A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout – I can’t waste my time with the likes of you!”

His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, “I could kill you for your impertinence.” “That,” the monk calmly replied, “is hell.”

Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.

“And that,” said the monk, “Is heaven.”

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Pre-coaching questionnaire – life coaching

 

General

 

Name
Address
Telephone number
Email address
Birthday
Spouse/partner’s name
Children’s names

 

Coaching

 

Primary focus

 

1.

2.

3.

 

How will you know when you’ve achieved what you want?

 

 

What do you want from your life in the future?

 

 

What’s important to you in your life?

 

 

What activities have most meaning for you?

 

 

What do you do when you’re really up against it?

 

 

 

Pre-coaching questionnaire – executive coaching

 

General

 

Name
Company address
Work telephone number
Fax number
Email address
Job title
Brief description of
your current job
Time spent in this role
Length of service at
This company

 

Coaching

 

Primary focus

 

 

 

How will you know when you’ve achieved what you want?

 

 

What do you want from your work/career in the future?

 

 

What’s important to you in your work?

 

 

What work-related activities have most meaning for you?

 

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Value elicitation exercise 1

 

Value	Definition

 

Value elicitation exercise 2

 

Personal values or things that are important to you	most	least
Accountability (reliability, doing what you say you will do)
Achievement (attaining goals, accomplishment)
Advancement (progress, promotion)
Adventure (taking risks, new and challenging experiences)
Autonomy (working independently, minimal direction from others)
Caring (compassion, affection)
Challenge (stimulates full use of your potential)
Change/variety (varied, frequently changing responsibilities/settings)
Competitiveness (striving to win, being the best)
Co-operation (collaboration, teamwork)
Creativity (being imaginative, inventive, original)
Economic security (steady, adequate income)
Freedom (independence, autonomy, liberty)
Friendship (close relationships with others, rapport)
Helpfulness (assisting others, improving society)
Inner harmony (being at peace with yourself and others, tranquility)
Integrity (honesty, sincerity, standing up for beliefs)
Intellectual status (being regarded as an expert in your field)
Involvement (participating with and including others, belonging)
Knowledge (understanding with and including others, belonging)
Order (organized, structure, systematic)
Personal development (learning, strengthening, realizing potential)
Pleasure (fun, enjoyment, good times)
Power (influence, importance, authority)
Recognition (respect from others, acknowledgement, status)
Self-respect (belief in your own abilities, self-esteem)
Trust (dependability, reliability)
Wealth (abundance, getting rich)
Wisdom (discovering knowledge, insight)

 

Value	Definition

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TO READ

1.       Unlimited Power (1996) and Awaken the Giant Within (1992) by Tony Robbins  -P71

2.       Taming Your Gremlin (1990) by Richard Carson – P115

3.       Time to Think (1998) by Nancy Kline – P129

4.       Metaphors in Mind (2002) by James Lawley and Penny Tompkins – P138

Metaphoria (2002) by Rubin Battino – P138

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Coaching at its best is much more about peeling back layers of awareness than pushing to get things done.

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Assessing you skills as a coach by ticking the following:

 

·         Establishes and maintains rapport

·         Dances in the moment

·         Holds clients accountable

·         Seeks permission to offer ideas

·         Listens effectively

·         Asks powerful questions

·         Uses intuition

·         Raises the bar

·         Celebrates successes

·         Challenges and stretches

·         Believes in the client’ potential

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Spirituality

Aboodi Shabi, a highly regarded coach in the UK, specializes in coaching

for the soul and he says: ‘We might be performing well against

measurable targets, or achieving our goals, but we might also be like

empty shells, living lives that are automatic and soulless.’

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‘The most effective leaders are those who first learn to lead themselves. ‘

– Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner,    The Leadership Challenge, 2003              

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What you can do

• Become more aware of how good you are at listening by seeking feedback from people who know you well.
• Turn listening into a game and take every opportunity to actively listen out for not only what is said but also for the underpinning emotions.
• Recall a time when you were really curios about something then form this mindset, start to practice asking questions
• The next time you are in conversation with someone, find an opportunity to ask them a presupposition question that will empower then in some way.

