Timestamps

00:00:00: 300th episode giveaway!

00:01:03: Introduction

00:04:46:

What it means to take a coaching approach

00:05:24: The three hows of coaching

00:05:59: 1: managing the mindset - thinkers and doers…

00:11:34: … give space and support

00:12:43: … know your own mode

00:13:47: 2(a): asking questions…

00:14:32: … question-stacking vs question-sequencing

00:16:50: … 5Ws and H, or, TED

00:18:09: … dive-deeper questioning and multiple conversations

00:24:19: 2(b): active listening…

00:25:54: … a talk/listen ratio and a five-minute mind map

00:30:08: … clues and cues and the listening language

00:36:47: 3: structuring your conversation…

00:37:51: … the COACH framework

00:43:53: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi everybody, it is Helen, and before we get started on this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that this is episode 300 of the Squiggly Careers podcast, which is, I don't know, it's a bit of a random milestone.  But it's meaningful to Sarah and me, because it's taken a lot to do all of those episodes, and we hope that it's all been helpful to you. One of the values of our business, Amazing If, is "useful", so we thought, "What can we do that is useful to celebrate the milestone?" and what we have done, and you can let us know whether it's useful, is we have produced one ginormous PDF that has 100 Squiggly Career PodSheets in it! 

So, we produce a PodSheet every week with all of our episodes.  We've collated 100 of them together so that you have, I don't know, the ultimate Squiggly Career workbook, who knows; let us know.  But you can download it, we will put the link in the show notes, it will be on the toolkit on our website, we'll be posting all about it on social.  But please, download it, use it, share it.  Hopefully, it's a really useful free tool for you and other people's development.  And with that, we will get into this week's episode.

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where every week we help you to navigate the ups and downs of your Squiggly Career, sharing lots of practical ideas for action and tools to try out that we really hope will give you a bit more confidence, clarity and control.  And today, we're going to be talking about how to take a coaching approach to support someone else in their Squiggly Career.

Helen Tupper: So, why is this an important thing to focus a bit of energy and effort on?  In a Squiggly Career, nobody succeeds by themselves.  At times, we all need support from other people; however you're working, wherever you're working, you're better if you're not doing it alone.  And it's also very likely that you will face some knotty moments in your Squiggly Career, so times in your career when it feels a bit difficult and you're not sure what to do, and it's really in those knotty moments that we need that support most of all. What we can do for people is we can help them to unravel those knots. 

So, when they're in that sticky situation when it's all feeling a little bit tough, if we can take a coaching approach to help that person, what they are able to do is navigate their way through the knots.  So, they can unravel the knot, they can get unstuck, they can uncover their own ideas, they can move through it all a little bit faster.  So, we're not saying there aren't going to be tough times, and we're not going to say that it's easy to unravel it, but it is possible and what you can do is support someone to do that. When we take a coaching approach, so we help people get unstuck and uncover those ideas for themselves, they are actually then much more committed to acting on it.  So, if we always give people the answers, or we always tell people what to do, they're not always committed to taking that forward; we've sort of made it a little bit too easy for them.  We say, "Well, this is what I did in this situation.  This is what I think you should do". 

But when someone else says, "Actually, in talking to you, I've just thought about something that I could do", their idea that they have had, they are much more likely to take.  It's a bit of an ego effect, where we think our ideas are brilliant.  And what you're doing is helping someone to come to those ideas, so they're going to be more committed to their career development as a result.

Sarah Ellis: So, who might you be having these conversations with?  So, this could be just a friend at work, maybe a work best friend, a colleague that you get on well with, so sort of taking a peer-to-peer coaching approach.  Maybe you're a manager and you want to take more of a coaching approach with the people in your team; maybe you're a mentor and you're thinking, "What would it look like to ask some really good coaching questions as part of our mentoring conversations?" We know we obviously talk a lot about coaching yourself, we have a book called You Coach You, and one of the things that we always want to make sure we're really clear about is, what we're not saying is that coaching yourself is a substitute for having really good career conversations with lots of different people. 

So here, I think this is where we're looking at that challenge from a different perspective.  So of course, still coach yourself, but also go and have the conversations that you need with each other. I really like the idea that in a Squiggly Career, we can create an ecosystem of people helping people with their Squiggly Careers; because though, of course, there are people out there who are incredible coaches and who've done lots of training and are real experts at some of the things we're going to talk about, we don't all have access to those people and even if we do, it tends to be more ad hoc or occasional.  So, I think what we're really interested in here is the day-to-day, how we could all borrow a bit of brilliance from coaching to be useful for each other.

