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.

Join the conversation on the power of coaching by sharing this with your friends and leaving a comment on the blog.

 

 

My daughter returned from a trip to a country store with a loaf of artisanal Italian bread baked with thyme and sundried tomatoes. Spread thickly with yellow farm butter it was a feast all on its own.

A well-known coach calls questions the bread and butter tools of a coach, so a coach asking questions is like baking artisanal bread and spreading it thick with farm butter to present to the client in an appetizing manner.

Coaching Christian Women

Stressed, overcommitted, over responsible, and out of control of their time and resources, women in the church are in great need of discipleship coaching.

I see these women regularly trying to balance the finances, balance their lifestyle, balance their work-life, balance their home and family and still have some ‘me’ time all with some discipleship or spiritual transformation thrown in there somewhere too.

A woman benefits from coaching for spiritual transformation, and if she will take the time to enter this accountability relationship, she will discover growth.

I only have to look at Proverbs 31 to see a woman who has balanced her time, her strength and her abilities and is successfully growing from the inside out. King Lemuel says of her, “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised” (Prov 31:30, ESV).

In coaching women in the church we need to ask powerful questions, questions that provoke enquiry, make them think deeply about their lives, their motives, their desires, their future, and their spirituality.

Questions in the Scriptures

What is the most powerful question you have ever been asked?

Did it make you stop in your tracks and think more deeply?

What if you had never been asked that question?

God asks deep, penetrating questions because he wants us to think. God’s first question in the Bible to Adam, is, “Where are you?” (Gen 3:9, ESV), which made it impossible for Adam to ignore his sin or continue to hide it.

He had to expose his condition and thus make the move to restoration of relationship with God.

Job begs God for answers and God asks him questions, in fact, the longest list of questions in the Bible is in Job 38 and 39, provoking enquiry about what Job’s belief system is and bringing Job back to the responsibility for his own life.

Wise Coaches

As coaches we believe our clients have the answers to their own lives. These answers may be buried so deep inside; it takes more than a spade to dig down through the layers of soil to find the treasure.

Powerful questions can be like drilling for oil.

As you go down, you will eventually hit the precious stuff!

“You can tell a man is clever by his answers. You can tell a man is wise by his questions” (Naguib Mahfouz).

Wisdom for a coach is refraining from advice giving and moving to powerful, probing questions that provoke enquiry on the part of the client and curiosity on the part of the coach.

I spoke about artisanal bread, because this is baked on a small scale and needs an artisan, a craftsperson to lovingly hand form and bake each loaf. Just so, there is an art to forming questions that make people think, make them stop in their tracks and think deeply.

This is what coaching is all about.

Contact me at hello@alisonward.me for a free half hour session.