Turning Chatting into Coaching
Social encounters
As social animals with a facility for language, we chat a lot. We chat with friends, with family, with co-workers and, if we live in a place where the social codes encourage it, we chat with lots of the people we cross paths with as we go about our daily lives.
Some chats are enjoyable encounters. They reconnect us with the people that matter in our lives. They provide opportunities for recounting the latest events in our lives or for sharing our excitement about upcoming events. In some chats, useful information is exchanged. In others, we are playful.
But a lot of chat is empty and formulaic. What might have been an interesting and rewarding encounter amounts to nothing.
A special type of encounter
One way to make better use of our encounters is to turn some of them into little pieces of coaching.
To do this, we must focus on making the conversation useful for the person we are talking with. Sometimes this means helping them become clear about what they’d most like to happen in some area of their life. Sometimes it means enabling them to come up with a new solution to a problem that’s been vexing them — for if we just help a person talk through a tricky situation, possible solutions often come to them.
In even the shortest, simplest piece of coaching, the person being coached will feel listened to and understood. So they’ll feel warmer towards you after the coaching.
Getting started
We all have the capacity to turn some of our chats into pieces of informal coaching. As we all began chatting with people when we were very little, we’ve all developed the basic abilities we’d need.
But to begin coaching, we have to get used to using our abilities in a new way. There are three steps we have to learn to take:
- Noticing that there’s an opportunity to try some informal coaching.
- Asking a coaching question.
- Listening attentively as the coachee responds to the question.
Noticing the opportunity
The first step in any informal coaching is noticing that there’s an opportunity to try some coaching.
Perhaps you’ll be chatting with a person who’s wrestling with a problem and you’ll realise that you’re tempted to give them some advice. We all enjoy giving advice. But well-meaning advice is rarely helpful. We’re often swamped by advice. It’s everywhere and, even when it’s a good fit for the specifics of a person’s situation, it seldom cuts deep enough to change their behaviour.
People are far more likely to follow a new course of action when they’ve thought through the situation for themselves and seen — in detail — why it makes sense for them to follow that course of action.
Or perhaps it won’t be helping a person with their struggles that motivates you. Perhaps you’ll see that there’s an opportunity to have a more interesting conversation. And why not turn a conversation that’s a bit flat, or that’s run out of steam, into a piece of coaching? Why not make it challenging and potentially rewarding for both you and the person you’re with?
The coaching question
Once you’ve decided to turn the chat into a little piece of coaching, the next step is to ask a coaching question.
Coaching questions are questions that prompt a person to think on their feet. To answer the question, they must go beyond their current patterns of thinking and make new connections.
The questions direct the attention of the person being coached — the coachee — at what they might do in some area of their life.
- They’re always open questions in that, rather than asking for a particular type of answer, they invite the coachee to think and talk freely, finding their own way to respond.
- They tend to be personal questions, asking about the particularities of the coachee’s own life.
- And they tend be values question in that they ask about what matters to the coachee or what gives them a sense of meaning and purpose.
Since the best coaching questions are personal, we have to find questions that suit a particular moment with a particular coachee. The best way to find a suitable question is to be curious about the coachee’s life. What is currently frustrating them? How can they imagine things getting better? What thoughts are often at the back of their mind? What are their hopes and their dreams for the future?
If you really are curious about how the coachee can live well while facing all the difficulties and complications that life puts their way, and you genuinely want the best for them, any question you ask out of interest will work.
The attentive listening
Once you’ve asked your question, you can support the coachee in their thinking simply by listening attentively.
Don’t be tempted to offer your own thoughts about the topic. Don’t think about what you might say next. Just listen!
If you do simply listen, your listening will draw out the coachee’s thoughts. Ideas will strike them that they wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for your question and your listening. Your listening will create a space for them to think in and the more attentively you listen the easier it will be for them to sustain their thinking and think bold new thoughts.
Don’t judge anything that they say. Just accept it and encourage them to build on their thoughts by saying more.
Practicing coaching
If you practise coaching regularly, it will start to feel completely natural. It will become just another part of your social repertoire.
Learning to create a coaching dynamic can open up many doors. In the future, you might want to learn to use coaching as a management tool. You would deepen your knowledge of coaching’s basic techniques and learn how to structure your coaching so that, at the end of a short session, the coachee has made clear action commitments. Perhaps you’ll even find that you’d like to start working as a professional coach. Or perhaps all you’ll want to do is have richer encounters with the people you talk with. That is often enough.
If you’d like to make sure you’re fully ready to start coaching in real life, you can take our level one courses. Our level one theory course, Introducing Coaching, would tell you more about how informal coaching works. And you could practice coaching’s core skills on our level one practical course, Start Coaching. You would team up with two other people and — either over video chat or IRL — practice the skills together. Both courses are free.
You might, of course, prefer just to get stuck in and start coaching. Why not? The next time you’re chatting with someone and the conversation is flagging, or you feel like trying something new, why not ask a coaching question and listen attentively to the reply. Maybe ask a follow up question or two. See what happens.
Perhaps there will be an opportunity to turn some chatting into some coaching later today, or tomorrow. If there is, will you take it?
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