Helen Tupper: So, a very quick summary of what it means to take a coaching approach.  It is essentially a skill that we can develop where we are going to be able to increase somebody else's self-awareness and then accelerate their action.  It's not us solving a situation for somebody.  So, rather than solve, what we're more likely to be doing where we're taking a coaching approach is to support somebody through that situation.  And it's not about us leading that conversation, so driving it and telling people.  It's much more likely that we'll be in a listening mode when we're taking a coaching approach.

Sarah Ellis: So, today we're going to talk you through three hows, so the hows of taking a coaching approach.  We're going to start with managing the mindset, so really spotting and understand the mindset somebody has and how you might adapt your approach accordingly; then we're going to talk about the skills, listening and asking inciteful questions, and some things that might just help you get even better at those skills; and then finally, just how to structure these conversations.  So, a bit of a framework just to support you to know where you are in a conversation and where you might go next.

Helen Tupper: So, I shall start with managing the mindset.  And actually, I'm going to go back to an episode that we did a while ago now, about I think 55 episodes ago, to be exact!  It's episode 245, which is about your thinker and doer mode.  And what we talked about in that episode is that there is a tendency to for people to move more towards thinker mode or doer mode. So for example, Sarah is a bit more of a thinker, she's naturally more reflective and thoughtful than me, who is more of a doer, and I am naturally more action-oriented, pacy, moving things forward in parallel.  Neither of those modes are better than another, but what it means when you're taking a coaching approach is that you might need to adapt your approach, if the person that you are talking to is more of one of those things than another. 

Let me explain it a little bit. Let's say you're coaching a friend, let's say I'm trying to take a coaching approach with Sarah.  She's a thinker, which means she's highly reflective, she's very considered, takes a bit of time to come to a conclusion.  Now, that might sound like Sarah saying to me, "I need to think this through", or, "I need a little bit of time to think about it".  Those are the sorts of statements you might hear a thinker say.  Or it might look like, in a conversation, someone taking quite long pauses, deep breaths and long pauses, because they're slowing their thought processes down.  Or, what I could see with Sarah, for example, is getting quite uncomfortable if I rush Sarah for an answer. 

And those are the sorts of things that might help you to be able to spot if this person is more like a thinker. Now, when you are taking a coaching approach with somebody who is more like Sarah, more like a thinker, the questions that you might want to ask them are more about "what" and "when" type of questions.  So, I might say to Sarah, "Okay, I've heard what you're saying.  What do you think you could do now?  Or, when do you think you could have that conversation?"  The point here is, the what and the when types of questions move a thinker into action.  So, they're very good at the reflection and going round and round, and what we are trying to do is get them into action.  And it's why you might want to use a few more of those types of what/when questions, because that's a way that you can do that. The opposite of that would be Sarah having a coaching type of conversation with someone like me, who is an out-and-out doer, so all about the action, wanting to move things forward very, very fast, not necessarily thinking things through very deeply.  There are some benefits to being doers too!  But that might sound like me saying something like, "Yeah, I'm on it".  What does it sound like, Sarah; what do you think I say that makes me all kinds of doer?

Sarah Ellis: You say, "Yeah, I get it", like almost, "Stop talking to me, stop explaining it to me".  You say that quite a lot!

Helen Tupper: Anything else?

Sarah Ellis: It definitely sometimes look like multitasking in destruction.  It's sometimes quite hard to keep your attention and focus, and I think particularly because you want to move things on, the more you want to move things on, the more multitasking I see from you.  So, almost getting you to stop and stay still and to dive a bit deeper feels like a challenge, because that's not what you want to do, you want to make progress.

Helen Tupper: So, I have had lots of people, both coaches and non-coaches, take a coaching approach with me.  So, if you are taking this approach with a doer, who's demonstrating some of the behaviours that I would do naturally, a couple of things here for you.  First of all, use a slower pace to slow down the doer's pace.  So, Sarah does this with me very, very well; asks me questions, but does them in quite a slow way, so I have to listen a bit longer in order to get to the question that Sarah's asking me.  It naturally slows me down.  So, use your slower pace to reduce the speed of the doer's brain, or desire to take action. Then there are a couple of specific questions that are useful if you're coaching a doer.  The first is a why question.  So, "Talk to me about why this is important to you?" for example, could be a good question.  "Why" makes a doer think, so that's why that is a useful question.  Just watch out with the whys a little bit, because what you don't want to do is introduce any judgement. 

So, why, is quite a sensitive question to ask, it's very useful for a doer, but you don't want to say, "Why are you doing that, Helen?" so the tone is quite important when you use a why, but it is a question to make a doer think more deeply. The other thing that's really useful with a doer, if you're going to adapt your coaching approach, is lots of who questions, "Well, who else could help you?  Who else could you go and talk to?"  Because doers are very into action, they often go it alone. 

