What Professional Coaching Is Not?

Along with understanding what coaching is, as I wrote about in a prior post, it is just as critical to understand how coaching is unlike other helping modalities like mentoring, consulting, therapy, friendship, and even sports coaching. With this understanding, we can be sure to engage a coach to play the right role in our lives as well as to have the right expectations. Note that while coaching techniques can be utilized in any one of these roles, the role of a coach is formally distinct from each of these roles. 

Let me summarize.

1. Coaching is unlike mentoring & consulting in that coaches do not give advice from their past experience or current knowledge, but rather facilitate the client's advising themselves through various techniques of questioning, listening, affirmation and validation. A core assumption of coaching is that the client has their own answers and needs an en-courage-ing non-judgmental space within which to surface those answers. 

2. Coaching is unlike therapy in that coaches work with clients on achieving future optimal being, thinking and action, versus the healing of past wounds whose result are current emotional, psychological and relational imbalances. Professional coaches are not trained therapists though they are trained to identify situations where referral to therapy is appropriate.  Coaches may even work in tandem with a client and therapist in appropriate cases.  

3. Coaching is unlike friendship in that coaches are unencumbered with the agenda of being liked or accepted, but rather hold the client's agenda of having the result they want in their lives. This freedom allows the coach to be transparent in facilitating the client's planning, honest and credible in the client's affirmation, and unrelenting in holding the client accountable for execution.

4. Professional coaching is unlike sports coaching in that coaches focus on the creation of win/win scenarios and results in the client's life, while sports coaches, classically focus on win/lose outcomes, and for good reason. On a field of battle, one must win and render their opponent a lose, however on the field of life, one has the greater choice of rendering their stakeholder, even if an opponent, a winner also. This is the result that coaching looks  to facilitate to the degree the client is willing. 

As you can see, these are rather simple, but key, distinctions to be considered as you think about the role of a coach in your life and business.

If you want to talk more about this topic and how coaching might work for you, please reach to me at craig@wiseworking.com.

Be well and blessed.

Coaching: What Is It? What's In It For You?

I have been a practicing coach for a over a decade now, and recently, at the encouragement of many of you reading this, entered iPEC Coaching School to up my game and earn my professional certification, as I look forward to impacting the society and world to a greater degree via this calling for the rest of my life. It has been so interesting to me that for most of the time I have been coaching, in the past, I have not been coaching but rather mentoring and consulting. Sigh!

What I have learned is the distinction between coaching and other helping modalities, friendship, mentoring, consulting and therapy, all of which may contain elements of coaching but which are not purely coaching.

I have learned that a coach is someone retained to provide: 

1) a non-judgmental, non-advising space for listening to the wishes and plans of the client, 

2) affirmation & validation of the client's plans and progress in execution of those wishes & their corresponding plans, 

3) examination of barriers to the execution of the client's plans and 

4) accountability for continued forward movement in execution of the client's plans, and especially in times of discouragement, breakdown and internal & external resistance. 

As I have practiced this stricter coaching model, I have been continually gratified by clients' expression of this process' impact on their clarity of thinking, sense of affirmation, relaxation, hopefulness and commitment to having certain results in their lives and organizations. These effects on client-leaders result in influential change in themselves, and by extension, their families, teams, organizations, networks, and society, that the world needs badly. This is important for we are all damaged whenever any one of our potential is not realized, and I see coaching as discipline which can make significant impact in reducing this damage.

By the way, I am looking for leaders and leadership teams to work with, and especially those who are challenged with influencing and implementing significant change. You know where to reach me if you need me. In the meantime, whether with me or some other coach, I encourage you think about coaching to help you towards a greater degree of your own potential.

Be well and blessed! :-)

Is it a Prison or a Bridge? What are your Transferabilities?

So often in my coaching of others and my self, I come across the topic of how one views their past experience.


A typical response is that experience is a prison which traps one in an industry, role, network or familiar set of challenges & solutions. One deems that their reputation in one area disqualifies them from doing other things. While there is some truth to this, it is not as true as we too often think.
A better response I encourage, though I recognize its difficulty from personal experience, is to see our past experience as a bridge to every other type of service and opportunity we are inclined to pursue. This is easier said than done, but alas not impossible. Possibility is rooted in believing that your past experience is a bridge, and not a prison.

Here are a few bridges to contemplate:

1. Any experience develops a set of transferable skills useful in a variety of other scenarios outside your past experience. Inventorying your transferable skills  is critical and I advise you to not attempt this on your own but with other trusted colleagues as we all have blindspots and underestimations rgarding our skills.

2. Your past experience has cultivated a network of contacts (transferable relationships) who have contacts far afield of your current industry, role, etc. who can help you research, connect with, and bridge over to new possibilities for yourself. Strategic analysis and leveraging of your network is critical. People are typically more willing to assist us than we are willing to reach to them so I encourage this, and remember the value of the strength of weak ties.

3. Your past experience has exposed you to a number of industry and business scenarios (transferable experience & knowledge) which while “old hat” to you are new challenges to others who can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom. Here is where research of developments in other industries, or other sectors of your current industry, is useful to enable you to ascertain where your experience can possibly add more value.

As I encourage my coachees to filter these transferabilities in their own pasts through the perspective of bridge, versus prison, it begins to open up new possibilities for what they might do with their backgrounds in different context. I think this mindset and skill is going to be more and more critical for all of us as we face a locally & globally competitive job & career environment which is asking us to be more nimble, flexible and creative about our prospect.
May you always have the eyes and ears to see and hear how your prisons are really bridges! Happy transferring!

Musings On The Paradox of Certainty

I like certainty but it bores me when its not making me feel secure. 


I like uncertainty because it excites me when its not scaring me and making me anxious. 


