I don’t like the method but I like the result

One of the challenges of coaching is learning to work with people who have different beliefs than you do. You are not there to proselytise. You are not a missionary and must allow others to take different positions. As a coach you are there to help the client come to his own conclusions and certainly not to say ‘If I were you …..” and impose your own view built on your own opinion.

The right not to have an opinion

One of the great advantages of being a coach is the right not to have an opinion. You will know of football fans who have strong opinions about their teams when they actually know nothing.

Being an ‘expert’ without knowledge is prevalent with many social media users. But in reality the only right to have an opinion is to get the knowledge to form that opinion without resorting to only the media which confirm your beliefs. If you don’t have that knowledge be brave enough to say “I don’t have an opinion” And reserve the right not to spend your time forming your view.

Individual vs Group

In Western society, based on individualism, it can be difficult to recognise that your client believes that the group (whether it be race,religion, political party, country,) is more important than the individual and that conformity is more important than your individual need. In Edith Wharton’s novels about late 19th century America, keeping up appearances was all that mattered and if you did not follow the conventions retribution and exclusion were swift.

Is it the same today? In many societies yes, but the conventions change, and it is no benefit publicly regretting that hitting children is no longer acceptable. There was a time in the UK when politicians kept their affairs in secret, like John Major’s affair with a member of his cabinet , and scandals such as Jeremy Thorpe and Profumo could topple the mighty. Nowadays a Prime Minister can live with his lover and have children in the Prime Ministerial house in Downing Street. Society has changed, and so it should no longer be acceptable to promote hitting children on the grounds that it ‘never did me any harm’, though to many still living with values from a previous era, it still is.

Challenges to long-held beliefs

So much in the news in recent weeks has been a challenge to beliefs some have held dearly for so long. So the questions to ask yourself are:
• Were you own cherished beliefs challenged ?
• When was the last time you reviewed your beliefs and values?
• Have you still got the beliefs and values you were brought up with? The same ones as your mother or priest taught you? And if so, do you know why? (I never thought about it is not a good answer)
• Do you have the same view of history as taught to you in the schools – the winner’s version of history?
• Are you prepared to accept that you were brainwashed in school and look at different perspectives?

As a coach you need to know what your beliefs are in order to recognise whether your client has beliefs you cannot deal with. And to know when to quit.

I don’t like the method but I like the result

Times and collective opinion change. In Bristol in the UK, the symbolic casting of the statue of slave trader Colston in the harbour brought more results than forty years of just talking about it. In US and the world the Black Lives Matter protests have more effect than forty years of putting up with it. And so you have the ambiguity – you might like the result but not the method.
Public opinion has shifted, and UK has yet anther topic to be radically divided on. And as an individual (rather than a coach) you are going to have to have an opinion and perhaps stand up for it. So better build that opinion on knowledge, and learn to defend your stance and realise that it’s OK to have your views which are different from others and indeed to have your own internal conflicting views.

Dealing with ambiguity is a sign of maturity many people just do not get to. Can you?

by David Rigby, Smart Coaching & Training 2020

It’s party time – what is a party without games?

But nowadays games aren’t confined to parties.  Games appear in the workplace too.

Employee engagement and customer engagement can be low, learning from books can be difficult.  Engagement is also easy to lose and difficult to inspire. Gallup’s 2016 The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis report found that only 32 percent of US workers are engaged with their jobs daily; less than half that number, 13 percent, are engaged worldwide. Disengaged employees are less productive and have lower morale because they tend to think negatively about their jobs. Disengaged employees tend to bring their colleagues and teammates down with them,

It is proven that playing motivates people and enhances learning. Recruitment training and being in the office can actually be fun and social Gamification is a technique for applying game mechanics to non-game context, to make it fun and thus increase engagement. 

To successfully gamify you need four steps

• interactive challenges
• constant/instant feedbacks
• competition and social
• rewards and redemptions.

Gamification taps on everyone’s intrinsic motivations to have fun in enterprises.   Banks and telephone companies use gamification as a rewards and motivation platform to use employees using game psychology.  Community engagement to motivate target behaviours for various purposes such as in employee’s training/performance management or consumer marketing/sales advocacy. 

Why is gamification relevant to me?

You will almost certainly been subject to gamification whether you know it or not.  Those who no longer have the concentration to read a book and resort to little quizzes in FaceBook have been ‘gamified’.  But it’s not only you, its everyone you communicate with.  It is relatively easy to build the software (we can recommend an organisation) but what can you use if for is more the challenge?  The more you develop your soft and mindfulness skills the more likely you are to recognise ways of harnessing the stickiness of gamification to bring the waifs and strays back into the fold for good. Simple badges, levels and points which appear in normal software games can be used to develop continuing engagement.  

What kind of games are YOU likely to want to play?

• Do you like games which are strictly logical or prefer those which appeal to your emotions?
• Do you like to get into the real nitty-gritty, into great detail – or just want to skim the surface?

Your behavioural profiling preferences will tell you whether you are engaged with this – the detail you may or may not need the appeal to the emotions or lack thereof.

Any manager will need to know what social behaviours she may be trying to enhance, which target behaviours will help hit the goals, what extrinsic rewards to offer to get intrinsic motivation, and which tribes and communities she need to engage.

And engagement doesn’t just affect employees. Holding consumers’ attention through the continuous noise of competing marketing messages represents another avenue where engagement is critical to success. Modern consumers are fickle. Unless something truly intrigues them, they move on.

David Rigby – davidr@smartcoachingtraining.com