And when we get them to think about, "Who else could you consider?  Who might you need to get some input from?" it helps a doer to see the world that is bigger than them, which is often very useful and makes them a bit more considered, gives them a bit more data for their development. So, the main point here is, people naturally fall into one or other of these modes.  You can spot it by what they're saying, or sometimes the way that they're behaving.  And when you spot either a thinker or a doer in the person that you're taking a coaching approach with, just adapt the types of questions that you're asking, so that you can help them raise their awareness and increase their action; that's what it's all about.

Sarah Ellis: Whenever I'm trying to very consciously take a coaching approach, I always feel like I'm trying to do two things.  Firstly, give someone the space to be at their best, so we're not trying to make doers become thinkers or make thinkers become doers; thinkers will be great at the self-awareness, doers will be great at the action, so we want to give people the space to do that, to do what they already do really well, and the support to sometimes either speed up or slow down.  So, I think you're almost helping someone else adapt, based on the questions that you're asking. I always think, "When's the right time to give someone space?"  So, if someone tried to move me to action too quickly, that equally is not going to work.  So, someone's got to give me the space to explore options, to imagine scenarios; I'm quite future-oriented.  But then equally, someone who's really great at a coaching approach will spot that moment where they think, "Right, Sarah's had enough space now for that thinking.  I need to give her some support to help her to move modes, and use that awareness that she's got, that's probably quite good-quality awareness, and use that and turn it into action".  So, I always think, space and support.

Helen Tupper: The only other thing I would add actually, it is worth being aware of your own mode.  I don't know if you have this, Sarah, but because I'm a natural doer, sometimes when I'm taking a coaching approach, I might be the person rushing them into action, because that's how I naturally work.  And just because that's how I am doesn't mean it's going to help them in that conversation.  So, as well as adapting to the way that that person is with the questions in particular that I'm using, I also have to stay quite conscious of how my own mode might be affecting the conversation. So, thinker/doer sounds like this really simple thing that's easy to dismiss, but I think it's so important to having a high-quality conversation when you're taking a coaching approach.

Sarah Ellis: So, the next area we want to talk about is the two fundamental skills that will help you to take a coaching approach, and I do think both of these skills end up being very useful in our day-to-day jobs, as well as when we're trying to support someone with their Squiggly Career; and that's asking really insightful questions to unlock people's thinking and help them uncover new options, and also active listening. So, let's start with questioning.  I think when we're asking questions as part of taking a coaching approach, our job is to ask a question and then give someone the space to answer it.  So, the first thing to remember is, try and only ask one question at once.  It's really easy, certainly for me, and maybe this is because I'm a thinker, I sometimes think through my questions, as in say them out load.  So, almost my thought process comes out in multiple questions to someone. 

That's overwhelming, and also you risk someone answering either the easiest question, or you just lose some awareness, because you talk around some of the areas, rather than being specific about, "Well, let's talk about this one question before we move on". I often talk, when we're doing workshops on this area, about the different between question-stacking, where we do lots of questions at once, and question-sequencing, where we ask and then answer, ask and then answer; because of course our questions when we're coaching are often connected, we just don't need to do them all at the same time. If you do find yourself doing question-stacking, which I definitely do, I see this in myself quite frequently, my top tip is when you realise you've done it, often in the moment, just pause and it's okay to acknowledge to say something like, "I know I've asked you lots of questions there" or, "There's a few questions that I've just talked to you about. 

Let's start with…" and then you can repeat those questions, if you do find that you've done that unintentionally. The next thing when you're asking questions, if you spot that somebody is perhaps struggling a bit with how complicated a situation feels, or perhaps they might be blaming things outside of themselves, or feeling like they've got a lack of control about maybe what's happening to them, and that can happen in a Squiggly Career; there's lots of change and uncertainty, so there are moments where we maybe feel stuck or lost, and also we feel like we maybe can't do anything about it; your job when you're taking a coaching approach is to help people move their focus away from lots of things that might be concerning them, maybe lots of complications that might be happening around them, to really the things that they can control, that they can take ownership for. So, just when you're asking the questions, just make sure you've got "you" in there; so, "What action could you take?  Who could you go and talk to?" 

