TABLE OF CONTENTS Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay not defeat.
It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.
Denis Waitley
Effective coaching leads to action. Insight and learning without action is failure both for the coach and the coachee. The STARTED process asks you to hold back from the instinct to move into action until you are clear that the individual has identified their real target, and identified solutions of a kind and size that motivate their desire to act. It would seem that the work is now done, other than to offer words of encouragement. Wrong. Delivery requires as much of the coach as the other stages. In particular, the final stage asks you to stay involved and to continue to coach when action does not get the results intended.
It is common to see the action focused stage as involving little more than the invocation of SMART, through asking the coachee to identify:
What specifically they are going to do?
How much of it?
By when?
The agreement is committed to paper, and the task of the individual is to report back on progress. The assumption being that planning ensures success. It is a belief with a long pedigree: from Benjamin Franklin s, By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail , to a Barclays Bank advertising hoarding stating, A goal without a plan is just a dream .
Planning...
