Coach Express

What is Your Special Gift as a Coach?

Coaching is one of the fastest growing professions in the world. As a career it is flexible and financially rewarding. But this is not the main reason most people start coaching.

People come to coaching as a way of making a contribution to the world, of creating change - within themselves, their family, their community, their country, even the planet. Every coach brings a special and unique gift to coaching and to the world.

Special Festive Season Teleseminar

“The Power of Coaching”
Dec 19th, 2007

Register Now: http://www.icoachacademy.com

1. What excites you about coaching?
2. What change/contribution will you make in the world?
3. How will you make a difference?
4. How will you build a successful coaching business?

Register Now: http://www.icoachacademy.com

By Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland

In three weeks time I will be relocating my family from Melbourne, Australia to Shanghai, China. This change has been in planning for about a year and as each week passes I feel myself getting more and more excited. International Coach Academy is going to be offering coach training in Mandarin as of 2008.

As a coach and a leader I have been most interested in observing the responses people have given me when I mention that I am relocating to China. Let me share a few with you now.

The first response is an assumption that I have to go for work purposes and that there may not be a great deal of choice involved, rather a necessary part of my role at ICA. This could not be further from the truth. When I stepped off the plane in mainland China in 2005, I felt a wave of energy that I had not experienced before. I became immediately excited and I could feel the energy of the place moving throughout my body. I loved the culture, I loved the passion for learning that everyone I meet has, and I loved the vibrancy of the place. I felt connected in some way to China. It had entered my mind, body and soul weaving its magical, mythical spell over me. Whenever I am in mainland China I feel a sense of sadness when I have to leave it.

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By Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland

This article first appeared in the WABC, Business Coaching Worldwide ezine, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2006.

I am sometimes surprised to learn that coaches are failing to gather a range of information from their clients prior to the commencement of the coaching process. In the absence of such information, how is it possible to calculate ROI?

In the early 70’s, Donald Kirkpatrick introduced a model for evaluating the benefits of training. This same model is used today by training and human resources departments to evaluate the ROI of coaching. The model has four levels:

1. Reaction: How well did the client like the coaching?
2. Learning: What principles, facts and techniques did the client learn?
3. Behaviour: What changes in job behaviour resulted from the coaching?
4. Results: What were the quantitative results of the coaching in terms of reduced costs, improved performance, improved efficiency, etc?

Each level in the model requires information form both the client and the organization. In order to be of value, the information must be gathered before, during and after the coaching process. (more…)

With Alex Mandossian and Lou D’Alo

Those of you who are familiar with ICA trainer Lou D’Alo will not be surprised to see that he has hooked up with undisputed teleseminar heavyweight champ Alex Mandossian.

Inspired by what he learned in Alex’s Teleseminar Secrets course, Lou rapidly built a bustling coaching business using teleseminars and joint ventures as virtually his only marketing strategies and now teaches his clients and subscribers to do the same.

Now, Alex has agreed to do a one-time private and exclusive call with Lou especially for coaches. Because you’re part of the ICA community, you’re invited as a VIP guest.

This will be a content-rich 90 minutes especially for coaches, including a Q&A session where Alex will answer as many of your most important questions as possible.

You’ll learn the time-tested teleseminar secrets that will fill your client roster, build an endless stream of potential new clients, establish yourself as an authority, and create multiple passive streams of revenue - all from the comfort of your home.

For details of the event register here

In our weekly management meetings at International Coach Academy we spend the first 15 minutes of our meeting participating in an activity to develop greater trust in our team. We recognise that to achieve our goals we need to work effectively as a team and trust is one of our values. We also take it in turns to chair the meetings. This week it was my turn and part of being the chair is that you also facilitate the trust activity. I wanted to share this activity with you. (more…)

By Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland
(CEO)

One of the reasons that coaching is such an interesting field is that it draws from a wide range of theories, philosophies and disciplines to create a unique professional practice. If coaching were a plant, it would be an exotic, variegated hybrid! Coaching is more than just the sum of its parts, however. While coaching has a theoretical history in adult learning theory, psychology, management theory, sociology and spirituality, it has also operated as a unique field for over 30 years now. Throughout that time, has developed its own theoretical framework.

