Coaching Skills

• An essential skill for a Coach is to be able to elicit the Performer's perspectives around their issues without 'contaminating' it with their interpretations or judgements. We use the principles of clean language when we work with clients. With acknowledgements to David Grove who developed clean language and Penny Tompkins and James Lawley www.cleanlanguage.co.uk for making it widely accessible and for developing the modelling of symbolic information.

Modelling

• A Clean Coach seeks to reveal the content and relationships of the Performer's perspectives without seeking to understand them. It is like making an exact model of something so that it is available for objective observation and discussion rather than redesigning it so that it makes more sense. 
• Many potential Coaches fail to make this step and then remain puzzled as to why their rapport with Performer's is often strained.
• The benefit of having a model of the Performer's issue is that the Performer is more able to look dispassionately at their situation than they are able to when 'in the middle of it all'.

Goal Development and Achievement

• A Coach has to manage the process of the coaching conversation in order to
  • Develop a richly described motivating goal
  • Identify resources to support the desired outcome
  • Identify barriers that need to be changed or circumvented
  • Facilitate learning