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Use Our G.R.O.W Model to Coach Your People with Options
Today’s topic, You Need to Coach Your People Part 2. Learn How to Coach Your People with the 4 Steps of the G.R.O.W. Model – Part #2: Reality. Coach your people with Options – Step 3. Use your time working from home to become the very best version of yourself. This is a Virtual Classroom of 20-minutes, followed by a 10-minute Q&A.
You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Good afternoon everyone. Little bit early, just a minute to go. Just waiting for the next people to come in and then we are gonna get cracking. Got some wonderful mindset shifts to set. Share today around the option section of the grow coaching model. Make sure everyone’s setting up nicely drinks ready.
Nathan Simmonds:
Again, just making sure any mobile phones, any devices, any social media distractions that you’ve got. Make sure your phones are on flight mode for the duration. Maximize the attention that you can give to this and to yourself and maximize the investment that you’re gonna make in yourselves with this. Okay, super important. The only investment that is guaranteed is the one that you make in yourself.
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely a hundred percent. And that’s not the interest Return on that investment on yourself is much bigger than that. So we’re gonna give it 30 more seconds just to see who shows today. And then we are gonna get on with the options section of the grow coaching model. Really help shift some of the mindset and elements around this.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s gonna be good, excited to be delivering this. Might have to adjust the angle of the laptop so we can cover everything. Let’s go, let’s do this. Welcome to another sticky learning lunchtime session, another micro learning 20 minute Micro learning. Today is all around the options section of the Grow Coaching model. I’m sure you all know by now those that have met me before. My name is Nathan Simmons.
Nathan Simmonds:
I’m the senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM Making Business matter, the Homer Sticky Learning and the provider of leadership development and soft skills to the grocery and manufacturing industry. Now these sessions are all about giving you the additional tools, mindset shifts so that Ryan, while you are in, um, physical distancing and in in lockdown and preparing to go to work, it will give you some of those extra tools that are gonna help you go back with and be an absolute screaming success.
Nathan Simmonds:
And take whatever it is you’re doing right now and take it even further. So today we are looking at the O in Grow and as it’s bla blazoned across your screen, you all know what this already means. It stands for options. What does this mean to you personally? When we’re thinking about the option section of the grow coaching model? What does this actually mean to you? Open question. You can give me the answers in the question box or the chat box. What does options mean to you?
Nathan Simmonds:
Let’s see what your thinking is. Where your thinking is brainstorming and generating possible solutions and pathways towards attaining goals. Brilliant choices, fantastic. It’s the one thing that we always have. Even if we think we don’t, we always have a choice, primarily over how we choose to respond to a situation. Great start. So we’ve got quite a nice compact, um, group today. So there’s plenty of room to ask questions and, and get involved. It is about the options.
Nathan Simmonds:
The thing that often happens, and the first point I want to cover in this is when we are coachable, when we are used to the coaching model, when we’re leading people or being a leader and we’re working through this model, what we find is as we spend our time up in this section here in the goal and the reality and we are asking more questions in this space, you’ll find that as you are thinking about where you’ve come from, where you are going to, what you are doing, you’ll find that you’ll start already coming up with some solutions and options.
Nathan Simmonds:
You’ll find that your brain is already starting to run on a little bit. And when we’re doing the coaching, it’s very easy as the coach to find that. You go, oh, so what is it you’d like to achieve? Oh, that’s fantastic. Where, what have you done so far? Oh, brilliant. So you’ve done this and you’ve done that and done that. Well, what’s next?
Nathan Simmonds:
And we find ourselves as the human, as just being compelled to move forward and miss some of the great details up here because we want to get to the solutions, we want to get to the actions that are gonna be taken. We want to, and it’s a very masculine trait to get to the point and get closure on the conversation and know that people are doing what they need to be doing.
Nathan Simmonds:
So 0.1 is hold back, spend time in your goal and reality. When we’re talking about listening skills in coaching, ’cause it’s one of the key things around coaching, leadership, mental health, all of these elements. How much time does a coach normally spend listening in comparison to speaking? Let me know what you think the answers are. What percentage of your time as a coach is spent listening over talking? First answer in any more for anymore. What other answers do we have coming in? Before I start sharing these, what percentage of your time is spent as a coach or a leader listening in comparison to giving the or, um, to asking questions?
Nathan Simmonds:
Good mixture of responses. Here we’ve got 75%, we’ve got 45%. Um, reality kind of someone’s saying, you know, ideally it should be kinda 66%, but more often than not, it is 33% When you’re doing the listening and the talking as a coach, ideally we aim for the 80 20 rule PERS law of distribution. 80% of our time is spent listening to the person that’s in front of us and 20% asking questions.
