below. To see the entire video, just sign up.

You can change your mind and de-register at any time. We will, in any case respect you and maintain a low level of contact and keep your email address safe! When you sign up, we send you an email with link and your password (which you can change – passwords are case-sensitive!)

The Four levels are:

1. Intellectualizing
2. Intellectual pauses
3. Deeper level accessing – Self-reflective experiencing
4. Same but with pauses in excess of 2 seconds, sometimes minutes

The physiological evidence is given in the videos.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is predicated on looking at the human reactions to events rather than the events themselves. Performance Coaches are of course already doing this and in meta-coaching (Hall) this represents one set of a panoply of interventions regarding the perceptions and ‘frames’ of the coachee. CBT methodology involves ‘Socratic’ questioning to create discovery. Again we see links with best practice in coaching where questions are used for the benefit of the coachee’s self-understanding rather than the benefit of (for example) a very poor coach who is struggling (and misguided) to decide where to ‘lead’ the coachee.

CBT is not at all like Gestalt methods though where the goal is only the journey itself, not any established outcome. With CBT, as with coaching, the objective is to facilitate the coachee to deal with issues, identify goals, discover a motivated and sustainable way forward and to learn from the learning (meta-application of solutions). the goal-focus makes CBT a suitable candidate for a coaching methodology. The CBT coaching model has just seven steps and hence the coach can concentrate on what matters most, the responses (in all their guises) of the coachee – as such, a CBT approach is a worthwhile proposition, particularly in the life-coaching field.

An expert in practitioner work with CBT Coaching is David Bonham-Carter who provides a Life Coaching service with CBT techniques for dealing with stress, anxiety, self esteem & assertiveness issues. He says, ‘CBT is not about simply replacing negative thoughts with positive thoughts. It is about helping you to achieve a balanced and constructive approach to life and to the problems or dilemmas that you encounter in life’.

What is self-confidence and why is it different from self-esteem?

How do you get both and what is the one key secret to increasing these wonderful resources?

All is here. Watch this short free video! Just 2mins: 36 seconds!

How not to over- or under-manage and therefore de-moralize your staff.

An individual (vertical axis) becomes increasingly INDEPENDENT of management as they develop. This development involves skills and also new ways of learning and thinking at the higher levels – we call this ‘self’ development (horizontal axis).

Unless a task is urgent, a manager is best to work from the RIGHT of the graph; in other words, to assume that the individual is more competent than you think. This leads managers to answer questions posed to us, with questions of our own – this is order to help them find their own solutions and learn to think and solve on their own. Managers still have to be responsible for organizational requirements (safety, jurisprudence etc) but the acceleration in the learning of our people is greater if managers ask questions that make others think for themselves.

When an individual is truly lost, provide increasingly, stories, examples, context until they can again be challenged by good questions to think for themselves again.

Managers must understand the limits of their ability and job-specification – managers should not ‘counsel” where the individual is failing, distressed, self-harming etc. but rather get help from the appropriate corporate service.

See why this works from an independent source, listen to Sam in this video:

Buy the book from which the Model comes!

The GROW model is a simple model, particulary helpful for novice managers and coaches who want a thumbnail check on where there are in the session.

GROW stands for Goal, Reality check, Options & Will, Where, When, What, Who (and how)

The model is NOT sequential since many coaching conversations move back and forth as the individual gets increasingly conscious about the strengths and limitations of their thinking, motivations and goals. As with all models, the aim of the user must be to become so thoroughly competent, that the model is forgotten – this helps the manager/coach to maintain the highest-possible attention on the individual rather than indulging in their own thoughts and reducing their ability to follow the individual’s process. The model does not make ‘emotion’ overt though it is nominally part of ‘Will’. We believe that emotion is at the heart of motivation and de-motivation and hence emotion can be more widely acknowledged at all stages of the coachee’s journey. Hence the creation of our own STEPPPA Model, where ‘E’ stands fro ‘Emotion’.

McLeod, A. 2009

Language that reflects back the coachee’s own words is a win-win formula for success. This is called Reflective Language. The coach does not use up mental activity in interpreting and the coachee does not have to detach from the ‘experience’ they may be having in order to worry about the meaning of the words (interpretation of semantics) the coach is using. Reflective Language is very standard and used gracefully by all the best coaches I know. Coachees do not notice Reflective Language, but observers do notice!

The language is designed to help the coachee stay deeply in their discovery process. The words that they express are reflected back as perfectly as possible, so they do not need to translate them. It is like a keyhole that lets words (the key) out and then I insert my key (their reflected words) right back in again, without any resistance.

