Guest Post from Phil Hayes - Founder at Management Futures
What it Is
Story Coaching is a one-one, confidential, bespoke service aimed at helping a writer to develop their story, and their writing ability, to its full potential. It is non-advisory in approach and is delivered by trained coaches who are not necessarily creative writers themselves, though they are deeply familiar with creative process and practice. It is time-bound, usually offered in a block of one-hour sessions, and it’s highly goal focussed.
During a session, the coach encourages the writer to offer a description of where they are with their story, and what they want to achieve with the coaching process. Each coaching scenario is unique, and the coach’s discipline is to follow the writer’s agenda rather than imposing their own opinions, views or judgements. Once goals have been established, the coach works in partnership with the writer to explore their thinking, examine their writing approach, develop new ideas, consider options for making progress and, ultimately, create a practical plan for the next stage of their writing.
The coach creates a relationship founded on respect and trust, on deep listening, and on asking potent questions. They manage the session to ensure that time is used optimally, balancing the need for exploratory thought with the need to make tangible progress. In addition to listening and questioning, the coach will offer supportive challenge to the writer and their thinking and will draw on sophisticated coaching tools and models appropriate to each writer’s specific scenarios.
Typical benefits to the writer include:
Increased insight into their own writing process
Improved access to their most creative and productive mindset
Identification and removal of blocks to creativity and progress in their writing
Increased focus on the meaning of their story
Clarity around next steps on their story
Enhanced confidence and conviction in their writing abilities
Why it Works
Story coaching has developed from the flourishing non-directive coaching industry. From modest beginnings, non-directive coaching has established itself as a pre-eminent development tool, used widely in many organisations worldwide. Still growing sharply, the global coaching industry is now worth many billions of pounds. Originally focused on senior executive development in business, coaching has expanded to encompass virtually every sector including, government, the media, elite sport, finance and manufacturing. Along the way it has spawned many niche applications, including coaching for expats, retirees, new parents, women in leadership and numerous other groups.
Non-directive coaching is in high demand because, quite simply, it really works. Research into coaching in organisations shows significant improvements in leadership effectiveness, employee engagement, morale and wellbeing and a range of other topics. At the heart of this success lies coaching’s established models, philosophies and skills.
Most models of coaching have at their heart the same approach:
Identify core issues
Create appropriate goals for coaching
Explore thinking, options and possibilities around the core issue
Make choices and decisions as to action
Create a practical action plan
Most philosophies of coaching contain the following assumptions:
Coaching ‘clients’ are fundamentally resourceful people – even when they might feel blocked or stuck
Each client and each coaching scenario is unique, therefore ‘one size fits all’ approaches and solutions are not optimal
Coaching is a partnership activity between equals, not a ‘doctor/patient’ style of relationship
The agenda for coaching is owned by the person being coached, not by some external authority or expert
The guts of coaching are its focus on identifying practical and sustainable progress and change
Qualified coaches are highly trained in the skills of:
Rapport and partnership building
Deep listening
Summary and paraphrasing
Potent questioning
Goal setting
Supportive challenge
Session management
In addition, coaching has spawned and developed an imposing bank of potent tools, each with proven psychological pedigree, which allow for deep exploration and analysis within the coaching process.
Putting this all together, story coaching works because;
It encourages and facilitates self-discovered learning for the writer, and we know that this kind of learning is far more potent in creating personal development and change than externally delivered learning such as teaching or advice giving.
The relationship fostered in coaching facilitates psychological security for the writer, encouraging them to explore their thinking freely with no need to defend themselves or their writing.
The security and trust inherent in the coaching relationship allows the writer to accept challenge from the coach as something helpful and supportive rather than threatening.
The use of sophisticated creative tools and approaches by the coach, address simultaneously the thinking and feeling functions of the client. Neuroscientific research has shown the use of metaphor actively engages the brain far more than pure intellectual exploration.
The coach’s focus on process – exploring how the writer is thinking rather than the content of their story, ensures the coach does not stray into counterproductive advice-giving and opinionizing. This also means the coach does not have to be an ‘expert’ writer themselves, though in practice some are. Great coaches can coach in virtually any context and most consider themselves to do their best work when they know little about the subject matter themselves. I have thirty years of experience coaching, and in that time have successfully coached diplomats, brain surgeons, TV producers, elite sportspeople and eminent experts in many fields, without claiming to know better than them! Our established non-directive coaching approach is now showing itself to be as effective in the domain of story writing as it has proved everywhere else.
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