Nathan Simmonds:
Now there’s a similar distribution when we’re working in this space, when we’re focusing on our goal and reality on our options and tomorrow’s way forward, we want spend probably about 80% of our time focusing on the goal and the reality because the more clarity that someone has on where they’re going, that definition of destination and the more understanding through that educated reflection, the easier it is to come up with new ideas to help the individual move forward or for them to help themselves move forward.
Nathan Simmonds:
So we spend the majority of our time there getting that clarity so we know where we’re going, we know where we are. The analogy when I talked about this yesterday was a around sat nav. And we understand that there’s two pieces of information that you need in order to get where you are going, the postcode of the destination and the postcode of where you are.
Nathan Simmonds:
But the same analogy applies when we want to go go. So when we want to get somewhere, when do we put the postcode in? When do we put the destination where we’re going? Do we do it when we’re getting into the car or do we do it when we’re already driving down the road? And I know technology is moving on a little bit.
Nathan Simmonds:
When we understand where we are going, we already know where the destination is before we get in the vehicle. We understand where we are because we’ve woken up and we’re going there and exactly that. We do it at the start of the journey. Why? Primarily because it’s safe.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s not okay to be using your mobile phone while you are driving and trying to put in a postcode or trying to work out where you’re going or the best route when you are already doing 60 miles an hour. And this is the same with this section here and moving into options. If you are trying to do that and you are already running ahead, you are missing the point. And actually you could potentially be going in the wrong direction.
Nathan Simmonds:
How many people here in this group have already done this? You’ve started a journey, suddenly realize you’re going in the wrong direction or thought you were going the best way before you put the address into the, uh, into your sat nav and suddenly realize you had to do a u-turn or added 15 minutes to your journey. Yes or no? How many people have done this? I know I have guilty.
Nathan Simmonds:
Yeah, not me, but that was someone else saying guilty. Yeah, someone says, whoever says no is a liar. We’ve all done it. We start to run ahead. And it’s the same in our coaching. So if we learn to hold ourselves back and get this definition, then we can start moving ourselves forward. What you’ll also find
Nathan Simmonds:
As you start doing this, the more depth you get here, the more understanding people have of what they’ve tried, what they’ve tested, where they’ve failed, what they’ve learned, uh, in relation to where they’re going. You’ll come up with more than one option and you absolutely have to King Gardner, and I think some of you already know that I’m a king gardener, but you go all the way back to the Bible and they talked about the.
Nathan Simmonds:
I forget the full story, but you know, he, he the man who was casting a seed and sometimes they fell on rocks and sometimes they fell on hard places and sometimes the seeds fell in exactly the right place in order for them to grow. And it’s the same with our options and our op and our options and what we’re doing. We need to come up with a myriad, a plethora, uh, a multitude of ideas so that we can draw on them.
Nathan Simmonds:
Parable of the . I thank you very much, Christopher. Appreciate you Chris. We need to come up with multiple options and actually you’ll find that some of those options will stack chronologically. Some of the key questions I ask to people when we’ve already collated some of these. Okay, so what’s the next action you can take in the next 24 hours or the first action you can take in the next 24 hours? And I’ll go, oh, I can do that. Okay, great. Fantastic. And what’s the next action after that in 48 hours?
Nathan Simmonds:
Oh, I could do that one. And we start to stack the actions and the challenges and then you might say, what about seven days? What about 30 days? What about the next 90 days? And because you’ve got this bag of of tricks and different options you can put on, you can extract them out and then stack them accordingly. It also gives you an opportunity for the individual.
Nathan Simmonds:
If they only come up with one solution, they may find or you may find between the conversations that something got in the way and stopped them from going through on that action. And as a result of that, if they don’t have another action or another alternative, you may find by the time you get to the next coaching session, actually the person hasn’t taken any action because they didn’t have a stack of, of um,
Nathan Simmonds:
A stack of options or actions to take. So we have to make sure we’re asking lots of questions. So when we’ve done the digging in here, we’ve held ourselves back in this space as long as possible. We’ve shifted into the options and we can just, I say what are the options? What is the next step? One great question I love asking people in this space is, well, what’s the next smallest action you can take for the biggest possible impact? What else have you seen others do in this space that have helped ’em to succeed?
