An IEC coach told me an interesting story today. Her client, who had come for career coaching, was stuck in their second session, unable to work out his goal and uninspired by the process of coaching. Both the client and the coach were getting frustrated as the session was not moving forward. Then the client said, “Tell me your story – how did you become a coach?”
The coach – being a well-trained IEC coach – said, “Well, that’s not really what coaching is about” and quite right too. However, in the interests of shifting something in the dynamics, she decided to take a punt…she took a deep breath and launched in.
Mindful of a recent training in mentoring skills for the workplace, the coach told her story with a mentoring flavour; that is as a teaching story, rather than just a nice chat. At the end of the story the client was happy, energised and ready to go back to his coaching session. By the end of the session he had identified his goal and had started to explore the various options for achieving it. And the coach was happy. Despite the fact that she had gone against her initial instinct (not to tell the story) she had decided to go with the flow and “break the rules” of coaching and in doing so had obtained a great outcome.
The moral to the story? Sometimes breaking the rules is the only way forward.
And (at risk of creating a mangled metaphor) if a picture can tell “a thousand words”, then perhaps so too can a great thousand words paint a picture.
Get more information about Mentoring Skills in the Workplace.
