What are the best strategies for incorporating research into your coaching and mentoring practice?

Before I conduct my cultural coaching I ask my client to complete a cultural intelligence assessment which is based on academic research of worldwide cultural values and this acts as the foundation for our conversation. It helps the client with their self awareness in terms of their own cultural values and level of cultural intelligence vs others and the client benefits from being able to see how their values differ to those of others. There is no right or wrong cultural values but once we understand our own better, it helps us to understand other people's better and can enable us to be effective when living and working in a diverse workplace.

Networking for resources is a great place to find trustworthy sources. Ask your friends, colleagues, and social connections for recommendations they have tried themselves - as well as their rating of the sources. This can help you not only understand which authors or speakers to learn from, but further information on the quality, time commitment, and follow up resources that may pair well with what you are hoping to learn.

Read, read, read... Read both books that are recommended by other experts (whose credibility you respect), as well as those books that you are intuitively drawn to. Read titles that also includes lot of research, statistics and examples from practice and that provide some concrete techniques and ideas. Listen, listen... Listen to online (video/audio) courses, different seminars and presentations, podcasts, YouTube videos from the people that are experts in those areas (both famous and those less famous). Communicate... Speak with people you believe might provide you useful insights, ideas and their practices. Write them messages or emails with honest request for tips and guidance. Networking can do a lot as well.

Write your comments, thoughts or ideas on the sides of books/studies/articles. Have a notebook where you will summarize and brainstorm ideas you read/heard and ask yourself (without Ego influence): "What can I learn from this, what is actually useful and how can I integrate this into my knowledge and practice?"

Bruce Lee said it perfectly: "Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own." Using this statement, and then put your knowledge and experience into practice. Now you are getting feedback what works and what not, what should be adapted. After that, remember another Bruce Lee's quote: "Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend." Ponder on this and put it in practice, you might be surprised by results...

Figuring out how new information may inform your practice is a big challenge. The first question to ask is: How is this relevant to my own practice? There's a temptation to readily adopt new ideas to keep up with new knowledge, and the market. What's more difficult, and ultimately more productive, is looking at what new insights the information may bring. New ideas should cause us to reflect on our own work and how we might improve it, rather than pushing us to adopt and apply the information outright. It's best to use new information to inform thinking first before changing tools, techniques, or methodology.