By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you become a more effective coach. Reading time: 3:19.

“Are you watching your speed…we are,” flashed the digital sign display overhead. The motorist immediately checked her speedometer and instinctively eased up on the accelerator.

That real-time feedback leading to a practiced and well-defined behavioral change is what coaching is all about. Think of an executive coach as your personal 24/7 feedback digital sign display.

Flashing your feedback in real time, your personal or executive coach gives you real-time analysis of what you are doing so that you can make real-time changes to how you are doing it and why.

But too many executives, ensconced in their comfortable corporate suites, think they don’t have the patience or the time to put up with a real-world coach dealing with real issues. In real time.

Beyond the Corporate Car Wash

Those insulated-and isolated- executives would rather spend a few days a year at an Executive Retreat at a swanky resort listening to other smart, creative, intriguing people like themselves share leadership development ideas.

Of course that spray and pray it sticks -the Corporate Car Wash Model of leadership development - is futile. A few minutes after getting back on the open road (on the job) your car (your job) is covered with mud. Again

With so much more congestion on the roads, so many more complex issues to contend with there is a more recognized need to personalize leadership development and executive coaching with a more professional, a more hands-on polish of hand-rubbing new ideas until they shine from within.

That’s what coaches do . They virtually hand-rub the Genie out of your bottle.

Coaches bring out the best in you.

Coaches embrace poet William Butler Yeats notion that education -a.k.a. coaching-has more to do with lighting a fire not filling a pail. Light that fire to bake on a spectacular finish on the leader.

You Involve Me And I Learn

Entering a car wash, you spray yourself with facts. You memorize. Anybody and Everybody can do it.

But coaching is act in mesmerizing not memorizing. Mesmerizing coaches engage others with a flair for creative productivity that continually adapts to ever-changing conditions.

Coaching is particularly designed for some one. Training is generally designed for anyone.

Coaching is inductive: a process of illumination.Training is deductive: a process of elimination .

Coaching is personal, dynamic and responsive. Training is perfunctory, static and stable.

Coaching provides on going feedback on adapting to the changing road ahead. Meanwhlile, training pays homage to the masses, seeking clarity on the posted rules of the road.

Coaches know that success in today’s ever-changing marketplace is based on honing conceptual skills that wrests meaning from data; forges reality in the crucible of multiple points of view; encourages individual creativity and exploration and engages and stimulates individual participation and involvement. As Ben Franklin and Confucius before him noted:

You tell me and I forget.
You teach me and I remember.
You involve me and I learn

Involve yourself with a leadership coach flashing real time feedback to you so that you can become an even more effective driver. No matter how rugged the weather. No matter how serpentine turns like ahead on your road ahead.

And no matter how deep that genie is buried inside of you.

Today’s ImproveMINT

Engage personally in coaching others to keep your leadership thinking in mint condition.

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