The coachee does not notice or question the words because they are their own. Because this process of reflective-questioning is so perfect for the keyhole, the coachee does not notice the construction of the sentences either. The coachee is able to stay with their own evolutionary thinking and discovery.

Here is a typical dialogue:

Angus: So, what do you first notice when this pattern starts?

Coachee: My head starts to throb

Angus: And if something happens just before that throb, what is that thing that happens just before?

Coachee: It’s like there is a freezing of time for a millisecond and a cold blade opens up my forehead

Angus: And if something happens just before that freezing and the cold blade opens up ‘my forehead’, what is that thing that happens just before that freezing?

Because Reflective Language seeps in so beautifully, the coachee stays exquisitely with their process and here we see that it invites metaphoric possibilities:

Angus: “As someone who clearly contributes and is always ahead of expectations, how is your experience now of having a backlog of orders?”

Philip: “I feel frustrated with myself.”

Angus: “And what is this ‘frustrated with myself’ experience like?”

This is the metaphor question, inviting the possibility of a metaphor. It does not always work but Philip had a metaphor and shared it with me.

Philip: “It’s like trying to get through a dark doorway with a big, shadowy face-less figure in the way, like filling in the whole doorway.”

Angus: “A big, shadowy faceless figure is in the way of the dark gateway, what else?”

Philip: “He is the stupid policy-geek buried somewhere at head-quarters, his pockets are full of useless statistics, he is a light-weight but is filling up that gateway and I want to get past him, push him over, but he is wedged in.”

Angus: “This wedged-in geek is filling up the gateway and you want to get past him, push him over. How can you change this situation to make that possible?”

I was inviting Philip to find a solution that might make the doorway bigger or float away, that might make the policy-geek shrink.

Philip: “I have a pin-stick on my desk. Completed orders go on that. I am pushing it into the geek’s stomach and he is just a bag of wind, he is shriveling, going translucent pink and the papers are drifting away in the wind, there is just a pink mat with the words ‘You’re Welcome’ written on it.”

Angus: “And you pushed the pin-stick into his stomach and he has shriveled down to a pink mat with the words ‘you’re Welcome’ written on it’. What happens next?”

Philip: “I skip over and through, the gateway is polystyrene, breaking up and is flying away. All my orders are on the stick. The phone is ringing.”

Angus: “And this experience of the pin-stick and shriveling geek, the pink mat and the gateway flying away, then you find your orders all on the pin-stick, how is this different to where you were before, a shadowy face-less figure in the doorway?”

Philip: “I was stuck but I had the solution all along. It’s my pin-stick. I stab that geek every time I bang an order down on it!”

Angus: “So, what is the likelihood of you completing the orders on your desk within the time-frame you mentioned earlier, zero through ten?”

Philip: “Total, ten plus!”

Philip had explored his metaphor and found a new solution, literally right in front of him on his desk. No external factor had changed, just his perception of it. This is another example of the benefits of Conscious Perception, this time by involving his metaphors. The example is different from others so far in that one of the questions was to encourage him to adapt and change his negative image of the gateway by using color, light, texture etcetera to change the way he experienced the situation. These parameters of sensory information are termed sub-modalities and are widely encouraged in coaching and NLP therapy. In this case, Philip changed the big, shadowy figure to a pink bag of wind and then to a doormat with words on it; he changed the dark gateway to something made of polystyrene. This just broke up and blew away. With sub-modalities we can encourage changing perception of any experience or metaphor whether visual or not. The sub-modalities of a boss’ voice might include a squeaky-voice of Donald Duck. Smell can be changed. Visual material can be altered to reduce the size of an obstacle (as Philip did with the geek) but also to expand and lighten until invisible. An obstacle can be framed and then moved so far away that it is insignificant.

Sub-modalities:

Sub-modalities are simply variants in experience. In coaching, it is possible to extend the coachee’s experience of the world by inviting them to focus on, and play with those experiences. Needless to say, these ideas sprang from California in the 1960’s but are no less important for that. Exploring the sub-modalities of experience may involve changing a visual representation, an auditory representation or any kinesthetic (feeling) representation.

Clues to how people store information are available in their language. Phrases like, ‘I see what you mean’ and, ‘I think I grasp that idea’ suggest that the representations of these ideas are tied in with preferred mental (including emotional) representations. Inviting a coachee to experiment with the sub-modalities of their experiences can enable them to find more constructive ways of managing future situations and can be anchored to provide automatic support for difficult scenarios including phobias. For a more comprehensive look at sub-modalities, I invite you to read Bandler and MacDonald.