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On being coached

By Elizabeth Eyre (May 2008 Issue)
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Before I joined TJ back in August 2006, if you’d asked me about coaching, I would have admitted to knowing about sports coaches, life coaches (those people who tell rich people how to organise their wardrobes) and personal coaches (those people in the gym who make you actually break into a sweat rather than just amble along on the treadmill reading the paper), but I wouldn’t have known anything about business or executive coaches.

However, over the past two years, I’ve heard an unfeasibly large amount about coaching in the workplace, which isn’t surprising since, according to the latest annual survey by the CIPD, 71 per cent of organisations in the UK were using it last year.

If I believed everything I’ve heard about coaching, I would think it was L&D’s answer to King Midas – everything it touches turns to gold. I’ve had countless discussions with L&D people about how coaching transforms organisations and even the lives of the people who are coached, and all through the medium of the ‘coaching conversation’.

So what is this fabled coaching conversation exactly? I know that coaches are supposed to be the masters of asking deep, probing, relevant, supportive, caring questions
(Jeremy Paxman in angora), and adepts in the art of silence. By mixing these skills with others, such as being challenging when necessary and deep-listening, they are able, in some mystical manner, to guide coachees along a path of self-discovery.

But how does coaching actually achieve everything that I’m regularly assured it does? Although I’ve heard a lot about the efficacy of coaching, I’ve never really had a convincing – or coherent – explanation of why or how it’s so effective.

So I concluded that the only way to lift the veil of mystery surrounding the machinations of coaching was to have some myself and experience it first-hand. I was keen to see whether I would undergo some kind of magical transformation that would send me shooting up the career ladder, while simultaneously enabling me to get a grip on every other aspect of my life. At the same time, however, I was slightly worried that the coaching process, with all its probing questions and deep, meaningful silences, would uncover things within me that, like nasty creepy crawlies squirming blindly in the sun, would be better off staying under their stones.

Having just undergone a few months of transactional analysis-based counselling as part of a diet programme, I am painfully aware of how much baggage you didn’t even know you were carrying, and how it can come tumbling off your internal conveyor belt – underwear, not always pristine, flying in every direction – once a trained professional starts asking you: “So why do you think you thought that?”

But, since I always have the best interests of this magazine and its readers at heart, I thought: “What the heck, let’s go for it. If I’m revealed to be a latent axe-murderer, at least it’ll make good copy.”

The next step was to find someone who was prepared to coach me in as authentic a fashion as possible – I wanted to actually undergo the full coaching experience rather than have a taster session or sit and listen to someone extolling the virtues of something I didn’t fully understand – and to have their style, approach and results laid bare within the pages of TJ. Not an easy task but, just as I was beginning to think that I was doomed to stay eternally uncoached, I found Sean Weafer.

Weafer is an Irishman who specialises in coaching senior managers who have no time or inclination for training but who need to improve their effectiveness. He has developed his own model – the six Cs of coaching – and believes very much in keeping it practical; he has a spiritual dimension to his work, in that he believes that we are all pre-programmed to be constantly perfecting ourselves, but his focus is very much on achieving business objectives and, as the young people say, keeping it real.

He emphasises the importance of business coaches having been in business themselves and is not afraid to tell it like it is – my kind of guy! The speed at which we went from my mentioning in passing that I was looking for a coach to feature in a regular diary in TJ, to him organising a time and date for our first meeting, was such that I thought: “Here’s a man who doesn’t shilly-shally about. Here, also, is a man who seizes a good opportunity when he sees one. I think we could do business.”

And we are! Next month, in my coaching diary, I will talk about my first couple of sessions – deciding what I actually want to be coached on and setting some goals.

You can find out more about Sean Weafer at www.seanweafer.com

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