How to Coach Yourself
Be Your Own Head Coach
If you want to fuel your personal and professional growth, coaching can revolutionalise your learning. But the chances of having a professional coach by your side every day is rare, even at the most senior of levels.
Today, thankfully, coaching is weaving itself into the way we work and is now recognised globally as a pivotal tool in enabling professional growth. Learning through insight, gained through reflection, deep questioning, and supportive challenge, it is one of the most personal forms of development.
But whilst most leaders are skilled at using coaching as a tool to develop their teams, it is less common for leaders to apply these skills to coach themselves on a daily basis.
The great news for busy leaders who struggle to find the time for a bite to eat at lunch, is that coaching yourself is straightforward and doesn’t have to consume hours of your day.
In fact you can coach yourself in a few minutes or less.
And whilst you might not push yourself as hard as a professional might (in the same way as we hire personal trainers to really work us out) you can still make big shifts and amplify your growth.
For leaders who want to truly embed coaching into their work and life, using your coaching skills to not just coach your team but also coach yourself will pay dividends.
Has there ever been a better time to be your own head coach and champion?
Think: Many coaching models exist such as GROW, that focus on questioning to drive action. There are many, many questions that you can ask yourself to help stimulate new thinking. Below are just six, simple questions that you can use to coach yourself through almost any situation. Feel free to add more.
What are you trying to do?
What does success really look like?
What is necessary to succeed?
Where are you now in relation to what’s required?
What could you do to bridge the gap?
What will you do?
Listen: In helping leaders become more coach-like, I frequently work with clients to help them be better at listening. Listening is at the heart of understanding and it is a core coaching skill. Not listening just to the words that others say but to their voice, their body language, and energy.
Listening deeply like this is not something that humans are good at. Yet it’s likely that you’re even worse at truly listening to what’s going on inside you.
To be your own coach, you need to listen to you. Think about the issue that you’re trying to solve:
What’s your internal tone of voice like when you think about it?
What’s the story that you’re telling yourself?
What are you doing with your hands, your shoulders and your jaw? Are you tense or relaxed?
Reframe: Professional coaches will help you think about your challenge from different perspectives, ensuring you’ve explored it with open eyes, thoroughly.
Everyone has a natural way of thinking and natural biases. Perhaps you prefer delving into analysis and detail or maybe using data makes you run for the hills and you favour a helicopter view. Maybe your thinking centres on results, or maybe you naturally think about others needs and what matters to your team. If you want to become more aware of your natural style, tools like Everything DiSC for Leaders can help.
What’s your natural thinking perspective?
What do you instinctively shy away from?
What two questions could you regularly ask yourself to help you provoke your own thoughts and think differently? For example. if you are a natural big picture thinker - what does the data say? Or the reverse?
Plan and Do: Sometimes, developing fresh insight is enough. But more often than not, your thinking will stimulate a need to act.
Accountability is a vital aspect of the coaching relationship and regular coaching sessions help keep you on track. But when you coach yourself you take charge of your learning process; and that requires discipline. Remember the strategies you’ve used before to make changes and establish new habits and draw on what works, for you.
Ask yourself:
What exactly do you need to do here?
What’s the best next opportunity to do it?
What will get in the way or make it difficult?
What’s your contingency plan?
Reflect: Learning is a continuous process, as is the path to leadership. And learning happens through a combination of action and reflection. In practical terms, it means learning through what you do.
The challenge is that if you focus purely on ‘doing’ you miss the opportunity for deep learning. When you’re putting actions into practice, you can only fail if you fail to learn from them. As you’re putting your plan into practice, after each action ask yourself these three questions.
What went well?
Why did it go well?
What will you do differently next time?
Manage: In a professional coaching relationship, there is understanding, empathy, and a focus on bringing the best out of the person being coached. There are no egos and no judgment.
We all have internal saboteurs that live in our minds and work against us when we let them. When you coach yourself it’s easy to judge yourself based on what’s working and what isn’t. Think about how you would coach one of your team or peers. Be kind.
Read more about your internal saboteurs here:
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