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For people who don’t know you, can you tell our readers a little about yourself and how you coach others?
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What made you choose coaching as a profession?
I
think it chose me, actually. I was delivering NLP training and
through that, lots of people were asking me for 1:1 help with various
personal and business issues. Towards the end of the 1990s, the
coaching market became established, and what I was doing became known
as coaching.
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When you started out as a coach, did you believe that you would come this far?
I
didn't have a goal or destination in mind, actually, I just wanted to
do something that I enjoyed for as long as I enjoyed it. 20 years on
and I'm still enjoying it.
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What is your greatest success with a client?
That
depends on what you value as a measurement. Either 700% increase in
profitability for a Business Unit Director, or the CEO of a
conference business who recently told me that the coaching session I
had with him 10 years ago changed his life and continues to make new
opportunities possible for him, such as giving a great speech at his
own wedding! Personally, I value the latter example, and in fact the
original coaching session is used as an example in my book The NLP
Practitioner Manual.
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How many sessions do clients particularly attend for?
That
depends on the client's needs, but my aim from the start is to make
myself redundant because the last thing I want is for clients to
depend on me; I get bored. I find that for a leader to make a step
change in their thinking, behaviour and performance, 6 months is
about right, with maybe 4 to 6 sessions over that time.
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Do you always meet clients in the office or do you ever deliver sessions out in the open?
Actually
I prefer busy public places. Lots of coaches complain to me that they
find their work very tiring, and the reason for that, I believe, is
that in a private room, the coach is having to supply all the energy.
In a busy, happy, public space, there's so much positive energy to
feed off that it makes the session so much easier. I learned this
many years ago by accident when I had planned to do a coaching
session with a client who was terrified of public speaking in a cosy,
plush, deserted hotel bar. When we arrived, the bar was closed and we
were sent to the leisure club where the ladies' aqua-aerobics session
had just finished. The buzz and energy in the bar definitely made the
session easier.
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As well as coaching do you use NLP or Hypnotherapy to support your clients?
As
a coach, I don't think you can help but use all of your skills and
experiences, so yes, definitely. I would say that I don't use either
of those tool kits overtly, though, so I don't 'do' NLP or hypnosis,
but I do weave their principles into the conversation. For example, I
might say to a client, “So, by the time you walk out of that door
in an hour's time, how do you want to feel differently about that?”
In the cold light of this web page, it's loaded with Milton language
and even a linguistic timeline, but in a natural conversation, it
just gets the client to think about what they want as an outcome for
the session. I do conversational swishes, timelines, squashes, all
sorts. I've actually pioneered a number of unique adaptations of NLP
techniques which I know are used by many other coaches and trainers,
such as doing a swish with a flipchart.
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What do you do to keep up with the latest trends in coaching?
I
don't. Trends are only there for someone to sell something. I only
judge myself by my results as measured by my clients. I do keep up
with advances in other technologies though, such as neurology,
psychology, various aspects of human behaviour and so on. I think
that's much more valuable. As much as I struggle to read academic
research, it's much more valuable than the 'latest trends'.
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Do you attend any regular training?
I
look for interesting events to go to. I don't think it's necessarily
useful to keep going to coach training, I have found that coaches who
do that do it for one of two reasons; either they need the CPD
points, or they believe that they don't yet know enough to be a good
coach. I prefer to go to lectures, business talks and so on, anything
to expand the mind. Your local university will have lots of different
free events that you can go to.
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Who in the coaching sector do you look up to?
I
don't know anyone in the coaching sector these days. I used to go to
lots of networking events and practice groups but I found them to be
mostly populated by wannabe coaches looking for clients. I realised
that successful coaches don't go to such events, they're too busy
with clients! I'm also sorry to say that the people who become well
known in a particular field, if they're commercially driven, have to
keep reinventing their ideas so that they can keep making money. Even
academic figures are often driven by a need to be published in order
to keep the research grants flowing and their centres open. I suppose
I've never really been one for heroes. Of anyone, I look up to my
father the most, but he's not a coach as far as he knows!
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Why do you believe coaching is important to people from all walks of life?
I
don't believe it's important. I believe that access to education is
important, for people who want it, and coaching is just one form of
education.
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What is the main benefit from a coaching session?
That
the client gets something important for them that they had believed
to be just out of reach.
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Do clients come for one off session or do you meet them on a regular basis?
It
depends on what they want. If it's a problem fix, I'll do that in one
session. For example, fear of public speaking is a common one, and
I'd expect to have that sorted in about an hour or so at most. If it
takes longer, the client starts to question too much and begins to
believe that their problem must be really serious. So I treat the
client with total respect, and their 'problem' with total disrespect.
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For someone potentially looking for a coach, what questions should they ask before booking a session?
Treat
it like any service; a plumber, gardener or whatever. Trust your gut
reaction and ask for testimonials, but bear in mind that no coach is
going to refer to a client who hated them! An acid test is to ask for
a money back guarantee. If the coach says no, they can't have a lot
of faith in their skills.
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Do you have a coach yourself? How does your coach help you?
Not
formally, but I know where to go to talk things through.
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Has having a coach changed your life?
