We coach leaders to the Pinnacle of performance
Giving and Receiving Help:
Topic Highlights: ▪ Performance Improvement Coming into Focus ▪ The Expert Transformational Coach ▪ Filling the Niche between Self-Help and Expert Coaching
A niche
exists between the ineffectiveness of self-help
Performance Improvement Coming into Focus
To summarize, the framework for improving success now looks as follows:
Transformational coaching occupies the opposite end of the effectiveness spectrum from self-help. Coaching provides one-on-one guidance to help clients make behavioral changes to improve their chances to achieve short-term and sustained success. What attributes enable coaches to transform bad habits and reconstruct obsolete auto-contexts with a high probability of success?
The Expert Transformational Coach Some attributes of an effective transformational coach:
Filling the Niche between Self-Help and Expert Coaching
Transformation Facilitators: Professional transformation facilitators understand automatic activities and know how to employ transformation techniques. For improving behaviors embedded in a culture, such as time management, conflict resolution, making and meeting commitments, or holding people accountable, group facilitation provides cost-effective solutions. The same holds true for cultural assumptions such as the nature of the market or competition. Expert facilitators conduct experiential workshops using role-playing at the sessions and practice between the meetings. Experiential workshops differ from teaching seminars in that workshops create experiences that drive participants past the discomfort that accompanies change and provide the practice needed to instill new habits, auto-contexts, or skills.
Trusted Helpers: Readers can use what they learn at this website to guide others through transformational change for auto-behaviors that are not too difficult to change, such as procrastination or intimidation. Encourage the person wanting to change to identify intentions for new behaviors, and help the person stay with the process despite recurring discomfort. The discomfort associated with violating an identified intention to change and the pleasure gained from each instance of enacting the new behavior create increasingly powerful counteracting feelings to extinguish or at least attenuate the old behavior and establish the new one. The biggest help you could give other people to improve their chances of sustained success is to coach them through their blockage to self-discovery, which is a situational event rather than a permanent behavior change.
Group-Help: Group-help differs from experiential workshops in that no expert facilitator normally presides. Instead, everybody gives and receives support on a single narrow topic within the framework of an established process. People become better at helping others transform when they have experienced transformation help from others. Therefore, whenever I train coaches, I insist they experience the process as a recipient.
Toastmasters International is an excellent example of group-help. The more-experienced participants take leadership roles. They encourage all attendees to speak. The evaluation process provides corrective feedback and support. Toastmasters uses what they call the "sandwich" process for evaluations. It starts with citing what the evaluator thought worked well with the speech. Next, the evaluator provides suggestions for improvements. Finally, the evaluator provides feedback on what he or she liked best about the speech. This process helps people over stage fright, provides support to keep trying, and helps speakers improve their public speaking auto-skills.
Recovery group-help activities provide transformation and maintenance of extremely tenacious habits including addictions. If included on "degree of difficulty" diagram above, recovery group-help programs would show on the far right side. The benefits here come from giving and receiving help. When people receive help, they become better at providing help. Also, when other participants provide them nonjudgmental feedback about their issues, they can more easily become nonjudgmental when helping others. Because of the nature of addiction, group-help often provides ongoing maintenance support.
Most group-help programs originated with people who experimented with processes and found formulas that seemed to work. Group-help programs could benefit from having a theoretical underpinning, such as described at this website, of the mental processes involved in their programs, and they could make powerful use of the tools described here.
Whether you are providing help or receiving help from a trusted colleague, professional coach, or workshop facilitator, the help provider must know some techniques on how to transform automatic behaviors.
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