It doesn't mean that you ignore or avoid those other things that are happening.  I think it's really important that you acknowledge those, but you almost use those things that might be happening outside of someone's control as a bridge to then what can you control. If Helen was saying, "I feel like everything's really frantic, it's really busy", she's maybe describing a situation to me, I then might respond by saying, "Wow, that does sound like you've got a lot going on all at the same time.  How is that impacting your day?"  I'm using that description that she's given me as a bridge to go, "What's happening to you?  How are you feeling?  What actions can you take?" I think everyone listening to this will already be good at this, but we will mention it just in case: keep all of your questions open.  We don't want closed questions that people can answer too quickly, or with a yes or a no.  And my shortcuts to asking open questions are the 5Ws and the H, so: who, what, where, why, when and how; or, TED: tell, explain, describe.  All of those questions are just really good.  Start any of your questions with any of those, and they're a good place to start.

Again, if you do ask a closed question, and I definitely still find myself doing this some of the time, just repeat the question in an open way and it will feel like a different question.  So, if I just said to Helen, "Has your work got better since we last caught up?" that's it either has got better or it hasn't.  Helen might be like, "Yeah, it does feel like it's a bit better".  Then I might think, "Okay, that was obviously a closed question".  So, I'll just follow that up with, "How has your work got better since we last caught up?" so then I can use that closed question again as a bit of a bridge to an open question.

Helen Tupper: I think it just becomes one of those things that you get more conscious of.  I can sometimes hear myself saying it, and then I quickly turn it in the conversation, because I'm just more aware of it now, and I know that it unlocks someone's thinking much more when you use the open questions. The other thing that I think is useful when you are asking questions is to be aware of the depth of those questions, in terms of someone's self-awareness.  This is something we actually cover as a tool in You Coach You, but I'll talk it through now; so it's about dive-deeper questioning.  If you imagine three levels, let's imagine you are snorkelling in the conversation, you're trying to find some buried treasure.  The buried treasure is somebody's real deep awareness.

 You could dive to a depth level one, ie not very deep, and that level's really all about the facts of a situation. Let's say Sarah's having a challenge with somebody at work and I might say, "All right, tell me what's happening?"  What Sarah will end up doing then is describing that situation, she'll talk about facts.  And it's useful, it's useful to get that insight, but I'm not really getting to a lot of awareness about Sarah there, I'm just getting her reflections on the situation.  So, that's depth level one.  Then we need to go a little bit deeper, so depth level two, we're diving down a bit now; this one's all about feelings.  It gets a bit more personal here, you've got more emotion creeping in.  I might say to Sarah, "Okay, I've heard all the things that you've said about that situation, how is it making you feel?" Now we're getting a bit more deep here and Sarah might say, "I'm getting a bit more frustrated", and I might say, "Okay, and how else?" 

Sarah might say, "Well, to be honest, I'm a bit disappointed that people are behaving in that way.  That's not what I expected [or] it's not what I wanted".  I might say, "Yeah, that does sound really hard", so I play that back to Sarah.  Now, that gives me a bit of permission then to dive even deeper, and it's at the depth level three where we can really start to change someone's behaviour. 

This is where we get into fears. So, we've done facts, we've done feelings, and now we're pretty deep, we're talking about fears.  I might say to Sarah, "Okay, so you mentioned giving somebody feedback, but it's not something that you've done so far.  What are you worried about if you take that action?" and Sarah might then talk about, "Well, I'm worried that they won't want me in that team anymore, I'm worried that I'll be excluded from the conversation, or maybe I'm worried that they'll think I'm a difficult person", whatever's coming out.  That worry is the thing that will stop Sarah doing something different. What I need to do is work with the worry and talk to Sarah and say, "Okay, where does that worry come from?  When have you given feedback to somebody before; and how did that go?  What changed as a result of it?  What can you learn from when you've done this before that you could bring into this situation?" 

So, if I can work with the worry, I'm much more able to help Sarah to see, or to swim, if we're going with the analogy a bit more, to swim through the situation! It's really, really important just to think about, "What is the depth of the questions that I'm asking at the moment?"  I would say it's hard to go straight to the fears, like I'll go, "Sarah, what are you worried about?  Get on with it".  I haven't really got the trust in the conversation; we need to get there through a little bit of discussion.  So, it can take a little bit of time, but it's useful to think about, what depth are you naturally asking questions at; and what would it take for you to dive a bit deeper, because that is when you're going to make the biggest different to someone's development.

Sarah Ellis: The other thing that I think it's important to remember here is this is about conversations about our Squiggly Career, not a conversation.  So, you don't need to do all of these things all at once.  In fact, I think it's often the most useful conversations I've had, if you've got something that's pretty knotty, you're not going to try and help someone to solve all of that to unravel all the complexity of that knot in one conversation together. 

I'm not sure anyone's quite that good or that self-aware.  So I think again, in terms of expectations on yourself when you're taking a coaching approach, your job is not to solve in that moment.