Coaching, effective, feedback, listening, question, questions

This article is from Mind Tools

Is it ever a bad thing to have too many ideas?
Probably not, but if you’ve ever experienced information overload or struggled to know where to begin with a wealth of data you’ve been given, you may have wondered how you can use all of these ideas effectively. When there’s lots of “stuff” coming at you, it is hard to sort through everything and organize the information in a way that makes sense and helps you make decisions.

Whether you’re brainstorming ideas, trying to solve a problem or analyzing a situation, when you are dealing with lots of information from a variety of sources, you can end up spending a huge amount of time trying to assimilate all the little bits and pieces. Rather than letting the disjointed information get the better of you, you can use an affinity diagram to help you organize it.

Also called the KJ method, after its developer Kawakita Jiro (a Japanese anthropologist) an affinity diagram helps to synthesize large amounts of data by finding relationships between ideas. The information is then gradually structured from the bottom up into meaningful groups. From there you can clearly “see” what you have, and then begin your analysis or come to a decision.

Affinity diagrams can be used to:

• Draw out common themes from a large amount of information.
  
• Discover previously unseen connections between various ideas or information.
  
• Brainstorm root causes and solutions to a problem.
  

Because many decision-making exercises begin with brainstorming, this is one of the most common applications of affinity diagrams. After a brainstorming session there are usually pages of ideas. These won’t have been censored or edited in any way, many of them will be very similar, and many will also be closely related to others in a variety of ways. What an affinity diagram does is start to group the ideas into themes.

From the chaos of the randomly generated ideas comes an insight into the common threads that link groups of them together. From there the solution or best idea often emerges quite naturally. This is why affinity diagrams are so powerful and why the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers consider them one of the “seven management tools.”

Affinity diagrams are not the domain of brainstorming alone though. They can be used in any situation where:

• The solution is not readily apparent.
  
• You want to reach a consensus or decision and have a lot of variables to consider, concepts to discuss, ideas to connect, or opinions to incorporate.
  
• There is a large volume of information to sort through.
  

Here is a step-by-step guide to using affinity diagrams along with a simple example to show how the process works.

How to Use the Tool

1. Describe the problem or issue:
   

• Generate ideas by brainstorming. Write each idea on a separate sticky note and put these on a wall or flip chart. Remember to:
  
  • Emphasize volume.
    
  • Suspend judgment.
    
  • Piggyback on other ideas.
    

• Sort ideas into natural themes by asking:
  
  • What ideas are similar?
    
  • Is this idea connected to any of the others?
    

  
  If you’re working in a team:
  

  • Separate into smaller groups of 3 to 4 people.
    
  • Sort the ideas IN SILENCE so that no one is influenced by anyone else’s comments.
    
  • Keep moving the cards around until consensus is reached.
    

• Create total group consensus:
  
  • Discuss the shared meaning of each of the sorted groups.
    
  • Continue until consensus is reached.
    
  • If some ideas do not fit into any theme, separate them as “stand-alone” ideas.
    
  • If some ideas fit into more than one theme, create a duplicate card and put it in the proper group.
    
  • Try to limit the total number of themes to between five and nine.
    

   

• Create theme cards (also called affinity cards or header cards):
  
  • Create a short 3-5 word description for the relationship.
    
  • If you’re working in a group, do this together, out loud.
    
  • Write this theme/header on a blank card and place at the top of the group it describes.
    
  • Create a “super-headers” where necessary to group themes.
    
  • Use a “sub-header” card where necessary as well.
    

• Continue to group the themes/headers until you have reached the broadest, but still meaningful, categories possible:
  
  • Draw lines connecting the super-headers, themes/headers, and sub-headers.
    
  • You’ll end up with a hierarchical structure that shows, at a glance, where the relationships are.
    

Key Points

Affinity diagrams are great tools for assimilating and understanding large amounts of information. When you work through the process of creating relationships and working backward from detailed information to broad themes, you get an insight you would not otherwise find.

The next time you are confronting a large amount of information or number of ideas and you feel overwhelmed at first glance, use the affinity diagram approach to discover all the hidden linkages. And when you cannot see the forest for the trees, an affinity diagram may be exactly what you need to get back in focus.

affinity, digram, management, note taking, organise, Time