Nathan Simmonds:
One of the questions I love asking in the reality phase is, where else have you had successes like this in your business, in your family life? And we draw those successes up. So we help to reinforce with people through that educated reflection how and where they’ve got those successes from and what that idea and concept looks like. And then what we do as coaches and leaders is we neatly help them to transfer that concept of success where wherever it was into their options, well, based on that learning, what can you pull across, pull across to this situation that will help you succeed?
Nathan Simmonds:
So everyone that’s here, have you got something that you are, you’ve got a goal or something you are working on or a project that you would like to get a new idea about? Has ev, has everyone got something on their current agenda? I know someone’s just turned up late and do you know what, that’s absolutely okay. Have you all got something in your agenda at the moment that you are working on? Yes. We’ve all got something. I don’t think even if we were furloughed we, you know, or we wouldn’t be doing that, it’s fine. We would have something going on.
Nathan Simmonds:
Take that question and then reapply it that I just asked. Regardless of what you’ve got on your list right now, what other option or options can you come up with right now to help you move towards that goal? Give me one more option or action that you could take on that current project that you haven’t already thought about that is new to you right now in relation to this.
Nathan Simmonds:
And take a note of that for those I, you know, kind of got a bit of a quandary here, causing the mental friction to start, which is the best place to be? What’s the one next smallest action you can take that will create the biggest impact into, in relation to the goal that you want to achieve?
Nathan Simmonds:
And if you wish to share any of the thoughts that are now coming out of this question, please do in the chat box. I would love to see them. Which is the reason I get up is to ask these sorts of questions to help people shift their thinking and move towards these things. So we have to help people and help ourselves come up with a multitude of responses as just as the parable of the seed soul. Because some are gonna win, some are gonna lose, some of them are gonna be epic fails, which we love.
Nathan Simmonds:
Some of them need huge successes. But if you don’t have the next one to draw upon, it’s not gonna help. Response is be more open to inputs and not too closed off to ideas and suggestions. Absolutely. How are you gonna make that happen? Next option question. Ask others what they have done and experienced and share good. Who’s the next person that you can ask them that can share that experience? Learning a depreciation, uh, depreciation process.
Nathan Simmonds:
Find a champion to help with process understanding. Good. Who is that champion? Let’s start kind of funneling that thinking down. In fact, let’s change that question. Who are your top three champions? Who are your top three people to share experiences with? We can start to use the rule of three in our questioning here.
Nathan Simmonds:
Give me three suggestions or what Three suggestions have you got to help to make sure you stay open to those suggestions that are coming in. And then you can start to write those down and they start to turn into more options. You can start to see how they develop and expand and flourish. Number three, excuse mitigation. So most people here already understand that growth stands for goal, reality and options as far as we’re going so far.
Nathan Simmonds:
But what they also miss is the fact that o stands for obstacles as well. Excuse the handwriting. What happens? Regulars. Oh, we get this option, it’s fantastic. So the goal is to go on a picnic fan. This is fantabulous the weather’s right? We’ve got the, we’ve got the equipment, we’ve got the kit, we’ve got the food, we’ve got the food intolerances covered, right? We’ve got the physical distancing covered. It’s just gonna be the family,
Nathan Simmonds:
Right? Where are we going for a picnic? We know where we’re going. Brilliant. When, when are we going? We’re going tomorrow. What is the biggest challenge to having a picnic? It’s a loaded question. Tell me in the chat box, what do you think is the biggest challenge to going on a picnic? Should be fairly straightforward response on this one. Logistics can be finding the time weather. Now we’re talking logistics.
Nathan Simmonds:
Te especially at this current situation, definitely keeping everyone happy. We can cope with that. We in the UK we have this, you know, in a lot of places we have this fun, um, fluctuating weather systems. So we set the goal of going on the picnic. We’ve got everything we need to do. Everyone’s happy food covered the options, right? We’re gonna go to the, the national park over there at one o’clock and all of a sudden it rains. And then I say to the person next week, oh, how was the pit? And they say, oh, it didn’t go. Oh, what was the reason? Oh it rained. Did you do anything else? No.
Nathan Simmonds:
How many people here have been working with someone in their team in a project and they’ve set themselves an action, they’ve agreed to the action, they’ve run off and as I drew in the picture yesterday, they hit the smallest obstacle and the smallest stepping stone. And for some reason that action doesn’t get taken. How many people here have been left scratching their head wondering why they didn’t do something else? Now when we get to the options and we start to understand the obstacles, we can say, well what is it you need to, to keep in mind then in order to make sure that that option is a success?