What of this paradox and the pendulum swing back and forth between its extremes?


Like so many things in life, how you perceive the extremes is more important than the extremes’ realities I suppose. The more we need certainty, the more we are its slave and lorded it over by its absence. The more we accept uncertainty, the less we are its slave, and more free we can be. Hmmm.

I continue to work at cultivating my comfort with the discomfort of uncertainty understanding that most perception of certainty lies in one's confidence that they can influence certainty for themselves more than in the idea that anyone is going to make things certain for them. It occurs to me that this is one of the hallmarks of maturity and true adulthood.

May we all attain to this, and on the way not overestimate the degree to which we have arrived, nor underestimate the distance we have come toward that arrival. May we all be certain in the face of uncertainty.

Every Worker, A Game Designer – Part 4 of Every Job, A Game

Dignan, in the book, Game Frame, that these posts have been based on, talks about the process for designing a game. They are:
1) choosing an activity, or mastery focus area
2) creating the player profiles, or motivational description of the players
3) choosing the interim and ultimate objectives of the game
4) choosing the mental, physical and social skills to be learned and improved in game play
5) choosing the resistance, balancing between boring & demoralizing
6) choosing the resources

7) defining the skill cycles, or the rounds in which actions are  taken and feedback obtained

8) choosing the interim and ultimate outcomes which provide feedback

9) play, test and polish to refine the game

Dignan cites David Cook of Spry Fox as proposing that “Any activity can be turned into a game: 1) if the activity can be learned, 2) if the player can be measured, and 3) if the play can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion. You read this and immediately get the possibility that “all is a game” if you want to see it that way.

It occurred to me in looking at these design elements that much of this design has already been done for me in my job and organization, and that a game of sorts is to understand how it has and is being designed on an ongoing basis. Additionally, it occurred to me that there is an internal game which coincides with the external game of my work that I have the power to design and play to personal and organizational benefit. In fact, the more than my personal game can coincide and integrate with the organizational game, the more potential benefit there is for both of us. I might also find that these games are not integratable which is also an important signal to be acted upon.

Dignan says that “Achieving this requires examining the structure of our own activities and experiences in more depth than ever before. This process of observation and inquiry is the precursor to design. Indeed, to reshape the world around us—our workplace, our schools, our homes—we must become behavioral game designers.” In gaining confidence as a game designer, I recognize my role in creating good games not only for myself but for my team, my organization, my industry and my customers so that we collectively can heal the world.

May we all be better game designers and players ongoing. :-)

Building Blocks of the Game Frame - Part 3 of Every Job, A Game

In my first post in this series I suggested that we, and our work, can benefit from cultivation of a more gameful approach to work. In this post, I want to expand on this approach and its implications.

In his book, Game Frame, Aaron Dignan, talks about the the Game Frame, the building blocks that make up any game. Game designer considers these and so should we as we redesign our work as a game.

These building blocks are:

1) activities, or mastery focus areas,

2) player profile, or trait-based player descriptions with motivational clues,

3) objectives, or short and long term goals towards which effort is directed,

4) skills, or special mental, physical & social abilities necessary to win a game,

5) resistance, or forces of opposition (chance, puzzles, novelty, levels & competition) which create tension and interest in any game,

6) resources, or spaces & supplies we acquire and use to win a game,

7) actions, or move available to us in a game,

8) feedback, the game’s response to a player’s actions,

9) the blackbox, or the rules engine containing information about interplay between actions and feedback in the game, and

10) outcomes, or positive & negative results occurring while in pursuit of game objective

At first, I found this list overwhelming, but on further meditation, realized that all this has been going on within and around me my entire life and I have been good at playing most every game I have found myself in. I had not been savvy enough to see it in the context of a game though. I further get that seeing all this as a game: 1) lowers my blood pressure & frustration level, 2) improves my focus & persistence and 3) allows me to win more of the games I create, and even those others create for me. (Remember my prior post on games we play: Win The Game You Are Playing, Even If You Lose The Game Others Are Playing.)

When I assume that all these elements are part of the game, I am less caught off guard and frustrated by them. I pay more attention to how I need to learn and adapt. I do so more quickly, thus creating a competitive advantage for my self and my team. Truly my work becomes a game and I an ever more skillful player. That said, PLAY ON!!!

A Gameful Mindset CanTransform Your Job - Part 2 of Every Job, A Game

Continuing my Work as Games riff, I was really struck in my reading of Dignan’s, Game Frame, by the characteristics which make games irresistible. Games:

1) demand participation, a thing we all know we want/need more of at work,

2) can be played again and again, without a loss of enthusiasm yet with increased learning,

3) are understood through play, not work, you hear that, not work,

4) can happen anywhere, and I don’t know about you but work happens everywhere for me,

5) give us purpose, and I find more and more of this in my work as I age,

6) allow us to solve problems, that thing I personally live for,

7) give us control, that thing I am trying to live less for but which I still enjoy having,

8) show us progress, especially needful in the “grind”,

9) prompt risk taking, that thing we need to get more comfortable with,

10) let us face our fears, that thing we need to face more and indulge less

11) give us glory, that thing we love, if not live for, and no you don’t have to admit it,

12) shift time, as in “time flies when you are having fun”,

13) bring us together, and what else is work if not “getting together” for better or worse,

14) facilitate transferable development, a too little recognized phenomenon, and

15) represent what could be, that think we are all interested in creating.

On reading this list in Game Frame, I immediately see how a “gameful” approach to work would be transformative for me. I figured, why only play games when I am off work when I could benefit from the enjoyment of such play most all the time, with just a twist of perspective. I think, YES, these are all things that I crave and work for, but if playing a game provides this inherently, what an incentive to play a game, and especially at work where I spend most of my life!