To Use Coaching Models or Not

The Coaching Crowd® Podcast with Jo Wheatley & Zoe Hawkins

Jo Wheatley and Zoe Hawkins explore the evolving role of coaching models in professional practice, examining when frameworks support versus hinder client conversations.

Key takeaways

• Jo Wheatley describes frameworks as 'bumper lanes' for novice coaches, helping them contain unstructured client streams and make confident conversational decisions.
• Zoe Hawkins explains that models are not neutral; they privilege specific areas of focus (like emotions) and require coaches to take responsibility for where attention is directed.

Main topics

• Coaching frameworks and semi-structures
• Coach maturity and mastery development

Notable quotes

"Frameworks for me are really like guide wires. They're like if you go bowling and you've got the bumper lanes up, they're like the bumper lanes."

Conclusion

The episode offers practical guidance for coaches at all career stages,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) The Coaching Crowd podcast is for compassionate, courageous leaders, HR professionals and high achievers. Speaker 1 (0:09) People who are passionate about helping others to find alignment in their lives through coaching and who are thinking of training and developing as a coach. Speaker 2 (0:20) Hello and welcome to the Coaching Crowd podcast with me, Jo Wheatley, and my friend and co Speaker 1 (0:25) -host Zoe Hawkins. Hi, everybody. We're here again this week to talk to you about coaching models and whether to use them or not or when to use them or not and have a discussion around the times when sometimes coaches can feel a bit stuck using models and it can sometimes raise more questions around whether frameworks are helpful or unhelpful when it comes to coaching clients. So we're going to have some discussion around some of our experiences using coaching frameworks and models and how that shows up in practice and in coaching training as well. Yeah, we're going to talk Speaker 2 (0:57) about both perspectives because we are coaches ourselves, we're master accredited coaches. We also obviously run In Good Company, which is a world leading coaching education provider. We're exploring at what point does using a coaching model support the conversation and at what point might it get in the way of actually coaching. So we're exploring in a way that tension between the usefulness of structure or semi-structure and the journey that coaches go on through their careers towards mastery. Speaker 1 (1:29) And I do think some of this comes down to things we've talked about before on the podcast around coach maturity and that's not around. age and length of service and things like that, but more around your coaching style and how you coach. So I think when you are starting out in coaching, frameworks can be really, really helpful. And they can be helpful because it can be hard to know where to go in a coaching conversation. You know, when a client arrives at a session, rarely will they arrive with a nice... tidy goal for you to start working on. They arrive often with their thoughts and reflections of what may have been happening that week or where they want to focus the session. So typically when I meet with my clients and say, hey, how's it going? What would you like to focus on today? I'll get a stream of consciousness. Oh, well, you know, this happened last week and I've been thinking about this and I've got this big project coming up and, you know, I've just been feeling really down and, and, and, and, and, and, and you're like. So if you don't have a framework, some coaches would try and work with all of that in one conversation. And so frameworks for me are really like guide wires. They're like, if you go bowling and you've got the bumper lanes up, they're like the bumper lanes, the frameworks. They help you to make decisions about what to offer to your client, where to contain a conversation, where to expand it. And so when you're starting out, and even as a master coach, frameworks, are used, but they're probably used in a slightly more flexible and different way. So I think that's a good starting place, certainly where my mind's taking me anyway. There are Speaker 2 (3:04) so many different coaching models out there, obvious ones like Grow Clear, Oscar. I mean, we've got so many different, what we would call semi-structures for coaching conversations. So we never say, do this from the start to the end, hold your client within that. It's about learning what are the questions? Why are the questions here? you know, in this model? How might this model be useful? What do you do when actually, you know, lots of clients will use them to bounce off and they may then take the conversation in their own way? I think for us in terms of educating coaches, models are really great in the sense that they help to put questions in useful questions into a context because this I mean endless questions as coaches that we could ask our clients and when you're learning how to be a coach most coaches are like what questions should I ask when what's the most powerful useful question I can ask here and they worry about that so what models can do is provide that semi-structured some people might think of it as like providing a map and they can help to support coaches in training to build their confidence, to be able to see like, what sort of responses do I get when I ask this question? And what I mean by that is, where do clients tend to go in their mind or in their body? When I ask these different questions, it's Speaker 1 (4:26) a Speaker 2 (4:26) way of them learning about the purpose of asking questions. Speaker 1 (4:30) I Speaker 2 (4:31) still use models in my coaching practice, you Speaker 1 (4:34) know, so I use them. as a sort of in the back of my mind. So if I'm in a coaching conversation, I'm finding that conversation challenging for whatever reason. The first thing