Coaching in a post pandemic recovery
Coaching is needed more than ever and has a chance to show its value as we contemplate a post-pandemic recovery.
I’m a firm believer in the value of coaching as a compenent of wellbeing support.
The essence of coaching in this context is that it focuses on listening, asking questions, exploring options and helping the person discover answers for themselves - whether it be strengths, skills, opportunities, ideas or perhaps a concrete path to making a change in their life, home or work.
Leadership needs include wellbeing coaching
I coach leaders, particularly those in VCSEs. They have often been the ones expected this last year to support the wellbeing of their people and team members. But who supports their wellbeing?
Coaching is a key part of supporting leaders in their wellbeing and mental health, as is the need for trustees and peer networks to make this a reality as well.
VUCA
Coaching helps people face and manage - lean into - volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And learn to live with it. There are no straight answers, more options alongside shoring up our capacity to deal with and learn from adversity and difficult situations. Coaching supports personal resilience.
Change and agility
Coaching helps us change at a personal level. Also at an intra-personal and inter-personal level. In the workplace, coaching helps with the challenge of post pandemic work and job roles.
It will contribute to supporting people make improvements and become more agile. Teams can be coached to find pockets of good practice that can be replicated and scaled, which helps with a step change and gives time for individuals to work on aspects of themselves they need to work on to ensure things happen. And what better situation than this to have a coach.
Relationships - not advice
I’ve seen over the decade, as coaching has risen and been more professionalised, more adverts, postings and comments across platforms, social media and within networks, about coaching. I have observed that not everyone has the same model of coaching and that it is sometimes merged with advice giving or as a means to support a funded programme, for example. Whilst there is no universal, single defintion, there is more research and evidence now compared to ten years ago when I qualified as a coach.
As a consequence, combined with my experience and development from practice, I’d say that two of the vital elements of coaching are the relationship I build and the space that I hold.
There is no room for advice giving here. That is another form of support. We don’t coach to end up telling the coachee what to do.
It is linked to my intent for my coachee. If I have a relationship built on trust and I hold the space for you, then my intent is to understand, not to steer you towards what I think you should do. I read somewhere, possibly in an NLP book by Sue Knight, that the aim is to ‘spring loose someone’s inner resources’.
This frames it perfectly. Coaching in a post pandemic recovery should spring you loose!
Post pandemic help
And that last point brings me back to the value of coaching in a post pandemic environment.
I am with John Amaechi on the aversion to using the phrase ‘new normal’. People have had experiences of very different ways of living, learning and working . Wellbeing and mental health remains a huge concern alongside new ways of working (workplace culture where ever that place is now), the need to be agile and to continue to embrace technology and, importantly, to ensure diversity and inclusion are mainstreamed. And the existential threat of climate breakdown is very real; it hasn’t gone away.
There are opportunities to build new models of working and doing work. Expand that to new ways of doing business or providing a service with purpose.
Coaching starts with where you are and where you want to be. It can help every individual work out their own new journey and plot a path of wellbeing and life work balance that sets them on the road to post pandemic recovery.
Get in touch if you’d value a one off coaching session or more.