View of Monestir de Santa Maria de Montserrat, España
Coaching
Coaching is a means to process success and progress towards goals for individuals and organizations. In short, coaching will take the best of many worlds and package it together to enhance the approach your taking to reach your goals. Great coaches take into account someone's talents and capacity to give effort and work toward their goals while holding them responsible to their vision. We all have dreams and goals, wants and needs. But how many of us truly focus in and make meaningful progress towards those goals.
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There are myriad models of Coaching and approaches to carrying out Coaching with individuals and organizations. The Preferred way of coaching focuses in on individual growth and development (of course), but also holds our focus on the target. As we make progress, it is important to develop a means to measure progress and moments of success. After implementing a plan, we can revisit what is working and how to improve. This is no different for organizations or individuals. The approach might vary slightly but the practice of coaching for performance.
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Preferred Coach Training
The training that started it all.
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Sixteen (16) hours of the foundations of coaching. It's short, quick, and helps shift the paradigm from giving advice and relying on expertise to incorporating coaching expertise to elicit the answers needed to improve outcomes. Think of it this way, this is an overlay for people's skills as they continue to work in their industry.
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Materials:
Preferred Coaching Manual
Co-Active Coaching (Kimsey House, et al)
Preferred Coaching Deck
Preferred Coaching Model notepad
Components:
Coaching Ethics Overview (ICF and CCE)
Coaching from and for strengths.
Preferred Coaching Model Introduction
Coaching Skills
Peer-Coaching Practice
Paradigm Shifting
Pre-/Post-Training Coaching Knowledge Assessments
Adding Power to Inquiry:
Powerful questions, probing questions, open-ended questions...Call them what you will, there is an art to building conversations based on getting to the heart of the matter and making progress. It is tough to tackle the challenges that are at the core of each challenge.
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By definition, the art of using powerful questions infuses our conversations with the power to act on "powerful" decisions. They provide the psychological oxygen and space to consider our next steps in surprising ways, unpredictable ways.
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It is the best way to carry out conversations.
Program Evaluation
One of the ​core tenants of Coaching is to measure performance. We learn from our successes as much as from our mistakes. In order to increase our performance in any area of our personal or professional lives, we must hold ourselves accountable for our performance. Evaluation is one of the methods to increase accountability for a team.
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Evaluation plans are necessary for putting together a strong proposal for any project. How will you know you have met meaningful goals to demonstrate effectiveness? How will you measure the impact of your work? How do you know that the results that you are witnessing are due to you and your team's efforts? There are many important questions to answer and methods to evaluate. Whether it is the evaluation of processes, economic impact, or goals, a strong evaluation practice is important to build off of previous experience any hidden lessons that can be gathered from quantitative and/or qualitative data.
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While evaluation methods and services may be brought into play at the end of a project to measure outcomes and results, it is best to "begin with the end in mind." Each active project implies that thoughtful work has gone into planning a project in at least a few phases. Those phases could be labeled as - conceptualization, implementation and closure of the project. Whichever your label of choice is for each phase, a sound evaluation of the idea filled beginning, the laborious middle, and the desired results of your project are instrumental to finding success.
In Development
