VAULT Your Coaching

VAULT is a simple concept to provide greater value to understand coaching. VAULT stands for the following:

Vulnerable - as a leader are you conscientious of becoming vulnerable or leading with vulnerability?

Ask - do you ask enough questions that are open-ended to truly gain clarification and understanding of the people you are coaching in terms of their strengths and opportunities to improve?

Understand - the goal of coaching is to understand people in terms of their desires, goals, inhibitions, struggles, etc. Often managers who coach sometimes want things for other people that they don't want for themselves often cutting themselves off from really understanding what somebody else wants.

Listen - as a coach do you really listen? Do you demonstrate listening with active listening by stating back or paraphrasing what somebody said and meant? This type of listening will accelerate and explode trust between both parties.

Tell - when you tell somebody what to do do you do it in a cooperative way with a statement such as "what if we" so they know that you're an equal participant in their personal development?

The acronym is a fun way to check ourselves as coaches and to really look in the mirror and evaluate. I got this idea actually from a client who was talking about vulnerability and that's an area that I personally need to work on. In addition, she was telling me about her daughter who is in gymnastics and loved to do vaults. I don't know much about gymnastics, but we started to play around with the word and this is how this article came about-your thoughts?