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Conversations That Inspire: Coaching Learning, Leadership and Change

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Case Western Reserve University

Conversations That Inspire: Coaching Learning, Leadership and Change

143 ratings

Course 3 of 5 in the Specialization Inspired Leadership

Coaching can inspire and motivate people to learn, change, and be effective leaders, among other roles in life. Although most attempts are “coaching for compliance” (coaching someone to your wishes or expectations), decades of behavioral and neuroscience research show us that “coaching with compassion” (coaching someone to their dreams and desires) is more effective.

From the lesson

Week 1: How do people really help others?

The best coaches develop resonant relationships, which involve the experience of hope and compassion and the arousal of meaning. We explore how effective coaches inspire others, and use an approach based on compassion rather than compliance to promote positive, enduring change in their coachees. We then turn to Intentional Change Theory (ICT) as a model of sustained, desired change at all levels of human endeavor; detailing the five discovery phases that comprise ICT. Finally, we explore the Positive and Negative Emotional Attractors (PEA and NEA), their relationship to the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems (SNS and PNS), and how arousal of either of these systems can deferentially lead to either feelings of negativity and fear, or a focus on one's strengths and the excitement of experimenting with something new.

Watch: Introduction to Helping and Coaching10:32

Meet the Instructors

Ellen VanOosten, PhD
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Director Coaching Research Lab
Melvin Smith
Professor of Organizational Behavior, Faculty Director, Executive Education
Richard Boyatzis
Distinguished University Professor, and a Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science

[MUSIC]

Welcome, thank you for joining our course, Conversations that Inspire,

Coaching Learning, Leadership, and Change.

Before we get into an overview of the course,

let's talk just a little bit about what coaching is.

Coaching falls within a family of helping relationships that includes

manager-subordinate, doctor or therapist and patient, even parent-child.

Now coaching is similar in some ways to these other forms of helping

relationships.

But specifically we define coaching as helping a person make progress in their

intentional change.

Or in other words, helping them articulate and move closer to the attainment

of their ideal self, their personal vision of their ideal future.

Now this is an approach we call coaching with compassion.

Now in coaching with compassion,

one of the objectives of the coach is to establish what we

call a resonate relationship with the person being coached.

One centered around positive emotion, mindfulness, hope, and compassion.

Getting the person excited about some ideal future that they envision and

helping them maintain and persist

in moving forward with that excitement as they move toward that change.

This approach we contrast with another often used approach to coaching

that we describe as coaching for compliance.

Now, in coaching for compliance, it's a very different feeling.

In coaching for compliance, the coach is trying to help the person being coached

achieve some externally defined standard or objective.

Maybe having them do what you would like them to do better, or more of, or less of.

Very, very different than the coaching with compassion approach, where the intent

is to help that person achieve what it is they want to achieve in their life, right?

We know from our research that to make change stick,

it has to be intentional, right?

We also know that it has to start from that standpoint of articulating that

ideal self and personal vision.

We find that this anchors a person in what we call the positive emotional attractor,

right?

Really thinking about and feeling not only emotionally but

physiologically excited and enthused about that change effort.

This is contrasted again with the negative emotional attractor that individuals

often are placed into when they're coached for compliance.

So for a true effective coach to help a person change,

they have to move gracefully between that positive and negative emotion.

Spending more time focusing on that positive emotional attractor.

Anything else, guys, that you want to add about the approach to coaching?

>> The only thing I would add is that sometimes a person is

living in part of their ideal self.

So part of coaching helps them to maintain it.

>> One of the things that we know is helpful is to apply it to ourselves.

And so the only way to make this real for

you is to help you think about how you have developed in your life to this point.

So we're going to do an exercise, and for the exercise you'll need

either your personal learning journal or pen and paper.

So, if you don't have those right in front of you, go ahead and

put our recording on pause to set yourself up.

So let's dive into the exercise.

I'd like for you to think about, who are the people who have

helped you the most in your whole life, including work?

So think about people who have helped you to learn, and grow, and change.

People who have inspired and motivated you to be the person you are today,

or accomplish goals in your life.

And one thing that's helpful is to think about your life in different stages or

eras.

