* Executive coaching
* NLP
* Innervision
* Performance Coaching
Inner Vision
Facilitating performance excellence
An introduction to performance coaching
Perhaps you are currently running a business or you may know of people within your organisation who need support in shortening the learning curve as they settle into a new role or a new environment or there are people who you believe can engage more with their potential and as a result contribute more to the business. Whatever! The point is that you most likely will have heard something about performance coaching but you dont really have enough understanding to decide whether it is a development tool that would meet your needs. So if you read on my outcome for you is that you will fill in a number of knowledge gaps and as a result you will become more informed to make a choice.
What is performance coaching?
From an Innervision perspective, performance coaching is about
-Working closely with the executive to improve an aspect of their professional life and helping to promote clarity and action.
-Helping leaders to get unstuck from their dilemmas and assist them to transform thinking into actions and results.
-Helping the executive to gain greater awareness about the outcomes they are seeking linked to their values and beliefs.
-And building on this to help the executive to clarify current performance and limitations so as we can move towards unlocking more potential to enhance future achievements.
In essence, our approach is very much based on the underlining principles laid down by Harvard educationalist and tennis expert Tim Gallwey who threw down the gauntlet with a book entitled The inner game of Tennis (1974). The word inner refers to the persons internal state or as Gallwey explains it the opponent within ones own head is more formidable than the one on the other side of the net.
Therefore, our approach is based on incorporating a coaching psychology perspective into the work we do with executives. We understand that we all have created obstacles or habits that get in the way of us performing in line with out real potential such as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self doubts, exaggerating consequences of things going wrong and under estimating what we can do.
So from a coaching psychology perspective we will work with you to assist you to
•Grow your awareness about what you do as a leader and what you really want to achieve in your role.
•To encourage you to consider what habits and underlying attitudes are influencing current performance and on that basis what choices you have to grow your performance.
•For you to decide what you want to do about what you discover and then for you to identify specific outcomes and supporting actions you must take that will move you towards what you want to achieve.
•To work together in a collaborative relationship on your journey including monitoring your progress and for you to notice the effect changes are having on performance
What influences performance?
To help you understand why this approach is our preferred way of working with executives then please read on.
There are 4 crucial factors that affect the quality of our performance
•Knowledge
•Skills
•Attitude
•Habits
When organisations are asked which aspects they invest most in training and development the answer is usually knowledge and skills.
But when asked which of these are more long-term predictors of performance and make a more sustained change the answer is typically attitudes and habits.
A lot of more typical training and development programmes have failed to deliver long-term changes because they do not address underlying attitudes and habits. They have focused on giving knowledge and developing skills but if the trainee at an emotional intelligence (EI) level is not ready or convinced then at best the new knowledge and skills will be only applied in the short term before old habits resume.
What issues have to be considered here?
•Personality is relatively fixed and therefore non developable. ( supported by type and trait theories)
•Personality is not related to performance.
•IQ is also relatively fixed.
•Our ability to think is more dependent on our emotional state
•What we do (behaviour) is consistent with and influenced by our attitudes and beliefs we hold about ourselves.
Adopting constructive attitudes and developing complimentary habits is at the core of the work we will do together. This is central to how we manage our personality and cognitive abilities to be personally and interpersonally effective.
For example:
What difference would you notice about your performance if:
-You were in control of your emotional state to create a state of feeling positive and confident to solve a problem (as opposed to relying solely on IQ).
-You focused your energy outwards on creating relationships using the qualities you have ( as opposed to focusing on acting like an introvert)
-You practice being assertive by increasing your self esteem (rather than trying to apply new skills which dont seem to feel comfortable to you)
Working with attitudes and habits provides a framework for explaining how to make change sustainable. Remember, what we think about affects how we feel which affects performance.
What will we be focusing on?
Make your learning experiential.
Talking about change won't make it happen! However, learning to experience the way you respond internally will most certainly affect attitudes and habits so as to re enforce new learning.
Focus on feelings and self
As you will find out during your programme we will be focusing on the kind of experiences you are creating on the inside. That is, feelings are experienced within the body and the more we start to take notice of these feelings then the more we will raise self awareness and in so doing the more we can start to consider how we want to respond rather than responding through habit.
Change habits
Most of what we do is unconscious, automatic and habitual behaviour. If change is to be sustainable it must, therefore, become habitual. Making a change is one thing but maintaining it is more difficult. All too often we will revert back to old behaviours when under pressure or the initial motivation for change has gone. So we need to focus conscious attention here.
So who will my coach be?
Peter Harty is one of the UKs most experienced performance coaches. He started his practice over 10 years ago and has since completed over 10,000 hours of coaching executives from manufacturing and service sectors.
He has worked in senior management positions for over 20 years for several major blue chip companies including Managing Director of a large manufacturing plant and as HR Director.
With a psychology background he is one of the few to hold a Master of Science degree in Coaching Psychology and is recognised by the International Coach Federation as a master coach (since 2005). He is also a member of the Society for Coaching Psychology, a member of the Special Group in Coaching Psychology and a Fellow Associate of the British Psychology Society. Peter is also a licensed European NLP Coach.
