It is the dawn of a new era! I don’t know about you, but fresh starts and new beginnings inspire me with excitement for the endless possibilities that lie ahead. As you embrace the new calendar year and its symbolism of renewal, realignment and transformation don’t forget to celebrate your learnings, growth, and wins. I am humbled and proud to announce that my 20th year coaching anniversary is fast approaching this February. You better believe I will be celebrating this monumental milestone. Thinking of all that I have achieved with the help of YOU and this amazing community has me starting the new year off with a grateful heart. I’ll be sharing more about my 20th anniversary in the coming weeks and months…
Please read, like, and comment on my January 2024 LinkedIn article by clicking here.
One of my great loves in coaching is incorporating movement and activating the intelligence centers in the body. While I have found it easier to do this with the guidance of a coach or a colleague, I have also been successful in doing this on my own. Perhaps you’ll try this exercise on your own and have some incredible insights about a current opportunity or challenge! If you do, let me know what you experience and what comes from it. Would love to hear what you learn!
INGREDIENTS:
A patch of open space
A way to record notes
A single opportunity or problem you wish to explore
An open-mind
Before you begin, assess your physical space. Is there a (roughly) 4’ x 4’ area in which you can move around? Having even more space is better, but a nice four-foot square patch of rug or floor or grass or concrete will do. After that, simply have your smart phone handy (I like to use my Notes app and dictate to Siri, or sometimes I record the whole exploration using my Voice Recorder app) or use a journal or notebook with pen to write down your discoveries, and follow these steps…’
DIRECTIONS:
Define your focus/topic: Which current opportunity or challenge do you want to know more about?
Stand in the middle of your square and state out loud: “I am open to learning more about…”
Option: Write the name of your focus/topic on a piece of paper and place it in the middle of the square.
Then, step to the South side of your square and turn inward to face the center of the square. If you don’t know which direction is South, just pick one side of your square and think of this as the bottom or South side.
From the South side, ask yourself one or more of the following questions:
“What do I know to be true about this opportunity/challenge?”“
What conditions are supporting it?”
“What conditions are constraining/limiting it?”
“What else would be helpful for me to know about the conditions or circumstances surrounding this?”
When you feel complete with this side, step to the West side of your square and again turn inward to face the center of your square.
“How am I feeling about this opportunity/challenge?” For each emotion/feeling, explore further:
“What would be helpful for me to know about the … (you fill in the emotion here) I am experiencing? “
“What is contributing to it?”
“What is its source?”
Once you feel complete with the first emotion/feeling, move on to the second, and so on until you’ve explored all the feelings you have about this opportunity/challenge.
If you find you start to plan or strategize or get into action mode, simply take a breath and tell yourself “not yet, but soon…”
Final question from the West: “What else would be helpful for me to know about the emotions related to this opportunity/challenge?”
Once you feel complete, step to the North side and then face in toward the center of your square.
“In what way is this opportunity/challenge important for me on my life path?”
“What lessons might this experience have to offer me?”
“How might I grow by living through this opportunity/challenge?”
“What allies or supporters are available for me as I move forward?” [For each one that comes to mind, explore further:
“How can I best make use of what … has to offer?”
Once you feel complete with the first ally/supporter, move on to the second, and so on until you’ve explored all the support you have available to you for this opportunity/challenge.
“What else would be helpful for me to know about what this opportunity/challenge has to offer me on my path?”
Once you feel complete, step to the East side and turn to face in toward the center of your square.
“What is clear to me now?”
“Who will I work with as I move forward?”
“What additional resources would I like to invite in as I move forward?”
“What next steps are ahead of me?”
“What am I most looking forward to?”
“Who can support me with the more challenging aspects?”
“What do I want to remind myself of as I move forward?”
“What else would be helpful for me to take the next step?”
Once you feel complete with this side, then step back into the middle of your square.
Take a moment to center within yourself and express gratitude to all the intelligence and creativity that showed up to support your exploration.
For any allies or supporters that came to mind, take a moment to thank each one, one by one.
Say any final words to yourself to close the exploration.
Once complete, step out of the center of the square. Take a deep breath and move on with your day.
Documenting Breakthroughs and Insights: What do you prefer?
You may now see why I prefer to record my voice as I go. But if you’re taking notes on paper, you choose if you want to do so throughout or wait until the end to jot down the key notes you want to remember.
Self-Guided or With Another: Some Tips
When you move through the Four Direction Exploration on your own, this is considered a self-coaching exercise. You can also do this with the guidance of a coach or a colleague. When working with someone else who is not a professionally trained and credentialed coach, be sure to have them prompt you with open questions only and to say “Anything else before moving to the next side?” to close each step. And kindly remind them that you do not need any opinions, suggestions, or advice. You only need a guide and a witness.