I
guess so, yes, though accidentally. My partner gave me a lot of very
challenging feedback when we first met, and it made me rethink the
whole direction of my life. While I didn't employ her as a coach,
that's the job that she really did. We shouldn't think of coaches in
only a one dimensional way, but instead think of the role that they
play in our lives.
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What area of expertise do you specialise in?
I
suppose it's become two things. Fear of public speaking is so common
and so easy to resolve that I end up doing it quite often. The more
interesting area for me is modelling high performers. I've written a
book about it, Genius at Work, which contains my full modelling
methodology. In NLP terms, it's the basis of how you create custom
techniques, so whatever the client raises, I model and create a
custom intervention for it. When you model lots of people, you start
to see patterns of excellence which make it so much easier to coach
future clients.
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How do your friends react when they find out your a life coach?
I'm
not a life coach. I'm just a friend. One of the worst things that
coaches do is to fail to turn off the coach at 5 o'clock.
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Has being a coach benefited you personally? How?
It's
given me a varied and interesting career.
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You recently released a book, can you tell me a little bit about it
Genius
at Work is a methodology for modelling high performance. The book
takes you right through all the basic principles and the most up to
date research in brain function, so for example it finally explains
how learning and 'anchoring' work without the mumbo-jumbo
explanations of many NLP and coaching books. By following the book,
you'll be able to identify high performers, extract the essence of
their talents and turn the model into a template for pretty much
anything. I used it to create a custom coaching program for a well
known engineering company, a graduate program for a high street
retailer, a development program for an industry regulator and so on.
And of course, I use it almost every day to learn really useful and
interesting tricks from people who I meet. One of the problems that I
see most often in corporate training is the use of 'rituals' and
'incantations'. A ritual is a sequence of actions which is designed
to bring about a certain result, a common example being the sales
manager who believes that if his team just did what he does, they
would be as fantastic as he is. An incantation is a script, a magic
spell which is sure to get a certain result, so if a store assistant
asks you, in a dreary, deadpan voice tone, “Can I interest you in
one of our fantastic special offers today?” you're supposed to fall
over yourself to part with your hard earned cash. The high performing
sales people who were observed to create these scripts didn't
actually say those words, they adapted their interaction for each
customer. They didn't have a script, but they did have an underlying,
consistent way of thinking about their behaviour and results, and
that's what you can get at using Genius at Work, so you end up with
people who say something slightly different to each customer but
usually get the same, positive result. The script is easier for
corporates to teach – or at least they think it is – but it's
really counter-productive. When we model high performers, we find the
same common traits coming up, every time, in every walk of life or
skill set. They under-rate their own skills, they make it look easy
and they can't explain how they do it. The Genius at Work approach
enables you to get underneath that and unlock the real secrets of
their success.
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You have recently started a radio talk show, how is this going?
N/a
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Do you coach people in groups or just on a one to one basis?
Both
I suppose. 1:1 work looks more like coaching, but when I'm training a
group and one person raises a personal issue, I use it to coach the
whole group because I know they'll all identify with it in some way.
For example, on a presentation skills course, I'll talk to someone
who is anxious about the nature of worry, which is actually just an
application of our goal setting ability. Of course, everyone worries
at some point, so by changing one person's understanding of worry,
the whole group benefits without having to step into the spot light
and talk about their own experiences.
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What is your life mantra?
Life's
too short to have mantras.
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Do you have a vision board?
I
don't even know what one is. I imagine it's a big board on the wall
with all my hopes and aspirations on it. I've seen other people use
them, and to me, they're just a big advert for stuff they haven't
actually done. They would cleverly add the word, “yet!”, but
actually it just seems to be a big excuse for not doing some
impressive sounding stuff. What a waste of time! Just get on with
your life.
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Why is goal setting so important?
Oddly
enough, I don't think it is. What I mean is that we are goal directed
animals, we can't not set goals. So I don't think it's as important
to set goals in the sense that coaches are probably familiar with, I
think it's more important to be aware of the goals that you already
have for yourself and which drive you every day. Only when you're
honest about what those are can you modify them to get different
results.
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What is the difference between negative and positive goal setting?
I
don't think there is a difference. We're analogue creatures, so we
can't directly think in terms of negatives, so a negative goal such
as, “I don't want to still be in this job in a year's time”,
translates into, “I want to be in this job a year from now, still
feeling miserable about it”, because that's the image that you
might make in your mind when you verbalise that goal. So a goal can
by definition only be something you move towards. You might be
motivated away from failure, for example, but that tells you nothing
about what direction to move in, so you're likely to go from the
frying pan to the fire, as they say. You really want to be in the
living room watching your favourite TV show, so there's no need to
think of getting out of the frying pan, that's just the triggering
event, it's not a goal.
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What goals have you set for yourself? Did you achieve them?
I
have goals such as having so many clients, running so many corporate
projects at a time and so on. I promise myself a little reward when I
get there, so for example if I win a corporate project I might
promise myself a camera accessory. I find that those sorts of goals
become reality quite easily.
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Does coaching work for everyone?
Yes,
but not everyone knows that they're being coached!
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Where do you see yourself in the nest 3-4 years?
I've
been asked this question since my first job interview nearly 30 years
ago, and I still can't come up with a better answer than, “enjoying
myself, somewhere”.
