October 20, 2012
Coaching an Individual
My sister recently came to me frustrated with her finances. This was the perfect opportunity for me to practice my “Coaching an Individual”. Her problem was that her bank account had been in the red for several months and she struggled to find ways to cut costs so that, she would not end up in the red month after month.
What I did was I began by asking her a series of “Powerful Questions” to get the ball rolling and to get her to start thinking of options that would get her to her goal.
I intended for her to come up with some options and action plan that would work for her and that she would be comfortable with instead of me telling her what she should do.
As I asked more questions her focus area actually started to shift to a different problem she was having. I felt like I was somewhat losing control of the conversation as we were getting away from the original problem and on to another one without coming up with an action plan to resolve the initial problem. Instead of coming up with a clear and concise plan the conversation actually became a therapy session.
What I would do differently is better understand what her real problem is. I would go back to her original problem and take the five ‘Why” approach. By doing this we should be able to get down to the root problem.
I learned that although there may be many problems to tackle. You should stick to solving one problem at a time. Just like the