Getting started with coaching: how to map the journey?
Posted on February 20, 2020 by Pantaleon Fassbender, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
This comment is about coaching tools for the initial mapping and clarification of coaching topics.
In every coaching process, it is crucial to explore a coachee’s emotional spaces and capabilities’ landscape to jointly define robust solutions for the challenges or needs that initially have led to the client consultation.
We prefer in this step “open” tools like the Blue Board or the Coaching Disc that allow – at first sight – inconsistent emotions and ideas to emerge. These tools provide “spaces” that will enable the coachee to visualize essential topics, relevant people, and critical beliefs, as well as how they might relate to one another.
Business coaching related to mission-critical projects is about the client working on his or her systems thinking capabilities – applied authentically to achieve impact. It all adds up to why? how? , and what? (in this order)!
Very often, the seemingly inconsistent elements on the board constitute building blocks for a new practice. This picture provides an excellent launch-pad for the coachee’s future action-planning.
You need not speculate about the unconscious when you introduce such approaches to a client, tuning into the playful aspects of sorting out a complicated “mess”, and finding order in chaos mostly does the trick.
But again, to know your trade and to be aware of transference or countertransference in the early stages of a coaching engagement isn’t bad either.
Looking more narrowly focused on tools to highlight capabilities and resources that can be honed and utilized for solution-building, CCL’s Experience Explorer-cards have served us well in the past!
