International Teaching Seminars Blog

Leadership is perceived as being in short supply. We are, so many believe, crying out for leadership.

Leadership, I have found, is like charity - it begins at home. To be a good leader of others you first need to know how to lead yourself - and when you can lead yourself you can lead others.

Leadership, when you are true to yourself, flows like a river and is without effort. It emanates and radiates. It is not something that is forced out with determination, or that creates high blood pressure and sleepless nights. Put another way, leadership is about personal congruence, and the key to personal congruence is being able to pace yourself.

You need to be clear about the journey you wish to make, the speed at which you wish to travel and the beliefs and values that will guide your path.
It is about becoming the leader that is already within you.
Once you can pace yourself you are ready to lead yourself and others.

You need to be able to honour and acknowledge the different aspects of yourself whether your conscious mind likes them or not. You will also need to address your own particular habitual patterns and experiences.
If this sounds like a tall order, the good news is that the ways to achieve this can all be taught.

In addressing these areas you will find yourself personally changing and becoming more completely aligned, a process which goes on over a lifetime.

It is like becoming a charioteer with all your horses running in the same direction, at the same speed and
with the same intentions.

The pay-off is enormous as you are truly able to walk your talk, to practice what you preach or to do what you say. It produces a particular kind of leadership style which is sometimes called ‘leading by example’. This is about leading by being: being one whose behaviour is naturally aligned with who you are and what matters to you.

So often when I’m coaching executives my function is to draw out what they have not recognised that they have within themselves. The more competent the person becomes, the less they need to dominate.

My experience is that once people know they can have this, they want it very badly because it is profoundly healing and very empowering. The fruits of such self-empowerment are readily apparent.

Unfortunately, many find themselves in businesses and organisations, in positions where they are expected to demonstrate a leadership style which is not really them, a cultural ‘norm’ that just doesn’t fit. If the culture is one of ‘have to’ as opposed to one of ‘want to’, real leadership suffers.

To enhance someone’s ability to be a leader in their life, one must first enhance the individual who will be that leader. There is no better way to do this than to create structures which draw out of an individual his or her own unique vision and mission. Why? Because these are born of that person’s identity.

The more you can draw on these the better you are able to influence. The more influential you are, the less you need to try to control.

That’s what leadership coaching means to me.

Ian McDermott, founder and director of International Teaching Seminars (ITS), offers practitcal tools for personal, business and clinical success in this three part article.

“I just want things to be like they were before I got ill.”

Working with people I have heard this sentiment expressed many times over the years. But of course if this really could be achieved; if things really were just the same as before this person got ill, guess what? Other things being equal, we might reasonably expect a repeat of what happened before. In other words they’d get ill all over again.

I think many practitioners have heard clients or patients say similar things; they want a return to what for them feels normal. Too often though normality is confused with the familiar. For most of us the familiar is deeply reassuring.

However, if that familiar way of functioning has got you to a place where things aren’t working for you, then it’s going to be necessary to do something different. And that probably means you’ll be doing something that feels unfamiliar. In NLP there’s a famous dictum which says, if what you’re doing isn’t working – do something different! This may sound pretty obvious advice but when we’re feeling stuck, by definition, we are not at our most innovative. Indeed we often fall back on our old familiar ways of being and doing.

There’s a danger that the more stuck or helpless we feel the more likely we are to just do more of the same but with more effort – this is what I know how to do so I’ll just try harder doing what doesn’t work. As one client said to me when they realised the need for change “doing virtually anything different could lead to an improvement for me if only because it would shake up my old routine.”

Motivating Clients

This is true in any area of our life but the implications of this for health practitioners and clients are particularly significant. Very often how effective we’re going to be depends on how able we are to motivate a client so that they can see the value of stepping outside their old patterns and doing what may feel unfamiliar. Much of my work in NLP has been focused on developing ways to ensure this really happens and many of my trainings are designed to teach this as a learnable skill.

I’ve found building such motivation easier to do when I can provoke a reassessment and some new thinking on the part of the client. I want to explore with clients what would need to be different so that a better life might be possible. But first I need to get their attention. I mean really get their attention. And that’s how I came to develop different ways of responding to what they said. To take the example above:

Client: “I just want things to be like they were before I got ill.”
IM: “What! You want to be ill again?!”

Of course that’s the last thing that either of us wants. What they want is for things to be different and better. But whenever we want things to be different and better it means some things are really going to have to change. So what specifically will that mean for this particular person? Together we need to get clear on what change will mean and how we’ll know if it’s happening.

Reviewed by Dr Peter Stokes, principal lecturer/division leader, Lancashire Business School, University of Central Lancashire.

This is straightforward, nut-and-bolts “how to” guide to coaching. The book takes the reader through the necessary basis of the coaching process and options. It is well-written, sticks to the business at hand, and is true to its “Essential Handbook” title.
However, don’t overlook the sections “Coaching – The Larger Issues” and “Coaching and Beyond”. These create a platform from which readers can progress to further reading.

One of the more intriguing and interesting sections of the book is “Being Impeccable”, which brings a moral and ethical dimension to the subject area. Coaching has been considered as a novelty and has, like many fashions, clearly attracted its fair share charlatans. The aspirations and code of conduct discussed here are worthy and valuable aspects of the coaching world.

Useful -
Well-written -
Practical -
Inspirational -
Value for money -
Overall -

The Coaching Bible can be purchased from the ITS site by clicking here.

