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How many times in a week do you get asked for advice?
If you’re half-way good at your job, I’m going to guess that the answer is “frequently”. If you’re quick to offer your advice I’m going to be blunt: you’re not helping.
I’m going to argue that most people who ask for advice are really asking for clarity and for the confidence to make a decision.
And by clarity, I don’t mean clarity about knowing what you think or what you think should happen. I mean clarity in the asker’s own mind.
Advice doesn’t give clarity or the confidence to act
These things are not in our power to bestow on others – they come from within. Clarity and confidence come when new insights emerge, motivating the asker to act from their own conviction. read more…
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
Coaching can be a powerful catalyst for personal and professional growth. The challenge is that there are so many people calling themselves coaches, and probably as many definitions of coaching as there are coaches.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
A colleague and I were working with a group to understand more about their responses to an employee engagement survey. We’d been hired by the management team because we had coached them and they, well yes, trusted us.
So how would you respond?
When it comes to trust words don’t work
I could recite the code of ethics I sign up to as an Accredited Coach. Or I could point out that we wouldn’t last very long in this business if we couldn’t keep what we were told confidential.
I begin with the truth.
“Thank you. That must have taken a bit of courage to say that to us and in front of the group”
Don’t get me wrong, as she had said those words, I feel a sharp pain in my stomach, as if she’s physically punched me. I’m aware my chest is tight and my palms are sweaty.
This person, who I will call Verity, had struck at the heart of who I believed myself to be. As a coach, building and maintaining trust are essential for my work.
What gets left unsaid is more toxic than what is brought into the open. Raising tough issues, especially about negative feelings, takes courage.
As I say those words of thanks I can feel my stress reducing. I now process the thought that something about how we are as coaches and how the group is, has allowed Verity to take a risk and speak out.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
Beth had signed up for coaching because she was leading a transformation project fraught with politics and big egos. Despite her experience and the faith that had been placed in her, she was concerned that she would “drop some of these moving pieces.”
Like a lot of my clients she was afraid she might fail
Today that fear seemed close to the surface. When I asked her what she would like to think through in our session, she seemed startled.
“Well,” she said. “I guess I just want to talk it out loud…if that doesn’t seem too self-indulgent?”
But clients also bring their inner critics with them
I could hear her inner critic loud and clear.
“Self-indulgent?”
Beth told me that she felt that she should just get on with it. She was a master of planning; used to this stage…..etc….etc. And then she was off into the detail of the project.
She really did need to talk this one through.
And it was helpful for me to listen less to the deep content of what she was saying and more to the emotions that lay beneath the words. A pattern began to emerge:
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
My name is Moyra Mackie and I’m a recovering perfectionist.
Even though I know that perfect is not possible, I hear the siren call of perfectionism whenever I’m under pressure. This might be a tight deadline when I’m tempted to research one more fact or fine tune (again) the design of a slide deck or report. Or it might be when I’m facing a stressful situation like negotiating a contract, presenting to a large audience or going to a networking event.
The upside of attempting to be perfect is that I will prepare. Really, really well. The downside is that I will over-work or become paralysed by doubt and fear or hyper critical of myself and others.
Perfectionism is rightly described as a life-stealer
“Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.”
― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
How can you close the gap between the ideal and the reality?
So began an exercise on the last day of my second workshop in year 2 of my Masters in Coaching program.
The tutors took advantage of a suddenly sunny break in the weather and suggested we worked in pairs whilst we walked around the grounds at Ashridge.
This is what I felt – and only half articulated – as my answer to those questions.
Companies are human
For me, organisations are not sets of reporting lines or processes or hierarchies, but groups of people who need to talk to each other.
The quality of those conversations will dictate how motivated, innovative, productive and profitable that organisation is.
“Organisations are interpersonal places and so necessarily arouse those more complex emotional constellations that shadow all interpersonal relations: love and hate, envy and gratitude, shame and guilt, contempt and pride…the emotional choreography each of us weaves, consciously or unconsciously” – David Armstrong, Emotions in Organisations
Trust is the key
I believe the secret to efficient organisations lies in reducing FEAR and increasing TRUST; in improved leadership and open, constructive conversations. read more…
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
I’ve come to believe that we all need to have a dream if we are to make the right choices for ourselves and those we care about. This is what life coach and writer Martha Beck calls Finding Your Own North Star.
Here’s why I think we all need a dream before we can succeed.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
“Coaching and counselling are really for losers”, said a forthright friend of mine the other day.
“I know it’s what you do but I don’t believe in this coaching stuff. If people were just a bit more resilient… I guess if you’re a bit of a loser it might help, but otherwise I don’t believe in it.”
And with friends like that you might think…
But I really didn’t take offence. I’ve been hearing echoes of that statement for a long time.
It’s not lack of budget or sign-off power that is holding them back. It’s the idea that they might have a problem that needs to be fixed, or some trait that needs to changed. read more…
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
Nick Pugliese must have given his mother quite a few sleepless nights. When he graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, with a degree in political science and philosophy, Nick decided he’d like to gain some interesting and challenging work experience.
So he chose a telecoms company in Kabul, Afghanistan.
At college he’d been captain of the football team – or as they say in his hometown of Rochester, NY – “soccer”. So it wasn’t long before Nick started playing the game at weekends with his Afghan colleagues. It was a mental and physical escape from the restrictive, claustrophobic world of the small expat compound.
And then he got offered the chance to play for Ferozi FC, a professional club in the 14-team Kabul Premier League.
Nick had to choose between his $3000 a month job with the telecoms company and the $300 a month wage at Ferozi FC and a life outside the safety of the compound.
Nick chose the life outside
He became the first American player in the Afghan league since the 2002 invasion. read more…
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
“In coaching the client learns and grows through reflecting on their own experiences and intuition via thought-provoking and insightful inquiry from the coach in a trusting and supportive environment.”
In order to be consistently effective, it helps if coaches first go through the same process “reflecting on their own experiences and intuition”
And that is just what I have been doing for the last 12 months; Year 1 of my MSc in Executive Coaching at Ashridge Business School, a program that aims to “develop your ability to respond to, initiate and enable change through the coaching process.”
In addition to attending a series of two-day experiential workshops, I have also been writing a 12,000 word personal reflection journal, answering a series of questions that require me to apply psychological models to specific coaching cases and to my coaching approach.
It’s not abstract, it’s highly personal
The assessors are not looking for evidence of someone who can understand and recite reams of academic theory and research, they want to see how deeply I can inquire into what makes my clients tick and how self-aware I am about my own patterns of behaviour.
Coaching is all about the relationship
Research shows that the most important factor in determining whether coaching is effective or not, is the quality of the relationship between coach and client.
And if this is the case, then it is vitally important that I understand what baggage I bring to the coaching room – what are my triggers, my drivers, my biases?
Effective coaches are always learning and reflecting
“If you do not develop yourself enough to withstand a client’s stress, you default to actions that handle your own discomfort but are not useful to your client.”
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