Sometimes that can feel quite dissatisfying.  When I talk to lots of managers about taking a coaching approach, managers are often so used to wanting to be helpful in the moment, wanting to fix things fast.  We all want to feel useful; that's when we get that helper's high that scientists sometimes describe, from those chemicals that are released when we go, "Yeah, I did a good job here and now".  I think it's important to recognise that when you take a coaching approach, in the short term, sometimes you might come aware from those conversations thinking, "I'm not sure how useful I was today", or you don't get that immediate feedback loop of somebody going, "Brilliant, I feel all sorted now".  Sometimes it does take quite a few conversations, and sometimes it might not be until a year or a couple of years later where someone really appreciates the impact of those conversations they've had with you. That's quite a hard thing to let go of, I think, when we're all quite used to immediate gratification.  Essentially here, you've got to buy into, it might not feel as good right here, right now, but it will be much better for someone's Squiggly Career ultimately.  So, we've got to have that kind of long-term payoff, rather than that short-term, immediate, "I feel great right now".

Helen Tupper: I've had many more after-the-moment messages from people showing appreciation when I've taken a coaching approach, rather than when I've solved a problem for them.  The solving a problem for them thing, like if I'm in a meeting and I'm like, "I'll introduce you to that person", they say thank you then and there and that's it, that's done with it.  But the messages after the moment I've had, I don't know, 24, 48, even a week afterwards, where someone comes to me and says, "Thank you, you really made me think about that.  I've done this thing differently as a result" or, "I didn't even realise that that was something that I was doing in that situation, until I had that conversation with you", those sorts of messages. So it's almost like, if you can just wait for that message after the moment, it is very likely to come, because you're just going to make such a big difference to people's development when you take the coaching approach.  So, it's like delayed gratification, I would say, when you do this!

Sarah Ellis: Then the other side of the coin, so to speak, when we're taking a coaching approach, is our active listening.  And listening is a skill where we typically over-estimate our capability, and that is actually quite rare.  Most of us underestimate our capabilities; we are better than we give ourselves credit for, but not when it comes to listening.  That's because we think we're listening, but really we're waiting to speak, we think we already know how someone's going to end a sentence, we've heard it before, maybe we don't agree so we've stopped listening. 

There are loads of reasons why we don't listen. I sometimes don't listen because what someone has said prompts an idea, so then my head disappears off in different directions with ideas, so I create new connections and it stops me being present.  Perhaps it's harder to listen sometimes when lots of people are working remotely, maybe you've got notifications popping up; please don't have notifications popping up, but maybe you have and maybe you can see the emails out the corner of your eye. So, I think the first think is think about just how can you set yourself up for success, when you're having these coaching-style conversations, so that you can be really present, because we know that the quality of your attention will increase the quality of somebody else's thinking. 

And if you think about it, it is quite rare to be really listened to, and it's an incredibly almost easy thing to do, but I think we've got out of practice.  When you do, people will be very grateful for it, just to be really listened to.    So, try and think about, "Am I setting up my surroundings to give myself the chance to be really present as part of these conversations?" There are two things that I do that have really helped me to improve my listening.  The first one that I do is a talking/listening ratio.  So, I literally often draw a little diagram on my notebook with two circles on a scale.  In one of them, I'll write "talking"; in the other one, "listening", and I will set myself a goal before a coaching conversation of what percentage of time I want to spend talking and what percentage of time I want to spend listening. On average, when I'm taking a coaching approach to a conversation, I'm aiming for 30% talking, 70% listening. 

That changes depending on who I'm talking to, maybe how well I know somebody, but even writing that visually, writing that down beforehand with these two different-sized bubbles, reminds me of what my role is in this conversation.  And for me actually, it's particularly important when I've not met somebody before.  So, I talk more when I'm nervous; I'm more nervous when I'm not met someone.  So, my talking/listening ratio changes depending on how well I know someone. So, that self-awareness really helps me to think about, "Okay, I need to make an extra effort today, because I'm talking to someone for the first time".  And then, after the conversation, I just reflect on how close to that 70/30 ratio, or whatever I had put, did I get to.  It just gives you a bit of that fast feedback, that immediately reflection on, "I wanted it to be 70% of the time listening, but do you know what, that felt more like a 50/50 conversation".  I find that really useful.

The second thing that I've been doing is a really simple idea, but I've had loads of positive feedback on this, and maybe this is the nature of how we're all working.  But this is the idea of doing something called "a five-minute mind map".  So, when you're having a coaching conversation, rather than worrying about having to remember everything in the moment, or maybe having to take lots and lots of notes, I've slightly changed how I approach these conversations, where at the end of a conversation, I will have five minutes where I finish a conversation and I do a five-minute mind map that I divide into two.

