Coaching the Uncoachable June 9, 2007
As someone who regularly coaches professionally I read with interest Seth Godin’s discussion on coaching the uncoachable. While I agree with his point, one of the main presuppositions in the post is just plain wrong.
He describes some of the symptoms of uncoachability and almost all of them imply that coaching is about the coach, when in facts it’s really about the person being coached. These symptoms also point to failures within the relationship between the coach and coachee.
* Challenging the credentials of the coach
This is a requirement. Of course, the challenge should be in regards to understanding how the coach can help your performance, not as a methods of discrediting their suggestions.
* Announcing that you’re being unfairly singled out
If a coach offers you a suggestion, you are being singled out. The coach (we hope) is professional enough to see in your behaviour things that can be improved or modified. It makes very little sense for the coach to single someone else out for your mistake.
* Pointing out, angrily, that the last few times, the coach was wrong
Yep, the coach may have been wrong in the past, and may be wrong now. It’s not about the coach, it’s about you.
* Identifying others who have succeeded without ever being coached
Yep. Those other people are not you. If your results are as good, or better than the person you identify, then we can discuss this further.
* Resisting a path merely because it was one identified by a coach
This is just ridiculous behaviour. The coach is there for your benefit, your improvement or the benefit of your team. If you want to act like a two year old child, is it any wonder that the coach begins to treat you like one. This, of course, just increases the difficulty and tension felt by both parties. Luckily, this behaviour is very easy to deal with by a competent coach.
Does this mean you roll over and do whatever the coach says? Of course not. It does mean you have to stop treating the coach like a parent and more like a peer. While this might cause different conflicts with your coach for a time, a professional coach will (should!) be able to modify their own behaviour to match.
What most people don’t know about Powerpoint presentations August 1, 2006
Microsoft’s Powerpoint is a very simple product. It does the job for what it is designed quite well. Unfortunately most people don’t know how to use it.
And the failure is not because people don’t read the Powerpoint manual. The issue is not about Powerpoint at all, but about the presenter. As part of the work I do in training presenters I have noticed a relationship between the comfort a speaker has on stage and the quality of the Powerpoint presentation.
You’ll notice the best presenters only sometimes use powerpoint, and when they do it is a single line of text, or a picture. They use it very specifically and very simply. The worst presenters have their entire speech in 8 point so everyone ‘can’ read it. The best presenters know Powerpoint is there to assist the presentation and audience’s understanding, the worst presenters sometimes think that a flashy powerpoint will distract the audience’s attention from their quivering voice.
When creating a Powerpoint presentation there are several things to keep in mind:
- The slides go with your words. Produce your slides when you know what you are going to say.
- A picture is worth a thousand words.
- The slides are not there to be understandable without your speech but there to represent the idea you’re talking about.
- You are the reason the audience is listening.
- Use huge fonts. Readable from the moon. At least 30 point.
- The slides are there for your audience, not for you.
- Keep it simple - each slide should be understandable within 5 seconds.
For some more information, Guy Kawasaki talks about this specifically and has some examples. There is the always very useful www.presentationzen.com. And you can download some other examples from Tom Peters.
Technorati Tags: Business, Communication, Presenting, Powerpoint, Storytelling, Training
To Er in speech June 21, 2006
There is unfortunately a common occurrence that to me is like nails being dragged down a blackboard.
It’s the ‘um’ and ‘er’ that some people put into gaps in their speech.
These are sounds added in between words and sentences to fill the silence and tell listeners that the speaker is still speaking. In a normal two way conversation, the people having the conversation take turns to speak. Like a tennis match these turns go back and forth. The listener knows when to speak next, when the ‘ball is in their court’, by waiting for the speaker to be silent. So if the speaker does not want to give up their turn, they add in some form of filler noise. An ‘um’ or ‘err’.
Of course, when someone is presenting there is no need for the filler noises as there is an expectation from everyone that the speaker is not having a back and forth conversation. Yet I’ve seen CEO’s of multi-national companies presenting to a camera and have two or three of these noises in every sentence. It was excruciating for me to watch.
The interesting thing about these filler noises is that they are not needed. Not only not needed when speaking to an audience, but not even needed when speaking one on one. You can keep silent within a conversation, and still hold the speaker position. The most obvious, overt example of this is when the speaker holds up their hand like a stop sign.
You can hold the attention of all listeners with entirely non-verbal methods. Take a look a Tony Blair and Bill Clinton during interviews for examples of this. Watch their behaviour, not what they are saying. Listen to the timing and rhythm and become aware of the silence that they deliberately allow into the speeches.
There are many things that you can do to first stop the habit of ‘um’ and second learning how to keep attention. To start, consciously slow down your rate of speech a little allowing you to listen to your own words and enable you to self edit what you say. And secondly, play with how much you can slow down your speaking and extend the silence without others commenting…
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Persuasion, Presenting
Begin at the end May 25, 2006
So there I was, watching someone be taught a new Aikido movement. I have learnt it myself, about 15 times now, so I forget what I learnt before and took careful notice to learn even more. My attention was drawn, not to the movement, but to how the person I was watching learnt it.
All movements can be broken down into component parts. Step 1, step 2, step 3 etc. Depending on how new you are to the skill, the smaller the steps are. The more skill you have, the larger the steps become. So what used to be bending your arm at the elbow, opening hand, pushing hand forward, adjusting distance, closing fingers, opening fingers, dropping hand is now one automatic movement of shaking someone’s hand.
So this fellow was having particular difficulty with the movement. He would perform steps 1 through 5, but get step 2 wrong. He would not notice his mistake until step 5. Repeating the movement, he would then still error on step two, but make changes to step 4 only to be more confused at step 5.
When you want to change the course of a river, you don’t start at the top, you start where it meets the ocean, dig the channel you want, then at the last moment break the old banks and redirect the river. You offer the river an easier path, rather than fighting it as you dig franticly in front of the oncoming wave.
I’ve experienced this many many times; Being confounded by a problem that I myself created by screwing up a step long before. This is one of the reasons I like to learn and teach things backwards. Starting with the end, and working back. So if I am teaching you to count to 10, I teach you 10. Then 9, 10. Then 8, 9, 10. Then 7, 8, 9, 10. Etc. Each time I teach a new topic (number), it flows into what you already know. So the more we learn, the better you get at everything you’ve learned before.
Yeah, it’s a little different than most of us would have been taught. It takes a little more planning and thought. And a fair amount of trust as you know where the end is, but no where to ‘hang’ that knowledge (which is another direct benefit). So if you teach others, offer advice, or just talk about a subject, how would you restructure your behaviour to teach it backwards?
Technorati Tags: Change, Learning, Psychology, Training