Years ago, Simon Sinek and others wrote a series of books dedicated to helping leaders discover their purpose and make that the focal point for their work in the world. He called one’s purpose the “why” and defined it as “the compelling higher purpose that inspires us and acts as the source of all we do.”
My coaching work is 100% aligned with my purpose, but I did not “discover” this until I was in my 30s. And by the “this” that I discovered, I mean both my purpose and the work that aligns with my purpose. Talking about purpose and inspiration is not at all a new concept, but I know that many leaders have never paused to consider their “why.” If this is you, I invite you to read on and learn how aligning your choices to your purpose can accelerate positive growth in your life and career.
There are hundreds of books that have been written about clarifying your purpose and aligning your life and work with that purpose. Career books, self-help books, spiritual books, business books, and much more. Over the years, I have owned and read many of them including:
Why You Need a Clear “Why”
Think of purpose or “why” like the destination you enter into your GPS. It tells you where you’re headed and gives you guidance for what turns to make along the way. When both you and your coach are clear about your purpose, then the topics you explore and the actions you take coming out of each coaching session will support you in living and working more in alignment with your purpose. You are then more likely to be successful in living a purposeful or purpose-filled life; a life that is meaningful and impactful in a way that tells you that you matter and your contributions to the world make a difference.
The Role of Purpose in Coaching
When working with a coach (or when you are taking a coach approach to people management or parenting), it’s important to first clarify where you are headed: both in the immediate term and in the long term. There are many approaches to defining purpose and I have utilized many of them in my work with clients.
Is there a Difference Between Capital “P” Purpose versus Lowercase “p” purpose?
Ask yourself the coaching question: “What is the purpose of work for you?”
You may respond with a practical response such as “to pay the bills” or a more filial response such as “to live out my parents’ dream.” Or your response may be something more spiritual such as “to fulfill my calling.”
Ask yourself this next coaching question: “What is your purpose in life?”
Your response will likely be a bit different from your response to the first question above. It may be related to your day job or instead have nothing at all to do with work. You may not know exactly what your purpose in life is, or you may be totally clear about it and use it as your guiding star day in and day out.
When the response you give to this second question sparks warmth in your chest or otherwise feels alive in your body, that usually indicates you have discovered your capital “P” purpose – that GPS destination that inspires you to keep going through challenges, that makes life feel more worth living, and that often involves you taking actions that have a positive ripple effect through your family, community, or beyond. If your response feels solid and right in your head, but does not necessarily cause a spark, then your purpose is equally worthy but more likely to be a lowercase “p” purpose. It still gives you direction, anchors your decisions, and makes sense for what is important for you.
Why do I distinguish Capital “P” and lowercase “p” purpose? We could have a long and engaging debate about this topic, and at the end we will likely conclude that we both have valid opinions on this topic. My view is based on my own life experience and what I have been blessed to witness in coaching with my clients these past two decades. With confidence, I believe that the capital “P” purpose is where the real juice is. Once you know it, you feel greater motivation and self-confidence. Clarifying and naming your purpose and then taking actions in support of your purpose can be so powerful that the process can even generate mental, emotional, and physical healing. Before discovering your capital “P” purpose, it’s almost like you had been living your life all along with a missing part. And once you plug in that part, your internal engine kicks in at a higher gear, allowing you to hum along at a higher vibration with greater efficiency and power.
How to Find or Clarify Your Purpose?
Read any of the books above and you’ll find guidance on how to do this. In my experience, it requires three components: reflection + self-awareness + some type of external input and/or confirmation.
Reflection in this context can involve looking back at the key events that have shaped you, noticing which people and what events have been your biggest “teachers”, identifying repeating patterns or challenges, and distilling the lessons learned. The role of self-awareness with purpose involves observing what is happening in your life with curiosity and clarity, recognizing what is and is not working for you, and being willing to change directions (even when it may not seem rational or linear) to move toward your desired GPS destination.
The external piece can be anything from taking a fun old school magazine quiz to “find your purpose” to completing a more robust and formal assessment. It could involve something more spiritual like accessing your Akashic records or discussing your life blueprint with someone trained to interpret your birth date and location using Vedic methods. And more recently, as the topic of psychedelic-assisted therapy has grown in popularity, some people are using plant medicine to explore deeper questions about their life and purpose.
When I teach coaching skills to professionals, I share a set of copyrighted questions that help build self-awareness in the client. Each answer to a question acts like a puzzle piece. Once the pieces are put together in a coaching exchange, the picture of your purpose then becomes clear.
