How Coaching Works

Using…

• the power of collaboration,
• creativity,
• practical best-practices for workflow engineering and performance improvement,
• cognitive-behavioral interventions, and
• project management mastery…

…Achievement Coaching helps clients create, assert, affirm and sustain:

• Clarity, Focus, and Purpose;
• Commitment and Accountability;
• Momentum toward Goals and Objectives; and
• Achievement of Milestones and Rewards.

Additionally, clients are empowered by greater personal integrity and bolstered confidence.

Standard Format for Coaching

For standard one-to-one Coaching, a client meets with an Achievement Coach confidentially for 90-minute meetings at least as often as every three weeks. During meetings, client and coach create continuous improvement by consistently re-evaluating and evolving an on-going Achievement Agenda. Typically, for coaching of workgroups, teams, business, or organizations, meetings are also required for ongoing evaluation and coordination of a Master Strategic Plan. Meeting locations are arranged as appropriate. Refer to GREAT FUTURE NOW Coaching Services for more detail.

Benefits of Coaching

(a.k.a., The Effects of “Coach-guided Collaboration”)

It is human nature for an individual to become comfortable with discomfort and to procrastinate — even when s/he knows better. It is the habit of the mind to be preoccupied with the past and fearful of the future. Your willingness to strive for achievement beyond the foibles of the mind and to exceed your basic human nature improves greatly when a trusted partner engages with you to access your creativity, harness your power, and succeed in the pursuit of your goals.

Coach-guided collaboration (a.k.a., “Coaching”) differs from mere collaboration in that a client’s investments of trust and energy with a coach creates a uniquely powerful and productive synergy of partnership, allows for shifts in outlook and possibility, and yields extraordinary results. Several effects of the collaboration of coaching that create and sustain change for every coaching client are:

• The Partnership/Commitment Effect: It is a phenomenon of the human condition that commitment to intentions and goals intensifies and partnership is generated when you (the coaching client) invest your trust and energy with your coach and you actively accept to engage in coach-guided collaboration.
• The Awareness Effect: Peaked awareness, clarity, reflection, and heightened creativity are achieved for the coaching client through the guided collaboration of coaching.
• The Focus Effect: Collaborating with a trusted partner while giving attention to the present moment and real-time circumstances produces focus on what is really going on and what truly stands-out as the greatest priority.
• The Discovery Effect: Guided collaboration of coaching allows for the realization of otherwise hidden questions and the discovery of answers that cannot otherwise be realized if an individual attempts to explore alone.
• The Revelation Effect: Engaging in collaboration with a coach reveals to the client that which you did not realize that you did not yet know. When coach-guided collaboration is at play, you have the unique opportunity to discover and become responsible for constraints to your point-of-view, judgements and attachments hiding-out in your “blind spots.” A revelation emerges for you about what there is to do to further your achievement when you become aware of what you didn’t yet know was out-of-sight from your point-of-view and as yet to be revealed or discovered by you.
• The Accountability Effect: Responsibility, confidence, keeping one’s word to others and to yourself, and follow-through increases and you increase the instances when you no longer settle for that which does not produce the greatest possible outcomes when engaged with your coach for coaching.
• The Momentum Effect: Coach-guided collaboration, your coaching, fosters rapid turnover of ineffective methods, plans, and actions in favor of successful methods, plans, and actions resulting in fast and efficient achievement of the most desirable results.
• The Breakthrough Effect: Each of us manifest beliefs and behaviors that seem second-nature, automatic, and sometimes hidden from our awareness or perhaps even in our unconscious mind. With coach-guided collaboration, you have the unique opportunity to discover and become responsible for constraints to your point-of-view, judgements and attachments hiding-out in your “blind spots.” Amazing breakthroughs (i.e., a culmination of revelations that change how you understand and relate to your world, amazing and profound correlating shifts in the direction of your life, and new empowerment for compelling new adventures) happen when you become aware of and take responsibility for what’s been going on, previously invisible to you, in your blind spots!