Nathan Simmonds:
What else do we need to include to make sure that you overcome the obstacles that we know are gonna come downstream? Because that’s called life. Because nothing in life is certain. Nothing in nature is certain. We know that things are gonna happen, we expect them, but through lack of questioning of some leaders and some coaches through kind of some of that inexperience, sometimes we don’t ask enough questions of the individual. ’cause we think that they think like us, they have a different level of learning, they have a different level of experience and exposure to these ideas.
Nathan Simmonds:
Therefore it is our responsibility as the coach and as the leader to ask them questions to help them get the clarity they need in order to move forward themselves. When the hiccup comes down, I said yesterday, now in England, if we want to turn right at the roundabout, we have to turn left. We know it’s gonna happen. But if you put someone else from another country on our roads, they may get on that roundabout and turn right directly, then you’ve got a serious problem.
Nathan Simmonds:
So we help people to understand what the obstacles are and we ask them more questions. What challenges do you expect to see? What is gonna come downstream when you take that action? What are the top three possibilities that may cause um, things to falter? Get them to clarify. Okay, great. Based on that information, what can you put in place in order to make sure that you mitigate that, circumvent it, overcome it, smash through it, whatever is the right language for the individual you’re talking to.
Nathan Simmonds:
So by doing this, we create lot By staying here, we create lots of, um, option, um, clarity. We hold ourselves back, we get more than one option and then we make sure that the person can see the obstacles coming down and we help them to mitigate their own excuses before we see them. Hope this has been useful. What has been useful from today’s session? What keepers have you written down today from what we’ve covered in the last 21 minutes?
Nathan Simmonds:
One minute over. What have I covered? What have I shared today that’s been useful for you in the way that you lead, the way that you coach and the way that you do what you do? Tell me in the chat box or the questions box, I’d love to see, wanna know what’s landed, what’s resonated
Nathan Simmonds:
Good. Spending 80% of time in the golden reality. Fantastic. Next, smallest action for biggest gain. Huge question. Very small, very big. Make sure they understand the options they have. Absolutely make sure sure they understand the, the impact of those options as well just as those are coming through. Um, also got the link there for tomorrow’s session. So this is the last session for this week, tomorrow, which is gonna be the way forward, the will, the wrap up, all those elements.
Nathan Simmonds:
Make sure after this that you do register for that ’cause I wanna see as many of you there as possible. Um, fall back on previous successes. Fall back on previous success. Yes, use it. We do not rise to the expectation, we fall back to the level of learning, but people forget to learn from what they’ve done before in themselves. They very easy separate themselves from their previous successes and think that that’s not them or it isn’t relevant to where they’re going now.
Nathan Simmonds:
There are only a certain number of patterns in this life. There are only a certain number of patterns in the way that we work and think. And when you get that individual to clarify that pattern, to understand the way they work, to understand their nature and use it, they will get more successes in different places. It multiplies and compounds, uh, planning for obstacles. Absolutely they’re there. We know they’re gonna happen. It’s not about being negative though. It’s about being solution orientated.
Nathan Simmonds:
One of my favorite phrases and quotes that I use a lot is the problem is the solution. And when you start to shift your perspective in this space and you start looking at the problem as the solution, well actually how else can I use that problem to solve another problem? Um, how does this solve a problem for someone else? Or how is this a solution for someone else? Ah, and as Captain Jack Sparrow said, I think the problem isn’t the problem, it’s your attitude towards the problem. That’s the problem. That might sound like drunk logic, but it works.
Nathan Simmonds:
Uh, pull back excuse mitigation and example of the seed sower, which shows that maybe problems shows there may be problems, but you can overcome. Absolutely they’re gonna happen. Acknowledge them. Let them come in. When you hit things with force, regardless of whether it’s quantum, astro, Newtonian physics, the moment that we hit something with force, we create a resistance.
Nathan Simmonds:
The moment you acknowledge it and allow it to come in, you can either take hold of it or let it slide past or you can continue moving. This is super like, super important questions. What questions have you got for me today based on what I’ve covered to in this section of the options and the obstacles question in terms of a client, by having too many additional options available, would it not create an easy way out at the moment the slightest obstacle occurs?
Nathan Simmonds:
Yes. In short, the idea is you kind of, you want them to make it easy for themselves. So if they have lots of options and, and an obstacle comes in or an excuse comes in, they have another option to fall on so they can just keep going. So the idea is you want them to, to have a couple of things. You may get them to stack the options in chronological order. You may get them to highlight the obstacles of those options.
