Coaching Competencies Quiz

Coaching Competencies

• Continues coaching in the direction of the client's desired outcome unless the client requests otherwise
• Partners with the client to end the coaching relationship in a way that honors the experience
• Listens Actively: Focuses on what the client is saying to fully understand the message.
  • Considers the client's context, including identity, environment, experiences, values and beliefs to enhance understanding
  • Reflects and summarizes what the client communicated to ensure clarity
  • Recognizes when there is more to what the client is communicating and further enquires
  • Notices and explores the client's emotions, energy shifts, non-verbal cues or other behaviors
  • Integrates the client's words, tone of voice and body language to determine the full meaning
  • Notices trends in the client's behaviors and emotions across sessions to discern themes and patterns
• Evokes Awareness: Facilitates client insight and learning by using tools and techniques such as powerful questioning, silence, metaphor or analogy
  • Considers client experience when deciding what might be most useful
  • Challenges the client as a way to evoke awareness or insight
  • Asks questions about the client, such as their way of thinking, values, needs, wants and beliefs
  • Asks questions that help the client explore beyond current thinking
  • Invites the client to share more about their experience in the moment
  • Notices what is working to enhance client progress
  • Adjusts the coaching approach in response to the client’s needs

Emotion - Contributors to the Field

• Paul Ekman: Studied facial expression and hand gestures in the 1960’s, discovering they were universal and revealed 6 basic emotions. Developed tools and workshops for the CIA and FBI to detect when people were lying.
• Jaak Panskepp: His work with animals led him to conclude that basic emotion emerges not from the cerebral cortex but from deep, ancient brain structures, including the amygdala and the hypothalamus.
• Dacher Keltner: Consulted on Disney Pixar’s movie Inside Out. His research suggests there are 27 distinct emotions, with distinct bodily responses for emotions.
• Lisa Feldman Barrett: The theory of constructed emotion contends that emotions are a kind of memory-based reasoning. Emotions are not reactions to the world, they are how we make sense of what’s going on inside our bodies in relation to the world. “Emotional granularity” includes being able to differentiate between emotions: the more we can tease apart what’s happening inside us, the more choice we have.

EQ - Emotional Intelligence

• Daniel Goleman: The capacity for recognizing our own feelings and others, for motivating ourselves and managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.
• Others: The personal and interpersonal skills and capabilities that enable one to cope successfully and influence environmental demands and pressures.

Stress

• Definition: The physiological and psychological response to situations that threaten or challenge us (Seyle). A real or perceived discrepancy between demands and resources (Lazarus).
• Stress Response:
  • Physiological: Arousal, hormone secretion
  • Emotional: Anxiety, fear, grief, resentment, excitement
  • Behavioral: Coping strategies, problem-focused and/or emotion-focused

Stress Response and Resource Management

• Stress is your mental and emotional reaction to a situation, not the situation itself.
• We need to understand the physiology of stress and how emotions affect it.
• When we are stressed, key biological systems are triggered that help us respond appropriately to danger.
• Brain
  • Neo-cortex: The thinking/cognitive brain (pre-frontal cortex)
  • Limbic system: Broader emotions and instinct (amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus)
  • Reptilian brain: Basic life functions
• Body
  • Mobilize energy (glucose, fat etc)
  • Deliver energy to the right place (heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate increase rapidly)
  • Sharpen cognition (alertness, senses)
  • Blunt pain perception
  • Defer long-term building projects (growth, sex drive)
  • Defer repair (immunity system)

The Stress Curve

• Eustress: Healthy tension that can lead to peak performance.
• Distress: Chronic tension that can lead to fatigue, exhaustion, and illness.

Unconscious Relational Dynamics

• Scripts established in childhood color the way we disseminate or gather information and the way we convey information implicitly and explicitly.
• Intuition is judgments that appear through unconscious, holistic associations, built from unconscious, implicit learning.
• Unconscious perceptual distortion:
  • Projection: Attributing your own undesirable ideas, feelings, and motives to others.
  • Identification: Relating to another person’s circumstances or ideas based on perceived similarity of experience.
  • Transference: Projecting perceptions and expectations of one person onto another.
  • Counter-transference: Responding unconsciously to transference.
• Parallel process: What happens in one system impacts another. Occurs when the coach reproduces the behaviour or emotion of the coachee. Can distort the coaching conversation to focus on the coach’s agenda rather than the coachee's. Experienced coaches can use parallel processing to help the coachee.