Compass Coaching Frequently Asked Questions
What does the coach do? What does the individual do?
The role of the coach
The role of the coach is to provide objective assessment and observations that foster the individual’s or team members’ enhanced self-awareness and awareness of others, practice astute listening in order to develop a full understanding of the individual’s or team’s circumstances, be a sounding board in support of possibility thinking and thoughtful planning and decision making, champion opportunities and potential, encourage stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations, foster the shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives, challenge blind spots in order to illuminate new possibilities, and support the creation of alternative scenarios. Finally, the coach maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics.
The role of the individual or team
The role of the individual or team is to create the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals, utilize assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others, envision personal and / or organizational success, assume full responsibility for personal decisions and actions, utilize the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives, take courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations, engage big picture thinking and problem solving skills, and utilize the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach to engage effective forward actions.
What does coaching ask of an individual?
- To be successful, coaching asks certain things of the individual, all of which begin with intention….
- Focus—on one’s self, the tough questions, the hard truths--and one’s success
- Observation—the behaviors and communications of others
- Listening—to one’s intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks
- Self discipline—to challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and to develop new ones which serve one’s goals in a superior way
- Style—leveraging personal strengths and overcoming limitations in order to develop a winning style
- Decisive actions—however uncomfortable, and in spite of personal insecurities, in order to reach for the extraordinary
- Compassion—for one’s self as he or she experiments with new behaviors, experiences setbacks—and for others as they do the same
- Humor—committing to not take one’s self so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation
- Personal control—maintaining composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity
- Courage—to reach for more than before, to shift out of being fear based in to being in abundance as a core strategy for success, to engage in continual self examination, to overcome internal and external obstacles
