The wonderful thing about pursuing coaching as my ‘encore’ career is the huge opportunities for growth, learning, personal development. For me as well as my clients.It has me thinking all the time. What works best for my clients, what do I need to do to show up as the best version of myself.

In a blog back in May I wrote about acclaimed coach, Tim Gallwey’s view that coaching, be it life or executive, should focus on the coachee achieving ‘extraordinary wellness’. From this ‘extraordinary success’ will follow. This really resonated with me. It made sense. If through coaching an individual can identify what is important to them, let go of their self-limiting beliefs and free their minds to embrace exciting and challenging goals, life becomes filled with passion, purpose and success.

But how easy is it to identify what is important? How many people pursue a university degree or a career pathway without spending the time considering if it fits with their values. How influenced are they by parents, teachers, friends when making their choices? Are they hardwired to seek out a huge salary and/or a glamorous lifestyle at the expense of their happiness? We only have one life. We owe it to ourselves to use it wisely.

Coaching has long been seen as a reward for those that reach a certain level in their career. I was only offered it when I took up a strategic leadership position. Fortunately, this view is slowly changing with coaching being offered to a far wider range of people irrespective of their position in an organisation or their life stage. It should be available to all including teenagers when they are considering their career/university options and to those nearing retirement.

A couple of weeks ago I was once again at Warwick University for a two day workshop to kick off the second module in my second year of a Masters in Coaching. The workshop included exercises which we could use in our own coaching practice. including a number focusing on ‘values’. I’ve done quite a lot of work on my own values particularly when doing the ethics module but, I’ve not explicitly used a ‘values’ exercise with my own clients. This experience has made me reconsider. 

The first exercise was a fairly simple one. From a list of values we were asked to pick our top 8. We could also use values that weren’t on the list. We then wrote these values on post-it notes and placed them on the floor in a configuration that captured their importance and the relationship between each of them.

This was mine:  

It’s important to recognise that values can change as life changes. What is important in midlife may be very different to what was important as a teenager. And will morph again as a consequence of our life experiences, good and bad. For example, I doubt ‘health’ would have been at the top of my list in my early 50’s. ‘Fitness’ may have featured but my health was a given. But losing and recovering it twice, and not wanting to make it a hat trick has elevated it to the number 1 spot.

The next exercise was to draw our ideal life if we were living to our values. Cue why I never pursued an artistic career. My penguins were unrecognisable*. As were the antics of my matchstick figures. But it was an enlightening activity. It is so easy to describe life, or our future lives using lists but not so easy depicting it as a picture. It brought our values to life. It either reinforced their importance or brought about a rethink. 

The big take home for me apart from confirming my lack of artistic skills was the importance of the client  appreciating what their values are before identifying their ‘goals’.There a number of reasons why I’d previously started with ‘goals’. Many of the coaching models that I’m familiar with start with ‘goals’. For example, one of the most popular models is John Whitmore’s GROW. The mnemonic standing for Goal, Reality, Opportunity, Will.  Adding ‘values’ : VGROW would just destroy the mnemonic. 

There is also a pressure to identify the goal or goals very early on in the coaching process. I would feel that I’d failed as a coach if a goal wasn’t identified and agreed by the end of the first coaching session. But a goal that doesn’t reflect our values is either doomed to fail or, possibly worse, doomed to a be disappointing success. 

So I’m allowing myself and my coachee to slow down.

* I want to explore Antarctica