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Fascinating Results of Study on Managers and Coaching

Coaching has an identity problem in organizational settings. Everyone knows about coaching and may even use the term to describe how they work with people, but few are actually coaching. A new study demonstrates that managers believe they are coaching when they are actually just telling people what to do. Worse, because peers reward their micromanager-as-coach approach, the wrong behaviors are reinforced. The good news is there’s a fairly easy solution to help managers begin to coach and see powerful results. 

While teaching coaching skills for more than a decade I’ve witnessed firsthand the massive shifts in how leaders communicate after receiving a little training. Yet, I was still surprised by

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How To Pass The ICF Coach Knowledge Assessment (CKA)

The Coach Knowledge Assessment is an assessment the International Coach Federation uses to measure coaches’ understanding of the knowledge and skills important in the practice of coaching. If you have good coaching training, with these tips, you should pass the ICF CKA with flying colors! 

Coaching has turned into a $2 billion a year industry. The International Coach Federation (ICF) is the largest coaching association in the world with more than 34,000 members in 145 countries. The ICF

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How to Automate Follow Up With Email for Free

Studies show that attending a good training event will produce about 23% behavioral change. That’s not much change for the amount of time, money, and energy put into these events. The same studies show that if you follow up training with some kind of coaching, average behavioral change increased to 89%. That’s a huge difference. The problem is, we have more trainees than coaches to do the follow up. Rather than throw our hands up and say, “oh well,” let me show you a way to automate follow up for free. 

4 Keys to Follow Up Well

Follow up is essential because of “human nature.” Between procrastination, our lack of confidence in the new skill, and many other things competing for attention it’s easy to put off implementation of what we learned for a less busy time. However, there probably will never be a less busy time!

4 keys to follow up well are:

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How To Ensure Learning From Your Example

Modeling preferred behavior is a powerful way of influencing the people around you. But your example isn’t enough. People usually don’t know why or how you’re doing what you’re doing unless you tell them. Here’s how to ensure learning from your example. 

Our workshop participants tell us that they learn a lot about interactive training by watching the way we lead our workshops. They see us model brevity of teaching, use many different interactive exercises, and facilitate skill practice during the workshop.

We model it. They see it. But in the end, they can’t replicate our training style. Why?

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How To Make Good Action Steps

Good action steps are critical to getting things done. You need to make action steps for yourself and you may need to coach other people to form theirs. Not all action steps are created equal. Here’s how to make good action steps. 

As a professional coach, I know my client will only make progress on their goals if

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Are You Too Busy To Be Successful?

Being busy has become a badge of honor. It’s viewed as a sign of working hard. But too often busy-ness is the result of focusing on the wrong outcomes. Are you too busy to be successful?

We’ve figured out that if we want to feel successful and have others think well of us, we will get busy. Working hard, long hours, with a busy schedule are surely the signs of

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How To Lead Great Video Conference Calls

Video conferencing can be an inexpensive way to gather people from a distance for productive meetings. All too often, however, it can be a frustrating waste of time due to poor planning, technical issues, and poor execution. Here are 10 ways to lead great video conference calls.

To have productive video conferences you must think like Steven Spielberg. Every scene in a Spielberg movie is

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Unlock Every Conversation With Powerful Questions

Coaching skills are useful with everyone we meet, no matter if we have three minutes or an hour. Here’s how to use the five steps of The COACH Model® in daily conversations. 

We have conversations everyday. Most of them are not coaching conversations. They are brief interactions on-the-go. You can build stronger relationships and