So let's start from when you were a child and a teenager, maybe up to age 18.

Another stage would be 18 to 24, maybe through college or military service.

Another might be 25 to 35, and

consider ten year increments after that up until the age you are today.

And an easy way to record your reflections would be to create some sort of table,

with some columns.

Beginning on the left hand side, put the era or life stage.

In the next column, put the names or initials of those people who come to mind.

And then in the column to the right of that,

begin to jot some notes down about how those people have helped you.

Go ahead and put the recording on pause to complete the exercise and

we'll see you when you're ready.

Welcome back.

I hope you enjoyed the opportunity to think about people who have had a lot of

meaning in your life.

The next step for the exercise is to analyze possible patterns.

So to do that, look for similarities or

differences among all the people that have come to mind.

When we look across life stages and consider, are there surprises there?

Are there things that maybe you didn't expect in terms of the names and

the ways that they've had an impact on your life?

Guys, do you have any other thoughts about how to make the most of that exercise?

>> Often when people make these reflections,

they notice how the people in the early years of their life who have helped them

the most tend to be family members, parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles.

And as they get older, sometimes you add in teachers or

coaches, early managers, or a spouse or partner, close friends.

So what we're asking is do you see any similarities or

differences within any of the eras and then across them?

What this exercise helps us to do is to begin the process

of diving inside as to our experiences with people who have helped us.

And as Ellen said, this will help us convert the thoughts and

ideas into something that's an emotional reality.

This course builds on the earlier MOOC,

Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence, but doesn't require it.

We've designed it so you could do them in sequence or independently.

We will be covering some of the similar ideas.

But in this MOOC, we'll take them in a different direction, and

much more in depth around the process of coaching and helping.

After all, the earlier MOOC was about leadership, this one is about coaching.

Now with this brief overview, let me also mention the flow of the course.

We're going to be together for about five weeks.

And this first week we're going to be really looking at

how do we go about couching people to inspire or motivate them.

What is it that happens in the coaching process?

And as Melvin talked about earlier, what's the difference between the excitement

of coaching with compassion, versus the feeling of obligation and

often oppression that comes from coaching for compliance?

Next week, we'll go into the physiology and neurology of effective coaching.

And throughout the rest of the course, when we say coaching, we're going to be

talking about effective coaching, not just anybody trying to do it.

The following week we'll look at how do you coach people around their ideal self,

their personal vision, around resonant relationships.

Then, the following week,

we'll look at how do you coach people around their real self.

How they're acting and coming across to others.

Looking at their strengths and

their weaknesses, looking at the balances involved.

Developing a learning plan and starting to think about experimenting and

practicing with some change process.

In the last week of the course,

we'll really talk about how do you establish a culture of coaching.

We'll look for the role of coaching in leadership development,

both inside organizations and in terms of external programs.

We'll look at the roles of peer coaching, and the potential that peer coaching

has to help us expand the impact of this approach to helping others,

motivating, inspiring others throughout an organization.

And then the final module we'll look in search of that coachable moment,

that moment in which a person is ready to learn or change.

We recommend that you download and

use the personal learning journal that we've provided.

That on any of the personal learning assignments, or reflective assignments,

or just even doing the readings or listening to the videos,

you use the personal learning journal as your journal, as your learning log.

As a kind of compilation and a history of the ideas or

thoughts or questions you have as the course unfolds.

We think that if you actually do those assignments, and the personal learning

assignments in the personal learning journal, you get to keep them.

Because once you enter them onto the Coursera platform for a grade or

to be evaluated, unfortunately, you can't retrieve them.

And then we will have a number of readings that you can access for free.

We will have a number of supplemental videos of interviews

with the people whose research we're talking about.

And hopefully, all of this will conspire to enable you to not

just learn about coaching but to become a better coach.

Now, we've been doing this in a face to face workshop here at

Case Western Reserve University for about 12 years.

Three of us have worked quite a bit on it.

And the idea is for us to provide this learning experience that can help somebody

who's never done coaching get over the initial hurdles and

start to build basic foundational skills.

But it's also designed in a way

which can help somebody who is a professional coach get even better.

So we look forward to seeing you in the next module.

[MUSIC]

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