A Few Models and Methods of GREAT FUTURE NOW Coaching

Rewriting the Future: Based on The Three Laws of Performance

Drawn on well-established lines of research, as well as, numerous and varied real-world case studies, The Three Laws of Performance provide a basis for study and an application of principles and best-practice methods, including rewriting the future, that can enhance performance of individuals, groups, organizations, and leaders.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness, attention to the value of choices, and rational clarity affirms and supports physical health, mental health, and greater momentum toward achievement.

Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry (first developed in the doctoral program in Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University in 1980 and today sponsored in great part by the Weatherhead School of Management at CWRU) involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI is a search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often-involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. AI seeks, fundamentally, to build a constructive union between a whole people and the massive entirety of what people talk about as past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul — and visions of valued and possible futures. Taking all of these together as a gestalt, AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core” — and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized.

Language-based and Physiology-driven Affirmation

Routine, and even one-time, exposure to uplifting, affirmative, supportive, encouraging, and motivational events raises endorphin and serotonin levels in the blood and brain. (Serotonin is powerful vasoconstrictor associated with one’s ability to accept reality and define one’s own identity. Endorphin is any of a group of proteins with potent analgesic properties that occur naturally in the brain associated with a general state of wellness.)

PI Technology and Methodology

Performance Improvement (PI) technology/methodology is a systematic approach to improving productivity and competence. Moreover, PI is the systematic and systemic identification and removal of barriers to individual and organizational performance. It is the application of methods, procedures, and problem-solving strategies to realize opportunities related to the performance of people. More specifically, it is a process of analysis, selection, design, development, implementation and evaluation of programs to most cost-effectively influence human behavior and accomplishment. Ultimately, PI is a systematic combination of three fundamental processes: performance analysis, cause analysis and intervention selection — and can be applied to individuals, small groups and large organizations. For more about specific approaches to PI, consider the methodologies and best practices of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) and the Human Performance Technology (HPT) model; as well as, the methodologies and best practices of The Association for Talent Development (ATD; previously known as, The American Society for Training and Development, ASTD).

Cognitive-behavioral Interventions

Cognitive-behavioral interventions are based on the Cognitive Model developed by the Beck Institute, which is, simply: The way we perceive situations influences how we feel emotionally. So, situations do not directly affect how a person feels emotionally, but rather, his or her thoughts in that situation result in emotions and feelings. When people are in distress, they often do not think clearly and their thoughts are distorted (or dysphoric) in some way. Cognitive-behavioral interventions help people to identify their distressing thoughts and to evaluate how realistic the thoughts are. Then they learn to change their distorted thinking. When they think more realistically, they feel better. The emphasis is also consistently on solving problems and initiating behavioral change.

Personal Effectiveness Best Practices

Personal Effectiveness Best Practices is a wide and diverse realm of principles and methodologies from which to draw upon for insights, training, and individual practice and mastery. Just one really great example of effective productivity is David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” or GTD methodologies. Among other methods, Achievement Coach Greg Kilgore specializes in GTD and can bring the benefits of GTD to his clients’ daily endeavors. In the realm of communication skills, influence, and leadership, again just one great discipline worth noting, is a the mastery of, Daniel Goleman has coined the discipline, the practice and mastery of Emotional Intelligence. Development and mastery of emotional intelligence can bring someone deep personal satisfaction in the experience of living, as well as, rich and rewarding relationships in personal life and business pursuits. What’s more, the case can be made that the first and foremost practice of executives and aspiring leaders are the attributes of an “emotionally intelligent” leader.

Progressive and Holistic Business Vision and Commitment

Businesses can transform how they do business and the effectiveness of performance when business leaders are committed to the enrichment, fulfillment, and performance-excellence of their employees.

Life-Work Balancing and Lifestyle Design

Professionals can maintain momentum and achievement in their businesses and careers when they strive for awareness, balance, and harmony in their professional and personal lives.

Cooperation, Unity, and Collaboration

When individuals come together in an organization and strive to maintain clarity and remain open to collaborative communication and intuitive insights, then creativity, accelerated action, and greater results happen.

Topics to Come Later…

• The Case for Hiring a Coach (adapted from The David Allen Company, 2002)
• Differences Between Coaching, Therapy, and Counseling
• A Brief History of Coaching (adapted from “The New Private Practice” by Lynn Grodzki, 2001)