So, 50% of the mind map is writing down what I heard from that person, so any actions that they committed to, any words that I heard them say a lot; what I noticed, so were there moments in the conversation where they felt uncomfortable; maybe anything else I want to just jot down so I remember for next time.  And then the other 50% of the mind map is me reflecting on my own coaching capability, so what did I do well; what were my even better ifs; I might do my little talk ratio diagram there; I might think, "What techniques did I use that seemed to be really useful?" because here, I think we're almost creating our own coaching toolkit and almost our go-to questions, what seemed to be helpful, what didn't seem to work. As I've been talking to groups about this, where I think this maybe is tricky to do is if we have to add five minutes onto the end of a conversation where so many people are in back-to-back meetings. 

So, I think it is useful to have a slightly shorter conversation, but to have five minutes at the end for yourself, than to keep the conversation the same and then try to find five minutes later in the day, because you just know that that will then never happen. So, if I was catching up with someone, let's say they were like, "Could we have a half-hour chat?" I might actually now suggest, "Can we do 25 minutes?" and I just give myself that five minutes back. 

Or, if I'm talking to someone for a bit longer, for 45 minutes, I'll make sure that I've not got another meeting until 15 minutes later; so bonus, that time I get to do my five-minute mind map and get a cup of tea, or something else exciting. That five-minute mind map, I think the reason it helps your listening is, you feel reassured that you've got some time straight after the conversation where everything is fresh in your mind to just reflect and write down and think about, "What did I hear", also my own coaching approach, and that seems to help people improve their listening, probably because we've come up with an intentional exercise that you know you're going to do afterwards, that is partly based on you listening really well to that conversation, otherwise it's very hard to do that mind map.

Helen Tupper: There are a couple of other listening tips and tricks that might help you as well.  So, the first one is about clues and cues.  So, when you're listening, the obvious thing is you're listening to the words that someone says, kind of an obvious thing.  But actually, there are some other clues and cues you can pick up on. So, the cues: when people are talking, what they give off is this thing called "parasocial cues".  It's the stuff that you see really more than the stuff that you hear.  So, it's almost like you're listening to their body language, as well as the words that they're saying. 

So that might be raised eyebrows, or it might be fidgeting hands; it might be them looking around a little bit, like maybe they want more time to think, so they're looking up, because they're engaging different parts of their brain, for example, if anyone knows about NLP-type stuff, neuro-linguistic programming.  You don't have to be an expert, by the way, in NLP, but you just have to basically look at other people when they are reflecting or answering your questions, and see if you can pick up on any of those cues, because it's a bit more data that we might use to inform how we're taking that coaching approach.

It is worth knowing as well that those clues are visible if you can see somebody, so maybe you are having that coaching conversation virtually and you can see them on camera, or maybe you're in the office with them; that's when you can pick up on those cues.  If you are camera off, for example, then it might be more about listening to pauses, or listening to pace, those sorts of things.  So, it's not just the words people say, basically, there are often other insights that you can get if you're really listening. 

That's why listening is so hard, because actually there is a lot for your brain to do, if you're actually going to do high-quality listening. One of the things that I find quite useful when I'm listening is I capture how many times people say the same words.  I find that a really useful thing to keep me in a high listening mode; I'll sometimes have a little tally.  In fact, I did this yesterday.  I was on a panel with someone yesterday, who didn't ask me to take a coaching approach, so I haven't told him what I was listening to yet!  But it's somebody that I know a little bit and we were both talking on the panel.  And the number of times he said the word, "make", I thought was really interesting. So, part of the conversation was around values, and he was saying how important it was in his career that he was able to make something; he was talking about making in this really tangible way like, "People want to make adverts" and, "People want to tangibly make things in their jobs". 

I was like, "People might, but you obviously do", because you use that word so much!  It was quite an interesting value to me, this idea of being a maker, because I don't hear that of people very much.  But that's the point.  I was listening so hard that I heard something that was different to me, it was unique to him.  Cues and clues, quite interesting. Also, listening language.  So, if you want somebody to feel like you are listening to them, there are a couple of words that you can say that create that impression.  So, obviously it is important that you actually are listening to them. 

But the words are, "That sounds hard" or, "I hear what you're saying".  Because we have such a strong association with those words, we know them as listening words, if you are saying them back to people, they feel like you have been listening to them.  So think about, could you use those like, "Gosh, that sounds like a really hard situation" or, "Yeah, I do hear what you're saying".  Could you find a way that you could naturally use those? The other thing that is useful is saying someone's name.  We are very attached to our names, most of us have had them for quite a long time. 