Other ways clients sometimes clarify their purpose cannot be planned. I have coached clients who lived through a near-fatal health crisis, or climbed their way out of a damaging relationship, only to accumulate through the experience some incredible clarity about what they do and don’t want in life and why, leading them to clarify their purpose. Lastly – and much more rare – is the case of people who have a lightning bolt type insight, sometimes called claircognizance (clear knowing), that makes their purpose known to them clear as day in a single moment.
How reflection + self-awareness + some type of external input all come together in coaching is by exploring ideas to clarify what really feels right in your bones and having the coach mirror back to you the emerging thoughts so you can hear them and digest them. Ultimately, you document in writing your purpose statement and use it as your GPS destination to influence your priorities and guide your decisions.
How Aligning Your Choices with Purpose Accelerates Growth
As mentioned earlier, once you clarify your purpose, it’s like plugging in a previously missing piece to your internal engine in a way that kicks you into a higher gear, allowing you to hum along at a higher vibration with greater efficiency and power. You feel more energized, you experience less friction in life, you have greater certainty about what you want to do and not do, your confidence grows, and cumulatively you realize greater satisfaction and well-being in life.
Living and working with purpose is not about ego, nor the material goals of job titles and bank accounts, although new roles and financial means can go hand-in-hand with walking in alignment with purpose. Aligning your choices with your purpose can accelerate positive growth in your life and career in a way that radiates a positive wave of energy and influence through your social, family, and work circles.
“Machines excel in processing data and making decisions based on predictive logic — so much so that they will likely eventually become more effective than their human counterparts at many of these analytical tasks. However, they fall short of grasping the intricacies of human emotions and social dynamics.
“A.I. will become a complement to our human experience — not a replacement for it. So that means that human skills will become increasingly crucial in both the design and interaction with A.I. systems.” -Alex Budek
This quote, from an article published in May 2023 in Inc. magazine, got me to thinking:
As AI evolves, what are the core coaching skills that we need to possess—especially the developers and engineers who design A.I. systems, as well as other organizational leaders and investors who influence these technologies?
What coaching skills do we all need to cultivate to help us manage the on-going disruptions in today’s white-collar jobs and the related change management that goes along with these disruptions?
Read on to learn more and let me know your thoughts on this critical topic that (I believe) literally affects the fate of humankind.
First, a definition: By “AI”, I mean artificial intelligence or the computer systems that have been designed and/or coded to be able to do the things that previously were only able to be done by humans (and select other smart big brain mammals). This includes “visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages”, per Oxford dictionary. And since almost all recently designed and new software, apps, systems have these capabilities built in, let’s agree for the sake of argument that AI is built into most (if not all) computer technologies.
Coaching Skills at the Intersection of AI + EQ
Can AI listen at Level 3? No. Can it be trained to do so? Maybe.
Can AI utilize its enteric nervous system to sense subconscious intent in another human? No. Could it eventually measure fluctuations in human bio data and then extrapolate another’s subconscious intent? Maybe, but here’s a question to ponder: would we trust AI more than ourselves in this type of situation? Hmmmm.
Does AI have intuition? No.
Can computer technologies with voice capability adjust its tone of voice dynamically to meet the emotional need of another? No. Can it be trained to do so? Maybe.
Does AI understand what it’s like to sweat nervously in an interview or wake up with anxiety because the rent is late again? No. Could it be trained to have a pretty good guess at what it’s like? Yes, but it would still not be a lived emotional human experience of stress.
As I explored the questions above, I affirmed the obvious, which is: I am not an expert on computer technologies, and so I won’t pretend to know all the current capabilities of AI, nor be able to talk about what skills are needed to design such systems.
However, I did wonder:
How many of the designers, developers, leaders, and investors in the field of developing AI can answer Yes to being able to listen at Level 3 or know they even have an enteric nervous system let alone understand the complexities of it?
I appreciate that I don’t need to think about how to design computer systems nor be concerned with the ethical decision making factors that influence how computer systems are designed. But, I can take a coach approach to inviting you to consider what skills may be needed to ensure we retain and enhance our humanity as computer technologies evolve. And as coaching supports the cultivation of critical interpersonal skills like self-awareness, interpersonal effectiveness, listening, observing, etc, I assert that the skills we need at the intersection of AI and humans are fundamentally coaching skills.
If you know someone who is a designer, developer, leader, or investor in the computer technology space, I invite you to share these questions with them.
For those people designing and investing in computer technologies that affect the lives of human beings:
What interpersonal and self-leadership skills are most important for people working on and with computer technologies?
What non-technical skills, when improved, would most greatly help those designing and engineering these computer systems to be more effective in their work?
When you are hiring talent or determining who will advance in their career:
Which interpersonal and self-leadership skills need to be most greatly emphasized when evaluating prospective job candidates?
As human beings evolve, and our interaction with computer technologies evolves, how can we retain the most precious aspects of our humanity?