Nathan Simmonds:
Um, yeah, the obstacles of those options so they can understand how they can mitigate those, mitigate those risks so they can still make sure it happens. And they may come up with two or three options to mitigate so they can make the option happen. Again. It’s like one of those Russian dolls options inside an option, inside an option.
Nathan Simmonds:
But you want them to not have any room for excuses. You want them to and you want to help them to think for themselves. So as the coach and as the leader, when we ask people these questions, they will start to learn the way of thinking. They’ll start to understand the approach of the coach and why, ’cause we keep subjecting them to it. They learn it by almost osmosis.
Nathan Simmonds:
And I’ve worked with people before, two examples, one lady in the wellbeing conversation and I said, oh, how are things going? She said, yeah, I was thinking about this and thinking about this and then I heard your voice in my ear suggesting that I should do this, this, and this. So I went and did that and then got myself an appointment at the hospital and did this so they can almost hear my voice in their ear asking the questions even when I’m not there.
Nathan Simmonds:
Another lady that I was working with, it was session number six of a, of a six, six, um, course pro a six session program. We got to the sixth session and she walks in and she says to me, and I said, oh, how are are you? And she said, oh, I’m fantastic. I said, what do you wanna talk about today? And she said, well, I wanna do this and then you are gonna ask me about this, so I’m gonna do that and then you’re gonna ask me about this.
Nathan Simmonds:
And this went on for nearly 40 minutes and I didn’t say a word she just said. She just said, oh, you, you are gonna ask me this question about this. And through the course of the five sessions of that intense coaching, by the end of it, she knew what was coming. So her thinking was already evolving and she was starting to develop that for herself.
Nathan Simmonds:
At the end of the session she stood up and went, Nathan, that’s been a fantastic session. Um, really loved it. Looking forward to and to letting you know how, how it’ll get on with this. And I said, you’re welcome. And she left. So when we can’t, when we keep asking the questions around the options and the obstacles, it just helps people to kind of think, mitigate, reassess, and keep moving forward.
Nathan Simmonds:
Because the challenge we have is we’re taught, as I said yesterday, is that we’re taught that success and failure are opposites. The moment we see experience failure, it’s negative and it’s painful. So we don’t keep going for it, we don’t keep moving through it. We just get stuck in it. Hope that helps. What are the questions? Have you got for me right now?
Nathan Simmonds:
What are the questions from what we covered today? In fact, we’ve got time. Um, any other questions from previous sessions? From the goals or from the reality sessions? Good. Got confirmation. That last answer helped. Thank you. Appreciate it. Any other questions? Just in case there is any coming through, we start closing up now. Everyone, thank you very much for attending today and keeping, watching the, the questions coming in.
Nathan Simmonds:
Please be aware, make sure you are logged in and you are registered for tomorrow’s session. We’re gonna be looking at the way forward, the w in the grow model also you’ve got the coaching, the grow coaching cards, which are available online. Um, they’re five pound that contain a lot of these questions that are gonna help you to focus your thinking, help others to focus their thinking, so you can really dive into that. Um, and really keep shifting your thinking on your own terms.
Nathan Simmonds:
You can use these for yourself, you can use ’em with a coach or as, um, as the leader, as coaching leader. Also be aware we’ve got virtual classrooms where we are teaching these, these we expanded versions of what we’re teaching here, expanded concepts to help you really dig into that content, help you be the best possible version of yourself, the best possible leader, uh, and take some of these ideas and elements that I’m sharing right now and make them even bigger. So we have the virtual classrooms available as well.
Nathan Simmonds:
The coaching cards are available as well. And also tomorrow’s session. Little secret as well, just on the end of this one. When this week there’s all been been about all, sorry, it’s all been about the coaching, the, the, the grow coaching model. Next week we’re gonna be looking at personal development. We’re gonna be looking at the personal development planning, how we, we use some of these questions and these approaches to get into our PDPs, our personal development plans so that we can help build our own progress moving forward.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you wanna start looking at your career development, your personal planning, how you’re developing yourself and moving forward, this stuff is gonna be the foundation for next week. Um, and really help you take that thinking up a whole new level. So if you haven’t also signed up for next week, do so. They’re already on our, on our registrations page. Um, dive in there, have a look tomorrow. W very, very excited about this.
Nathan Simmonds:
I’ve had a great week sharing these concepts with you. These mindsets, mindset shifts with you about the the grow coaching model and tomorrow’s gonna be no exception, really looking forward to it. Everybody, have a lovely rest of your day. Thank you very much for being here today and for giving me your time, your attention and your engagement. And I look forward to bringing you tomorrow. Have a great day. Bye.
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