Coaching stimulates growth!
Think about your most valuable learning moments.
How did they happen?
Through a book, or a speaker when you were searching for an answer? At a time we are seeking change in our personal or professional lives coaching is a powerful tool to aid us in reaching our goal.
Coaching is a way of working with a leader that leaves her more competent and fulfilled, so she can contribute more to her calling.
Adults learn from solving their own problems, and applying this learning to their lives, which is why coaching with a person who desires growth is effective.
Leaders want growth, but they struggle with how to achieve it amidst the hurly burly of normal, busy life.
Christian leaders want to do God’s will in their lives and so fulfill their calling as Peter entreats: “therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to make your calling and election sure, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall” (2 Peter 1:10 ESV).
A Christian coach can help a client to reach goals and keep growing with biblical understanding.
Transformation (The Purpose of Coaching)
Transformation often takes place through significant events that happen in our lives. Christian coaching uses these events, which may be anything from discomfort to pure frustration in the workplace or our relationships.
To face the need for change the client must have freed up energy, and must pay attention to habits and practices needing transformation.
Mary Beth O’Neill says, “Coaches are colleagues to leaders at exactly those times when they may flinch-or fight back, or dig in, or any number of responses.”
Coaches bring their unique relationship to the leader as a tool of growth.
The client is the subject and the object of the coaching conversation.
The coach brings skills including the courage to enter into powerful conversations. The coach endures the discomfort of the anxiety the client may feel at the topic in hand, while at the same time empathizing with the client, staying connected to her for the purpose of hearing her fully.
Coaches enable clients to move forward in their performance as a result of the transformation of their hearts.
A new heart generates a new behavior.
As the scriptures say, “the good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good ” (Luke 6:45 ESV).
The power of coaching lies in the heart posture of the Christian coach that is genuinely for the client.
Coaches should also ensure they have the necessary skills to help the client bring about new learning, reflection, realization and insight. Therein lies the power of coaching.
Seeing Gold Mines (The Possibilities in Coaching)
When we do not know what to make of circumstances beyond our control… “many of us are sitting on personal gold mines that a coach can enable us to reclaim for the fulfillment of our calling and destiny”(Joseph Umidi).
Transformation takes place through adversity. The boss we are clashing with, the person we cannot get through to, the colleague who brings out the worst in us- these are relationships that can serve to open our eyes to better ways of relating.
A Christian coach will know how this scripture applies:
In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:6-7 ESV).
The skilled coach, using listening skills, can create moments of connection for the client. The coach uses powerful questions to create conversations where epiphanies may occur.
Coaches ask questions such as:
- If you had to state a purpose for your life, what would that be?
- What options do you have for changing things?
- What bothers you?
- And what else? Tell me more.
This causes reflection the client might not normally pause to do, and may lead to the awakening of a hunger or a dream long forgotten and then the epiphany moment.
Transformation is something the client must do.
The coach does not rescue the client by taking on the client’s burden; rather the coach strengthens the leadership of the client by encouraging the leader to develop new skills and behaviors.
The Apostle Paul said: “But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load” (Gal 6:4-5 ESV).
Christian coaching follows the biblical pattern of leadership of each one taking full responsibility for his life and leadership.
As a coach can help you get to a goal quicker, so a coach can also draw out of you what is in your heart.
There is great benefit in Christian leaders receiving coaching for continued personal transformation.
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