As a leader, or people manager, who oversees the work of designers and developers in the computer technology space:
What non-technical competencies are most critical for your effectiveness as a leader or people manager?
What non-technical skills, when strengthened, would help you make wiser decisions about how you influence the evolution of computer technologies?
For innovators, decision makers, and investors in computer technologies:
How can AI help teach humans to strengthen human capacities and qualities like listening?
How can AI help coaches better understand their clients?
How can AI help managers better understand their direct reports’ mental, emotional, social, behavior, and other human needs?
For us mere mortals who are simply users of these computer technologies:
What non-technical skills would help us use computer technologies more wisely?
While I certainly have a point of view that informs how I would answer the questions above, I am genuinely curious what experts in the space would reply. I also do not assume I know what is best for others. I look forward to engaging in this exploration and dialogue, then taking steps to support others in cultivating the key skills and competencies needed to ensure we retain and enhance our humanity as computer technologies evolve. Click here to share your thoughts on this month’s edition of Coaching Tips.
I recently taught a Foundations of Coaching class to a group of professionals in Philadelphia. The participants quickly realized how challenging it can be to ask questions instead of tell others what to do. Why is the coaching skill of asking questions relevant for the workplace? And how can asking questions support greater understanding and empowerment for you and others to enhance critical stakeholder relationships and career success? Read on to find out!
Many of my clients at all levels of leadership have to intentionally practice shifting their communication style from talking to listening. It can be uncomfortable at first, especially when you are used to being the expert in the room. But learning to ask powerful open questions yields numerous dividends when it comes to gathering more information about key stakeholders. Asking questions also helps develop greater trust that can be leveraged for collaboration and mutual benefit.
For example, one of my c-level clients noticed that she was speaking 70% on average in her meetings with direct reports and peers. As a result, her 360-feedback revealed that those around her felt misunderstood, were frustrated they did not have a chance to share their point in meetings, and some even felt disengaged enough to consider leaving the company. Another younger high-performing client of mine realized his high level of energy resulted in him dominating a majority of his workplace conversations, unintentionally making others feel left out. In both cases, these clients engaged in an experiment where they practiced asking more questions to give others a chance to speak and share their ideas.
In the beginning of shifting your communication style, you may begin to realize — like my clients did — that there are many different types of questions.
Closed questions are typically very specific questions that one can answer with a yes or no, or a more precise answer. For example: “Did you submit that report already?” Or, “What time did you submit the report?”
Leading questions are ones where the person asking the question plants the seed for the kind of answer they’re looking for by including key details in the wording of the question. For example: “How did it go with finishing up that report?” Or, “What did you learn towards the end of wrapping up that project report?”
Open questions are those that provide a lot more freedom for the respondent to share their thoughts. Such as: “How are things going for you?” Or, “What ideas would you like to share?” Open questions are often the most powerful, and can position you to elicit the richest and sometimes most unexpected and useful information.
All questions can be effective questions if you are intentional in your wording and know why you are asking them. But often we habitually ask closed questions that bring a quick halt to the conversation and provide zero opportunity to engage the other in dialogue or relationship building.
In the case of my c-level client, after practicing asking more questions in her meetings, she quickly realized how much information she had been missing—about critical issues outside the formal agenda that indirectly impacted the focus of her work, about peoples’ well-being, and… this last piece was a rewarding surprise for her… she had been missing opportunities to delegate work to others who genuinely wanted to learn from her and prepare for a next role. That led to her freeing up time for more strategic work, board-level relationship building, and participating in industry events that gave her greater visibility for advancing her career.
For my younger high performing client, she had some similar realizations after changing up her approach. But for her, the types of information she began to learn turned out to be important for getting ahead of simple problems on her team and also mining opportunities to evolve key processes that were causing frustration and late-night hours for the product side of her team.
Similarly, in that Foundations of Coaching class I recently taught, the participants quickly discovered how often in the past they had actually been advising people on what they should do, by giving directive suggestions — sharing what they themselves thought would be best for the other person — rather than taking a coaching approach by asking others questions and empowering them to come up with their own ideas.
Why is this coaching tip relevant for both rising leaders and established leaders? When you take a coach approach to communicating with colleagues at work, you lean more into asking questions to invite others to talk. You don’t assume you already know the answer. You empower others to generate ideas, build their own knowledge, and solve problems more independently. You disrupt your default pattern of telling others what to do. And the more you can practice asking truly open questions, the more unexpected or relationship- and career-enhancing information you may learn.
PUT THIS TIP IN ACTION
In your next conversation at work, whether one-on-one or in a group meeting, ASK MORE QUESTIONS and discover what a difference this approach can make in what you learn and how you engage others.