So, if Sarah said to me, "Wow, Helen, that sounds really exciting, I can see how excited you are", that shows me that she's with me, she's listening to me; and using my name just makes me almost sit up and feel like she's with me in that conversation.  The important thing here is for you to do it naturally, so practise it.  You don't want to be like, "Now I need to say Helen's name.  Now I need to say that sounds hard". Then the other thing that you can do is also do a bit of playback.  This is really useful when you're listening, for both you and the person you're taking a coaching approach with, because you might say, "Okay, Sarah, can I just playback what I heard. 

So, you mentioned X, Y and Z, and you said that this was the hardest thing about the situation.  Is that a fair reflection?"  Doing that creates a bit of clarity for Sarah, because she might not have realised what she'd been saying, because actually if I'd been listening well, then I've just let her talk, and she's probably been finding her flow as she's been sharing this stuff with me. 

So, me creating a bit of clarity by playing it back could be quite useful. But also, as someone taking a coaching approach, it's actually really useful for me too, just to make sure that I've heard the things that Sarah wanted me to hear, and not things that I thought were most important about the situation. Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  One of the things that I always think is important to understand the difference between is repeating and summarising.  I think when you're repeating, you are literally sharing back with someone what they have said to you, word for word. 

So you might say, "Well I've heard you say, 'I feel overwhelmed' three or four times in our conversation so far".  I've heard you say that and you're showing someone that you've listened.  But also, you're helping them, to Helen's point, with a theme, "Okay, you might have just been chatting to me, but I've spotted that you keep coming back to this same phrase, or you've said it in a few different ways". I think summarising, when you do that, it's really important that you do what Helen just did in that example; you've got to finish a summary with asking an open question back to the other person, because when you summarise, the risk is you've summarised it and interpreted it in your way.  So, if I'm ever summarising back to somebody, I'd always say, "So, what have I missed in that summary?" really inviting somebody to say -- and that's always really interesting, because maybe they'll say, "You're about right, but this still feels really important to me". 

And so, maybe I didn't hear it as being really important.  But if they say that, in terms of what I've missed, you then think, "Okay, that's interesting, there's a useful insight in that". So, if you are summarising, just make sure that you don't -- because people often, I've seen this before when I've done this wrong, you can summarise and it's really easy for people to be like, "Yeah, that's right".  And also, people don't want to criticise you, criticise your summary.  So, just think about maybe asking something like, "What have I missed there?" or, "What else feels important that I didn't say?" giving people really easy permission basically to let you know if there is anything that feels critical that you just might have missed along the way.

Helen Tupper: I think, "Yeah, yeah", is probably another doer flag as well, because I'll be like, "Yeah, yeah, move on"!  It's definitely one.  So, the last area we wanted to talk about here when you're taking a coaching approach is a structure for a conversation. 

Now, this is a framework that we've got in our book, You Coach You, and what we don't want you to do is use a framework really formulaically.  So, imagine you've got, up to this point, a really natural conversation, there's a lot of trust, a lot of empathy, and then you introduce the framework.  Then suddenly, it becomes a bit structured and stilted and too formal.  We don't want you to do that. But the reason that we're going to talk through this COACH framework with you now, is it can really help you to start at quite an ambiguous part of a conversation, like when someone's maybe grappling with something a bit tricky, a bit knotty, like we said earlier, and then it gradually helps then to get more specific about what they could do, what action they're going to take, what help they need.  So, it's a flow really that helps you go from ambiguity and knottiness into something specific that someone can do. 

And I think the more you practise this, the more natural it becomes, so the less formal you feel like you have to use it. So, let me talk through the five parts of the COACH framework, and then what we will do is summarise this for you in the PodSheet.  And don't forget, we always link to the PodSheet in the show notes on Apple, and if you ever can't find it, it is on our website.  I think the best thing to do is to sign up for PodMail, because then you just get all our PodSheets automatically in your inbox every week.  But you work out what's right for you, but the PodSheet will summarise what I'm about to say.

So, the framework is COACH and COACH is an acronym.  So, the first letter is C, which stands for Clarity.  So, when you are taking a coaching approach, it is really important that you work out what is the thing that is most useful for you to focus that conversation on, because often people have quite a few different things that they are struggling with or want to talk through, or opportunities they're trying to explore, particularly if it's a knotty moment; there's probably quite a lot going on in that knotty moment. For example, for me, I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed at the moment, because we've got a lot on at work, there's lots of change, lots of things I'm trying to create; and in my personal life, I've got quite a lot going on, because I'm trying to move house. 