Suppose you were offered a way to recognise and realise all your goals, to find and utilise your unique strengths, to manage yourself more effectively, to identify and work around your limitations, to focus your intention and your resources and, above all, to make changes to your life for the better. Would you be interested? This is what coaching has to offer.

In my view coaching is more than a set of skills: it is a different way of being, one that characterises excellent coaches whatever their particular training or style. If comes from a profound coherence between what the coach does, what they believe and who they are. This is what makes good coaching seamless in practice. It’s what lie’s behind its power to help people make changes and in the process discover more what they have it in them to become.

At its heart, coaching is about partnership - not just the obvious one between client and coach, but also partnerships between reason and emotion, reflection and action. Coaching is interactive: it is a dialogue between equals. It involves a pooling of expertise. The client is the expert on herself and her situation and the coach is the expert on helping her discover how to make the changes she wants to make in her work and other part of her life.

Coaching recognises that small changes, if properly targeted, can have far reaching results. That’s why the best coaches are experts on leverage. It is, however, concerned primarily with process rather than actual content. It is marked by clarity in some areas: clarity of purpose, role, boundaries and ways and means. It’s also characterised by open-endedness in other areas because of the need for inquiry, exploration, reflection and experimentation. It is a process that is highly tolerant of doubt and ambiguity, and yet at the same time sharply focused.

Coaching is all about learning - for the coach as well as the client. Each coaching partnership is unique, making its own operating rules, its own discoveries and its own journey of progress. The best coaching takes no prisoners and pulls no punches, yet it develops the clients’ acceptance of themselves and others. Over time I have noticed that coaching becomes habitual - not because its conversations continue indefinitely, but because its patterns of reflection, enquiry, experiment and evaluation transfer from the coach to the client. It becomes part of the client’s own way of dealing with their experience. It also becomes a way of thinking that can cascade through organisations and families.

Be it formal or informal, executive or life coaching, coaching can be of benefit to most members of the community. Good coaches have a natural ability to enable clients to take stock, clarify their purpose, become focused and achieve greater ease. There are also the foundation of coaching skills. Just about anybody who is working with other will be more effective if they can do this.

Hence the value of a coaching approach.

Christian Lattanzio, 35, was born in Rome and moved to London 9 years ago.

Christian’s main interests lie in sport, particularly in how athletes learn and achieve peak performance. He is also a certified NLP Master Practitioner, attending programmes run by ITS. Over the last few years he went on to apply his studies and research on how people communicate, learn and achieve excellence when coaching sport; concentrating on football in particular.

Graduating with a degree in Philosophy and Linguistics from the University in Rome, Christian has a background in sport having played Football and Futsal in Italy both at Academy and semi-pro level. He currently delivers his Mental Skills Training Programme to the Under 18 squad of Tottenham Hotspur and West Bromwich Albion Academy, delivering a similar programme to the Under 18 squad of West Ham United the year before.Christian has affiliations with and has been invited to present his work by a number of professional clubs and associations such as The English FA, Inter FC, FIGC (The Italian FA), Manchester United, West Ham United, Hellas Verona, West Bromwich Albion, AS Roma and Udinese FC.

Christian also trains the mental strength of a number of professional and semi-professional athletes ranging from Football to Rugby, from Running to Swimming, from Basketball to Tennis, from Golf to Boxing. He also writes articles on Mental Strength Training for magazines such as “Movimento” and “Cycling Weekly”, as well as for European websites like www.basketnet.it, www.calciatori.com, and BBC Sport.

ITS recognises Christian as a dedicated mental strength coach, if you would like to ask Christian any questions please use the comments link below.

International Teaching Seminars is pleased to introduce “Coaching and NLP”, a workshop run by Henley Management College that introduces new NLP techniques and reveals their effective use in a coaching context.

Understanding patterns in thinking and behaviour can have considerable implications for the success of coaching situations. The workshop is presented by Ian McDermott demonstrates specific techniques for successful executive coaching.

Benefits

• Achieve an understanding of what NLP is, and how it can be used in the course of mainstream executive coaching.
• Gain new confidence in how to credibly incorporate these approaches into your coaching work.
• Experience key techniques in action, working with the acclaimed master of NLP Coaching.

About Henley Management College
A business school established 60 years ago by business, for business. High pragmatic and relevant programmes are readily applied back in the working environment, to make a real difference to individuals and organisations.

Is Coaching with NLP for me?
You don’t need to be NLP trained to be able to benefit from this workshop - and it will be invaluable to professional coaches, and to managers coaching in the day job.

Date
31 October

Time
9.30am - 4.30pm

Dinner can be booked at 7pm - at a cost of £19, payable at time of booking.

Fee
£555 (€840) plus VAT.

How to Book
To book online go to www.henleymc.ac.uk/coachingworkshops.
For further information please contact executive eduation on tel: +44 (0)1491 418767 or email exec@henleymc.ac.uk.

Please note: This is not part of the International Teaching Seminars course structure, this is offered by Henley Management College.

In this exclusive audio teleseminar, Ian McDermott explores the topic of Coaching, fielding an array of questions emailed to ITS. Discussing what coaching means to him, Ian also answers why Coaching is beneficial to those interested in becoming coaches.

ITS schedules many teleseminars throughout the year, notifications of these will be posted both on the site and on the blog.