This week Aleen Bayard and Steven talk about coaching.

It’s a very popular mechanism right now for organisations’ to hire coaches to develop their leaders.  But not everyone can afford to do that.

Self coaching is something that’s really worth while looking into.  It doesn’t take a lot of time or resources, but it has some really good benefits that it can achieve.

One of the things people often say about learning and development is it doesn’t really have immediate impact.  And self coaching is a way of achieving that.

One way to begin is to get some feedback from people you work with about a particular skill you would like to develop.  Perhaps listening, working with team members, collaborating, and find out what you can be doing better by getting some feedback from your colleagues.

Self awareness is an important thing that comes out of the coaching, and in a way some people don’t feel very confident about getting that sort of feedback.  So the self element means you can control how much you talk about, what feedback you get and what you do with it.  Which I think allows people to take that leap of faith to jump into doing this.

And in fact so much of coaching just requires a commitment by a certain date.  So the self coaching would be just putting some discipline in.  So if you want to become a better listener, let your network know that’s something you’re working on and you want to improve it in the two or three weeks.

All you need to do is pick a pen:

1.     Write down one or two things you would like to improve on

2.     Give yourself a timeframe for improvement

3.     Advise your colleagues or network of your intentions

4.     Check back with others or yourself within a set period. 

Let me know this week how you have got on with your own self coaching.

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