Coaching

The word 'coaching' is bandied around a lot these days, often by people who are unclear as to what it means. Coaching certainly appears to be a growth industry, judging by the number of senior executives who use a coach, not to mention the growth in 'life coaching', whatever that is.

Perhaps the key difference between coaching and training is that whereas in training much of the input comes from the trainer, who is attempting to transfer knowledge or skills to the trainee, coaching is about leading the person being coached to new insights about themselves and getting them to change behaviour which may be blocking their progress.

At Richard Lewis Communications, coaching focuses specifically on the area of persuasive communication, and may be more accurately described as a blend between coaching and highly-tailored training.

Everyone is an individual, but senior executives and politicians are often more individual than most! They can have powerfully distinct personalities which require sensitive handling. Their needs can be highly specialised. One thing they tend to have in common is that they are passionate about personal development, and it is probably that thirst for learning that got them where they are in the first place. Some examples of clients that our coaches/trainers have worked with include:

• A CEO whose true personality was not coming out on webcasts. We worked with him together with an expert on method acting and results were noticed by staff who had no idea he was being coached.

• A senior executive, recruited for his interpersonal skills, who realised during sessions with us that he had tried to mimic the rational, logical style of the board to convince them – when they had hired him precisely because he was different.

• A world-renowned politician whose messages had been diluted through over-zealous voice training, and who needed to be made less self-conscious again.

• A CEO who needed to speak about the future and hypothesise with a greater degree of subtlety, with whom we worked closely on grammatical form and function in these key areas.

• A senior executive who needed to convey messages more effectively across national and organisational cultural divides.

Often, our role is to coax clients into thinking more clearly. To take them out of the sea of complexity in which they live and consider what they really want to get across – to structure it; to consider the emotional sub-text and to take their listeners’ needs into account more fully.

The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, believed that clarity of thought was essential in order to avoid bad decisions. And it is the process of getting the right things agreed to and done that is at the heart of our approach to communication at this level.

For more information about how we can help you, please email us at coaching@rlcglobal.com

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