Helping the coachee or mentee work with anger
While anger is usually seen as an unhelpful emotion, it doesn’t have to be so. Managed anger can be a force for good, and has been a significant factor in every peaceful social change, from the...
View ArticleWorking with ethical dilemmas
Many of the issues that coaches and mentors encounter can be classified as ethical dilemmas. These occur when a person either feels that they are being asked to do things that are against their moral...
View ArticleWhat if the coachee says ‘I don’t know’
There comes a point at least once in a coaching conversation, where the coach feels instinctively that the issue is clear enough to pose a powerful question – one that will really make the coachee...
View ArticleWhen to refer a coachee or mentee for professional counselling or therapy
Suggesting to someone else that they need counselling takes courage. As a coach or mentor, you will in most cases not be a qualified therapist – and even if you were, there are potential conflicts of...
View ArticleWhy coaches and mentors shouldn’t beat themselves up when client change...
Every beginner coach or mentor goes through a phase of questioning their own competence, based upon a sense that they could (or should) have had so much more impact. Even very experienced coaches and...
View ArticleParallel processing in coaching and mentoring
Parallel processing happens when a coach, mentor or therapist reproduces a behaviour or emotion within their client, or more subtly, when they conflate the client’s experiences and issues with their...
View ArticleHelping your coachee develop resilience
In challenging working environments, resilience is increasingly an essential competence. People, who are resilient, are better able to cope with unexpected change, with setbacks and disappointments,...
View ArticleWorking with SUIs (Significant Unresolved Issues)
The concept of Significant Unresolved Issues arose from David Clutterbuck’s unpublished research in the 1990s on what issues mentees brought to their mentors for discussion. Participants in workshops...
View ArticleCross mentoring – Mentoring between companies
Most formal mentoring takes place between people within the same organisation, but this isn’t the only possibility. It is hard, for example, to create effective mentoring relationships within small...
View ArticleA warm reception for hot stone coaching
Coaching works best when the client is relaxed and attentive to both the conversation and to themselves. Hot stone coaching has been proposed as a means of heightening the client’s attention to their...
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