At ICA we believe that coaching is its own unique field and should be studied as such. We think that, while coaches may bring skills and ideas with them from former fields and professions, no one field or profession has any greater claim to expertise in coaching than another. Having said that, however, as part of your understanding of coaching, it is useful to know a bit about its history and the theories it shares with other fields and disciplines.

Over the next few weeks I will be highlighting the theories that we believe inform coaching. To begin lets look at Adult Learning Theory.

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By Robyn Logan
(Strategy Director)

In a recent article in the Mc Kinsey Quarterly, Richard Rumelt (Professor of Strategy at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management) refers to Steve Jobs as a “strategic entrepreneur”. He quotes Jobs as answering a detailed question about his long term strategy with “I am going to wait for the next big thing.” Interestingly, Jobs didn’t go into a long explanation about competitive positioning or long term vision, he was simply waiting until the right moment for that predatory leap, which for him was Pixar and then, in an even bigger way, the iPod.

According to Rumelt, that very predatory approach of leaping through the window of opportunity and staying focused on those big wins — not on maintenance activities — is what distinguishes a real entrepreneurial strategy.

Rumelt’s article is excellent and it got me thinking about the concept of strategy. As a former Strategic Planner I spent many hours assisting organizations to develop and document their corporate strategy. Very few of these organizations were engaging in what I would call “real strategy. Strategy is a bit like trust, or even love – you know when you have it and you know when you see it, but it’s hard to teach someone else how to do it.

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I have just turned on the television to listen to the evening news. The feature story is about the closure of a Ford factory
in a town. Over hundreds of workers are to be sacked as a result of the closure. The Ford factory is the main industry in the town with only a couple of other industries operating in the area. There is definitely not enough jobs in the town to go
round for all the sacked workers.

The news clip showed many angry workers, fear on their faces as they highlighted the impact that the closure would have on them, their families and the local community. Some workers had devoted their entire working life to Ford, hoping to retire there. Others mentioned the impact on their children and families as they would now have to look for work outside of their town, requiring them to drive great distances to seek employment, sacrificing family time for travel time. Other workers commented on feeling left out of the conversation, the planning, the decision that lead to the closure. Anger from misplaced loyalty to a company that they considered to be a part of their community, extended family in the greatest sense of the notion. Feelings of desperation, anxiety, and disempowerment showed on their faces and their words.

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By Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland, CEO ICA

I currently write a column for the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches, this is and edited version of that column - I hope you enjoy it and, as always, I welcome comments from you all.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the measurement of business coaching and an interesting range of people and experiences have helped me to clarify my thinking. I’d like to now share those thoughts and conversations with you.

First, I spent several weeks recently working extensively in China, developing our coach training school. I met many business coaches there and one common theme emerged-some individuals in China are actually coaching, but others really consulting and ‘adding on’ this new thing called coaching. The conversations then moved to the difference between coaching, consulting and training. I know that this conversation is not only occurring in China-it is occurring all over the world. (more…)

By Robyn Logan - Strategy Director ICA

“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”

“CoPs develop around things that matter to people… The difference between a CoP and a team is that the shared learning and interest or its members are what keeps it together. It is defined by knowledge rather than task. It exists because participation has value to members”

Etienne Wenger, 1998

Manuel Castells describes the internet as the most extraordinary technological revolution in history. And at it’s heart is not, as early punters first thought, powerful search engines, rather the ability to bring people with like minded interests and values together quickly, cheaply and easily. It’s the “like meets like” function and the “matching” function that proving to be the new drivers of the internet. It’s the networks and the communities who are driving the internet forward. (more…)