Overview

We will return to FAST in future chapters. For this chapter, the focus is on you because beyond any technique that coaching can offer, the most powerful tool you bring to a coaching conversation is yourself.

You already hold within you many of the skills required in coaching. You use them every day of your life and you probably don t even consider them valuable.

In order to be capable of coaching staff within an organization you need:

• to believe that people are capable of change

• to believe that you make a difference to how people approach their work

• to believe that coaching is not a special skill that sits apart from every-day interactions.

My earliest work role was in helping disabled school leavers move beyond education and into work. As part of my development I was sent on a programme to help develop my skills in enabling disabled teenagers to talk about their hopes, fears and anxieties in moving from the protected environment of residential schooling to a judgemental world where their disabilities marked them out as different and disadvantaged. As the course leader outlined the skills that were about to be taught, the person sitting next to me whispered, I don t know why I am here, the person who does all this stuff at our school is the cleaner . Within that school the children recognized that the...