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Coaching in Context
10 Plays1 year ago
Regardless of where we go, we coach the person...
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Transcript
The Dilemma of Titles: What's in a Name?
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Welcome to Prime Space, a Prime Coaching Academy podcast with your host, Elias Scultori.
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And hello, my friends.
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Today, I am going to start with a question, a question for you.
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How do you call yourself?
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What is the title that you put after your name?
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Leadership coach, executive coach, performance coach, career coach, life coach, business coach, transition coach, ADHD coach, holistic coach, dating coach, health coach, success coach, communication coach, team coach.
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So many labels out there.
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What do you choose?
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What is your choice right there?
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What are you calling yourself these days?
Elias's Personal Journey with Titles
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I used to call myself an executive and leadership coach.
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It sounded very...
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Very professional.
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And I used that term for many years.
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Perhaps you can even find this online and somewhere that I am.
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Executive and leadership coach or leadership and executive coach.
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Nowadays, if you go to my LinkedIn profile, you're going to see that I simply call myself a master certified coach, which is exactly what I do.
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It's exactly who I am.
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And I choose to use this title, Master Certified Coach, as a symbol of my commitment, of the effort that I have made to arrive at this place in my coaching career, and my commitment to the standards and to the ethics of our profession.
Balancing Professional and Social Contexts
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My commitment to being a coach, first of all.
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And I have to say that sometimes when I'm still in a social setting and someone out of the blue asks me, you know, what do I do?
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I perhaps right in that context I use, you know, I say that I am an executive coach.
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Because to this day, most people still don't quite understand the concept of coaching as a profession.
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So to make it easy for the other person, I put the executive in front so that it triggers some curiosity and then we can have a better conversation and blah, blah, blah.
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But I firmly believe myself in LinkedIn as a professional setting or when I go into a professional setting, I will call myself a master certified coach.
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And I do this because coaching is my primary tool.
The Core of Coaching: Individual Focus
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My job is
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is to be the best coach that I can be.
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That's my commitment.
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I say this because regardless of where we go, regardless of our context, regardless of the population we serve, we coach the person, not the context.
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The ICF is very clear and it's beautiful, the invitation that the ICF has for us to be very mindful of context.
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Because it's not our clients alone, right?
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There is a whole story.
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There is a whole environment around that person.
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that that person is interacting with.
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So being mindful of context is imperative for the coaching process.
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But it's very dangerous for us to be distracted by the context and forget the human being.
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The context is important, but the context is the backdrop for the person.
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And I say this because
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I see a lot of coaching organizations, sometimes coach training programs, sometimes the ICF.
Trends and the Human Connection in Coaching
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We get so distracted by the context and providing tools for the context and what is needed.
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And then there are the coaching trends that come and go.
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And when I started, it was like group coaching.
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Group coaching was everything when I started.
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And then...
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The assessments, it's so funny.
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The assessments is the funniest thing because every couple of years there is the big assessment that this is excellent, right?
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I used to be Myers-Briggs.
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I'm a Myers-Briggs practitioner.
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And then it became DISC, and then it was Enneagram.
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It comes one day, and then it is Hogan, and then Strength Finder, and 360s.
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Every time there is something that comes up.
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And they are wonderful.
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I learned so much when I did my Myers-Briggs training.
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I learned so much and it's still there.
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It still shows up once in a while.
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And then there is team coaching and everybody needs to have certification in team coaching.
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And then there is AI.
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Now the big thing is AI.
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What's AI going to do with coaching?
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And it's all wonderful.
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And I'm super excited about AI.
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Right.
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what AI is gonna bring to the coaching industry.
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I'm super curious of the development of this particular tool.
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And this is all wonderful.
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However, at the end of the day, I'm a person and my client is another human being.
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And my job is to connect heart to heart to that person, regardless of where they are.
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Remember, coaching is a disruptor.
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I keep saying this over and over again.
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Coaching came to be as a cry for a need.
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For the longest time since the Industrial Revolution, we have been treating our employees, we have been treating each other, especially professionally, as little machines.
