There are two main ways that people are coached today: face to face with their coaches or on the telephone. Some programmes rely wholly on one method or the other, and others
have a mixture of the two.

Because I’m in London and my coach Sean Weafer is in Ireland, my programme is combining face-to-face sessions and telephone conversations. And having had one telephone session so far, I’m at a complete loss to understand how organisations think coaching over the phone can possibly work.

I can understand the why – it’s flexible and cuts out travelling – but the how is a bit suspect.

Coaching, like a lot of learning, depends to a great extent upon the relationship the coachee has with his coach. If the rapport isn’t there, achieving your goals is just so much harder; most people can remember a school teacher with whom they failed to click and the negative effect that lack of a sympathetic relationship had on their ability to learn in that class.

I suppose you can form a meaningful relationship over the phone but how is the coach meant to fully pick up on a coachee’s body language or attitude or state of mind – or even see what they’re doing – when they are on the phone? Likewise for the coachee; the coach could be doing Sudoku for all he knows, uhuh-ing whenever there’s a pause and quickly scanning a crib sheet of deeply-meaningful questions for something that looks vaguely appropriate.

After experiencing my telephone coaching session, I really do think that you need to be in the same room to coach and be coached properly, particularly in the first sessions when coach and coachee are getting to know each other.

Just like email is so easy to misinterpret because you don’t have the visual cues helping you decide what someone is trying to say, phone conversations do suffer from a lack of that extra source of information. They also suffer because so many people dislike using them and feel ill at ease or constricted during a phone call in a way they wouldn’t during a face-to-face conversation.

As a journalist I use the phone every day of the week, but I still feel at a slight disadvantage and prefer to talk to people in the flesh. I always feel slightly nervous before picking up the phone and my phone coaching session was no exception.

Although I had met Weafer in person three times before the session, I still had the feeling that I was talking to someone I didn’t know, which was a bit off-putting and made it more difficult to concentrate. As did the fact that I was speaking to him from my desk, surrounding by colleagues who were no doubt ear-wigging like crazy to find out what I was talking about, rather than in the security of a meeting room.

I actually felt a bit silly saying my ultimate aim on the phone, in a way that I hadn’t in the face-to-face meetings which kind of took away a bit of its power for me.

We went through my worksheets again and recapped on my ultimate goal and the steps I was taking to achieve it. I had managed to complete most of the action points since our last meeting, so I ticked them off – huzzah! Some of the points I hadn’t been able to achieve, because the people to whom I needed to talk had been away, so I rescheduled them for another date.

I found going through the workbook on the phone extremely difficult. There are a few different sets of action points, goals etc and there were some very long pauses as I frantically scrabbled through my folder looking for the right ones, and then wrote in my new to-do lists. Silences on the phone aren’t easy to deal with – I always feel that time on the phone is for talking and I feel uncomfortable if I’m not doing that; if I’m not hearing someone talking, I’m wondering what’s happened to them.

All in all, not a particularly positive experience for me.

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

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