So, if Sarah was trying to coach me through how I could feel less overwhelmed, actually there are quite a few elements to that.  And so, what she might want to do is get me to really clarify what's the most important thing for us to focus on, so that you could feel more in control. Yes, I might surface all those different situations that are going on, but what Sarah wants me to do is really be specific about, "What's having the biggest impact; what do you want to focus on first?"  It's really important you do that, or a conversation could go all over the place.  So, get to clarity: what's the most important thing; what's the most useful thing?  It doesn't matter if someone's surfacing lots of different stuff, but just keep going back, "Okay, so what shall we focus on first?" 

So, that's the first prompt of the framework; it's C, and that's all for Clarity. The second is O, and that's all about Options.  So you might do a bit of playback here, you might say, "Okay so, Helen, you mentioned that the biggest thing actually is there are lots of new things that you are trying to do, and you can't work out what's the most important thing.  So, what are your options in terms of how you could approach it?"  You want a big, big open question there. 

You might feel like you want to give someone the answers at that point, "Well, just write a list, Helen, work out what's most important"; but remember, don't fall into telling someone what to do.  You want them to generate the options for themselves, because they might have better ideas than you, and also because they'll be more committed to the ideas that they generate, back to that point that we said earlier. So, people will come up with a few options and then before you move on, just keep them in that mode for a little bit, that option-generating mode, and say, "Okay, really interesting.  What else could you do; what else could you explore?" get them to stay there a bit longer.  I often find it quite useful to say, "Who do you see that is good at this?" and then they might name them, I might say, "Sarah, she's amazing at this, she's always in control of everything".  Then you might say, "Okay, what is it that Sarah does naturally that you could perhaps do instead?" 

Getting into someone else's head can sometimes help people to generate more ideas.  So, I stay with options for quite a long time, so that people think about all the different things they could do. Third bit of the framework is A, and that is for Action.  So here, what we want to do is say to someone, "Okay, here are some of the options that you shared with me", again I'd probably do a bit of playback there, "what two actions would be most useful for you to take forward now?"  I don't want ten actions, because they're probably not going to do that, so it's one or two, get them to really pick and prioritise at that point. 

Then, get them to restate them.  When they restate them, again they are likely to be more committed to them.  So, you don't want to say it to them, you want to get them to state it to you. Then, once they've stated the actions, we can move onto the fourth part of the framework, C, and that is for Confidence.  So, for each of the actions that they have identified, ask them, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you to move that forward, or to take that action?" 

What we're trying to do here is just understand if there's anything getting in someone's way.  So, I might say, "On that particular action, I'm 10 out of 10, I'm clear and I'm confident about taking that forward", and that's good, that's brilliant.  Or I might say, "I don't know, 4 or 5 out of 10.  I know what to do, but I'm not quite sure how to do it". Again, it's better to have that insight than to ignore it, and it helps you then with the fifth part of the framework, which is H for Help, because then you can say to somebody, "All right, so what help might you need now to move that forward?" 

Or, with that action that was 4 out of 10, you might say, "Well, what help do you need for that to feel more like a 5 or a 6 out of 10?"  So, it helps someone to be really specific about the support they need to move that action forward.  It's just a really useful framework that can help you in a conversation, so that you feel in control of your coaching approach, and that that conversation has a direction or a bit of a flow to it. I've talked that through pretty quickly, and I know that, and I've probably talked it through pretty confidently, because I have used it a lot. 

But when I started using it, I wasn't confident with it, and what I did have was "COACH" written down on a bit of paper, and I would literally have my pen on the bit that I was on to make sure that I stayed in it and I knew where I was.  And just going back to the point that Sarah mentioned earlier about conversations, you don't have to do all of the COACH, so all the clarifying and the options, the action, the confidence and the help, in one conversation.  Sometimes, I might spend a lot of time just getting to the clarity; sometimes I spend ages like, "What is it that's going on and what is it really important for us to talk about?" Then, someone might go away and have a think about options, and we might come back together to talk about the action.  So, it's fine if this takes a couple of conversations, but it is a framework that if you follow it, you can really support someone get to being quite specific about what they can do and who might they need help from.

Sarah Ellis: So, that's everything for this week.  We really hope that's been helpful for you as you try to take more of a coaching approach in some of your conversations.  And as we said at the start, hopefully we can all just help each other when we need it as we navigate our Squiggly Careers. Thank you to everybody who continues to subscribe, share, recommend the podcast.  Our listeners are brilliant, and we love reading your reviews in particular. 

We get a little email summary when someone writes a new review, and it continues to be the highlight of my week.  So, if you want to do us a five-minute favour, that's definitely something you can do for us that always bring a smile to certainly my face anyway! So, thank you so much for listening, and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everybody.