Coaching as a Humanizing Force
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And the result of this is the lack of engagement at work, right?
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Report after report, it says three quarters of the workforce around the world are
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including here in the United States, Europe, Asia, everywhere, more than three-quarters of the workforce is disengaged.
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But it's not just in the workforce.
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Like the epidemic of loneliness happening in the world, dissatisfaction, lack of fulfillment is everywhere because we keep putting the shoulds and the expectations so hard on each other.
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And coaching came as like, we can't do this anymore.
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We need to bring humanity into our relationships.
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Right.
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We need to treat our employees, we need to treat our co-workers and bring humanity back.
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And it's funny because here is this tool that the purpose of the tool at the core is to bring humanity and we try to keep pushing it into the corporate lingo.
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We start trying to measure it through the same tools that we were doing before.
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And I always feel like we are like this children's toy that you have to put the shapes in their specific holes.
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So we try to keep pushing this triangle into a circle.
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I feel this very tangibly in our industry.
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It doesn't fit.
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That's not the purpose.
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Our purpose is to look at the humanity of that.
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My goal, my expertise is not in leadership.
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My expertise is not in being an executive.
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My expertise is not in performance, in career, in business, in transition, in ADHD, in living a holistic life, in dating, in health.
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My expertise is not in success, in communication, or even in teams.
Beyond Labels: The Heart of Coaching
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My expertise is in coaching.
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Regardless of the context,
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What we as human beings, every single human being on the face of this planet wants is to be seen.
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When I go and I start working with this big shot executive in a big farm,
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Or if I am working with a mom that is struggling with their kids and family life, the labels are behind the scenes.
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It's not that they are forgotten.
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But the in the forefront is the person.
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I don't care about who they are, how many years of experience, how many PhDs they have on their walls.
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The most important thing for me is the humanity of this person.
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I had a conversation not too long ago with this group of coaches and they wanted to have a mastermind group of coaches talking about executive coaching.
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And wonderful, wonderful initiative.
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But I heard one of the, in the conversation, one of the coaches saying, and actually a very experienced coach saying,
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Yeah, executives, executives, they don't need this ICF stuff.
The Value of Human Connection in Executive Coaching
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That's not what they want.
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And that broke my heart, right, to see this very experienced coach say something like this, because in my experience, this is exactly what executives want.
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They know their job.
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They know their job better than I do.
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And what they want is someone to stop in front of them and listen to them and pay attention to them and support them into this reflective practice and to pay attention to who they are.
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What they want is someone that is going to meet them halfway in their humanity.
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And this is what we as coaches, this is what our training is.
Commitment to Excellence in Coaching
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Our training is to be the best coaches that we can be.
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Our tool is coaching.
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And let's pay attention because oftentimes we use these labels that we put before coaching and
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As a little crutch, what's truly happening there is that we're still a little insecure about the value of coaching, of the power of coaching.
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And therefore, we are unable or have forgotten that.
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to embody that aspect of coaching, embody the coaching mindset.
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So then we need that little crutch.
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We need that little label so that we can feel a little bit more empowered to be in front of our clients.
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So, yes, let's pay attention to the trends.
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Let's pay attention to the labels.
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Let's pay attention to the tools that we can gather.
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These are all wonderful.
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But let's never forget that our commitment is to being the best coach that we can be.
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And of course, it's not necessarily a plug here, but that's one of the things that Amy and I are so proud of our program.
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We teach coaching.
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That's the focus.
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And I hope that you will continue your commitment also to being the best coach that you can be because that is what your client wants.
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Even if they don't know yet.
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That's what they are looking for.
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That's what every human being in this world is looking for.
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So there you have.
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Thank you so much for listening and being here and paying attention to these thoughts and ideas.
Engaging the Audience: Subscribe and Share
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Don't forget to subscribe.
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Don't forget to visit our YouTube channel and see all of the videos that we have over there.
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And let me know what your thoughts are.
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Reach out and let me know if you have anything that you want me to cover in these conversations.
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Have a wonderful week, everybody.
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And I will talk to you next time.
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Take care.