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Hey it’s Andrew here from safetyontap.com

One of the questions I get asked a lot, is who is coachable? How can we work out whether I or someone else will get value from coaching?

In this episode I’ll answer those questions.

So, who is coachable? If you went to the shoe store, and you were looking for a particular type of shoe, the next thing you probably think about or ask about is do you have my size? As in, do you have something that fits me?  And, as we know, you can by your 7.5 women’s shoe size, maybe even with a different width than regular shoes.  If you buy that 7.5 from EBay or Amazon or somewhere else online, you might get it home, try it on, and despite the fact that the shoe is your exact size, it still might not fit.

I want you to think about the question of being coachable like this.  I’m going to give you the couple of things that will help you work out whether coaching is a good fit for you or someone in your team.

This is firstly from my perspective as a coach, coaching health and safety people and business leaders is what I do day to day.  But you can equally use this answer to consider how coachable someone else in your organisation is, if you want to be more coach-like in the way you support those people.  I’ll talk more about that in an upcoming episode.

So remember shoe shopping, this is going to be a very good guide, but it’s not going to guarantee a perfect fit every time.  Sometimes it’s only when we put the shoe on that we find out how good a fit it really is.

Let’s get into it this are the attribute who some into my experience is coachable and can derive good value from coaching. I’ve included some of the language and some of the behaviour that I think would go along with this attributes to help you worked out if that’s you or someone who you’re thinking about. The first attribute is curiosity.  A curious person wonders about the limits of what they know, about what they don’t know, and what they might be able to learn.  A curious person is interested in and habitually seeks out new experiences, new relationships, and new information.  Curiosity drives the motivation to explore.  A curious person is open to have their existing viewpoints and paradigms challenged and they welcome that.  A coach will do that.  So the first attribute is curiosity.

The second is being self-reflective .Reflection is the act of looking inwards, to deeply consider what is going on for you, for those around you.  It’s a process of making the unconscious conscious – to surface what is happening in particular situations or decision’s interactions, challenges or successes.  Like in sport, a coach doesn’t play the game on the field with you.  So a coachable person needs to bring their experiences to life in the coaching interaction, when the coach will help work through challenges and enablers to move you towards whatever version of BETTER you have defined.  And self-reflection also enables better perspective taking, where you don’t have a skewed view of yourself for your capabilities, you can see things from other viewpoints too.  So the second point is being self- reflective.

And the third attribute of a coachable person is being accountable.  Accountable for your own decisions, your own situation, your own failings and their successes.  Most importantly, someone who is accountable for their own growth and development – that’s definitely a coachable person.  You aren’t taking accountability for what’s going on than where not going to make much progress and they’ll be evidence for that in your life apart from coaching.

Fourth, a coachable person is human, and knows they are human.  They are fallible, they are inconsistent, they are affected by bias and emotion and don’t always make sense.  They have regrets and feel shame and get things wrong.  This is very human, this is every human.  But a coachable person embraces their humanness, their uniqueness, the fact that there has been no one on this planet like them and never will be again, and in the face of sometimes enormous challenge and setbacks and naysayers, they want to keep going.  They aren’t superhuman, they aren’t perfect, they are just human but importantly, they know it.  So the four things that I think are the attributes of a coachable person, the first is curiosity, the second is being self- reflective, the third is being accountable and the fourth is being human and knowing it.

There might be many other things to describe a person who is coachable – these are mine drawing on my own research and day to day work as a coach.  I get the best results with people who display aspects of all of these attributes. it’s not that you cannot be coachable if you don’t have all of them but the more you have the better results you’re going to get .The interesting thing is that if I had titled this podcast Attributes of a Leader, I could have said exactly the same thing and it would have still made sense. That something you might want to reflect on.

Becoming coachable is a great aim or increasing your coachability, as readiness for coaching and I becoming a better leader are one in the same thing.  I encourage you to get a coach if you don’t have one, I am of course love you to join Safety on Tap Connected so I can be that coach for you, but I am by no means the only option out there.  And I also encourage you to think about coaching as a mode of working with your team and the people that you serve.  I’ve got some great episodes coming up when I share with you more about coaching and becoming more coach-like.

 

If you haven’t already, check out safetyontap.com for all our previous episodes, and bucketloads of downloads like my handwritten notes of each podcast interview, transcripts, frameworks, worksheets and more.  The show notes for this episode are at safetyontap.com/ep082.  We’ve also got info there about how you can join Safety on Tap Connected, or maybe come along to one of our live events in the near future.  It’s all at safetyontap.com

Until next time, what’s the one thing you’ll do to take positive, effective and rewarding action to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way? See ya!

Thanks for listening in. If you like what you hear, I’d love to hear a review and your rating on iTunes or feel free to leave a comment in the show notes. Let me know what you’re thinking at SafetyOnTap.com. Until next week. I hope you take positive, effective and rewarding action to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. See you!

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If you want to accelerate your growth, join Safety on Tap Connected to get me as a coach, learn with a community of amazing peers and educational content you won’t find anywhere else.

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