Good coaching session But, my core behaviour has not changed.

Like many training sessions, you get really good fun moments where the interactive experience is good but nothing changes fundamentally in your behaviour long after the training session has happened. I am currently under going an ICF certification program and while I am learning to unlearn some old habits and relearn new habits, I am also observing the same phenomena happening during the one hour coaching session.

Your coach tries his/her utmost best to make you think by asking lots of questions to broaden your perspective. That feels good because as humans, we like knowing stuff we have not known before. It's just like (visual) blind spots, we get to uncover our "thought" blind spots. A good coach helps us in that discovery process.

So what is so bad about that? Well, people learn differently but people also learn to think differently. The "thinking" process in some coaching methodologies are too restrictive. To assume just because one is able to ask good questions and broaden a perspective for that one hour, does not equal to sustainable behavioural changes long after that session.

I have started to find learning styles differences also apply to "thinking" styles in coaching. Some people learn to unlock their thinking and get more clarity when you actually share your experiences with them. As such, the more life experiences you have, the more you can share and the more your coachee get's to learn and unlock new thinking and learning about their own situation. In almost all my practice sessions during my ICF coaching, I got way more positive feedback from my coachees when I found myself deviating from the core competencies of coaching process and spending more time digging deeper into the "why's" of my coachee's goals and going further back into their time life. And when you start to share your own experiences, pain and successes, your coachee's level of trust in you multiplies a few times and they actually start to reveal even more.

I have observed coaches with little "war" experience at work life and personal life who decide to join the coaching profession and proudly declaring a good coach does not need to share experiences and only need to help coachee find the answers through their coaching process or methodology by asking good guiding questions. But there is a real limitation here. The assumption here is asking good guiding and powerful questions. But what constitutes good guiding and powerful insightful questions when you yourself have not experienced enough in your life to illicit the best learning and thoughtful reflections from others? This is why in my subject matter heading I mentioned - your coaching session itself may have gone well but you do not walk away from a transformative experience which impacts you for a long time, where you will always remember that one session with that one coach forever.

So to summarise, in coaching, you need to help people think for themselves in more than just one way:

1. Through the power of your questions, yes but not enough - that is only one way to unlock their thinking mental models. It is good enough for that one session. You will make your money from your coachee. Other ways include...
2. Sharing your own journey of triumph and tribulations helps them unlock their thinking. To be able to do this, it does help tremendously when you have real "war" experience. You also get to INSPIRE them when they can see their journey unlocking through hearing your own experiences.
3. Having good life experience and 'war' scars, helps open up many more possibilities of questions for you. Your ability to broaden perspectives becomes a lot more enriched and it helps fuel point number 1) above.
4. Being able to go further back into the life of your coachee to understand how they learn what they have learned through past experiences, also helps you enrich the power of your questions to broaden their perspectives but more importantly to challenge their underlying assumptions about their goals and intent. From the coachee's perspective, their past learning frames their thinking process in a certain direction and they, and we as coaches, fall into the danger of unconscious biased thinking.

In conclusion: It is when we have the balance of the four different ways of unlocking their thinking mental models that we have a better chance of a transformational behavioural change.