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People often ask me “What do you do?”
I usually say that I work with individuals and teams to help them tackle challenges, develop strengths and enable them to develop and grow.
Examples of how I help clients improve their personal or team performance include:
Over the years I have found that a combination of training, mentoring and coaching has a dramatic effect on performance, as illustrated in some of my blog posts.
You may also like to watch this short video in which I briefly explain what working with a leadership coach involves and to read about other aspects of coaching.
Potential clients usually want to know how working with a coach will help them.
The answer often depends on what someone is trying to tackle in life – although it’s always worth asking “How do you know that you don’t need to work with a coach?”
After receiving a brief from the client or their employer, I sit down with them and complete an assessment to help us identify exactly what we need to work on.
In my experience, clients usually know they have an issue with improving their performance, even though they may struggle to define or understand it.
And that, right there, is the power of coaching: it helps you unlock your thoughts, your potential and enables you focus on what you really want to achieve.
Although coaching uses many models, at its heart it essentially revolves around a professional listening to a client and then asking them a series of thought-provoking questions that help them gain insight into the way they think.
The idea is that, if you understand the way you think and the way you appreciate the world, then you can take action to help you change the way you think and to achieve what you want. You could say reframe or improve their mindset.
I can help you address issues such as:
Much of my work involves talking with clients and helping them understand and then to verbalise their thoughts and issues, so they can define a problem.
Once a problem is defined, we can move forward with a coaching intervention and, as this brief video highlights, the problem a client thinks they have isn’t always what needs to be addressed.
My approach to coaching is to deploy a coaching intervention, which can take anything from working with someone for an hour or two to meeting with them for a few hours once a month for between four and six months.
Coaching should be a finite process because, once the client has solved their problem, my work is done. However, it is quite normal to work on a succession of issues, as solving one issue can lead to another, which can then unlock another …
I work with people to:
Working with teams is of course more complicated, as it requires working with individuals to identify skill or knowledge gaps, followed by assessment or facilitation to understand team dynamics. This process creates a platform for group working, to build the team and hone their effectiveness.
I have had much success with coaching clients over the years, as you can see on my testimonials page and in these examples of how coaching has helped two of my clients address issues around decision-making and leadership:
Client 1.
Someone who’d recently been on a graduate employment programme asked for my help in improving his decision-making.
Through the process it quickly became apparent that attitude to opportunity cost was an issue that was clouding his thinking; he was afraid to choose one option over another because he feared he might miss out on something (an example of FOMO – Fear of Missing Out).
We therefore spent some time enabling him to appreciate that decision-making has to be completed based on available information. You have to appraise situations based on the information you have got and approach things by determining benefits and consequences and then deciding what would be the best decision.
Sometimes you might take a short-term view, sometimes a long-term view.
Although this is quite a basic issue, if you are a natural or prolific procrastinator then you need to appreciate what’s holding you back and improve your thinking towards information that is needed to make decisions – without becoming reckless in your attitude to assessing risks.
Client 2
An established junior doctor approached me, so she could have some thinking time to help her prepare for transitioning into her first consultant role.
This was an interesting assignment, as the client was moving into a different Health Trust, different medical environment and would be managing people for the first time.
We spent some quality time helping her think about what would be expected of her, how she thought she should “show up” for the role and also what behaviour traits and practices she could adopt to help her be more productive.
By challenging some of her perceptions towards personal leadership and reflecting on what she had experienced as good leadership and decision-making from others, she was able to frame some new thinking about what she wanted to achieve as a leader and what leadership style she wished to adopt.
Coaching provided a safe space for her to develop new approaches and to explore her thinking around different leadership styles.
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Insight Leadership Solutions: Working with professionals, leaders and business owners across North Wales, Mid-Wales, Shropshire, Cheshire, Wirral, Manchester and Liverpool to improve effectiveness and increase profitability.
Cilcoed
Chirk
Wrexham
LL14 5BX
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