Coaching: What is it and how is it different from mentoring?

Join Tony Sloman, Sarah Dalton and Rita Holland in this podcast on coaching. Learn more about what coaching is, what to expect from a coaching session and how it’s different from mentoring. You’ll hear about why seeing a professional coach can be very beneficial to medical trainees.

Summary Writer:  Eloise Sobels

Script Writer:  Tony Sloman and Sarah Dalton

Editor:  Jules Willcocks

Interviewer:  Tony Sloman

Interviewees:  Sarah Dalton and Rita Holland

About Tony Sloman

Tony Sloman is the director of Passion and Purpose. P&P and Associates is a transformational learning organisation that has developed unique programs for over 15 years. Tony is a Lead Facilitator/Coach who designs and delivers most of the P&P programs. P&P techniques are underpinned by the P&P EMPOWER model and evidence-based practical application. P&P serve government, large to medium corporations, NFP and the medical sector. Through a successful collaboration with Dr Jules Willcocks, an Emergency Physician, they created and deliver a highly successful program across Australia that empowers medical practitioners to ‘show up’ when the pressure is on.

Tony studied at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London and is passionate about developing leaders and professionals that inspire change. Tony’s qualifications; Bachelor of Science (IT, psychology, philosophy), Diploma of Professional Acting, two graduate certificates in executive coaching, training & assessment. Tony enjoys ocean swimming throughout the year and time with family.

About Dr Sarah Dalton

Sarah Dalton is a Consultant in Paediatric Emergency Medicine at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead as well as Director of Clinical Engagement at eHealth NSW. Sarah is President for the Division of Paediatrics and Child Health at the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and holds a Masters in Applied Management in Health. Sarah has a long-standing interest in trainee development, and is a strong advocate for improving Quality and Safety in Healthcare. She has a particular interest in clinicians leading change and has completed a Fulbright Scholarship to evaluate Clinical Leadership Development Programs in the United States.

About Rita Holland

Rita is the founding Director of Capstan Partners, a company she started specifically to meet the coaching needs of doctors and healthcare professionals. Rita’s experience includes over 2,000 hours of coaching conversations with senior leaders and executives, with experience in individual and group coaching for wellbeing and resilience, leadership development, and organisational cultural alignment programs within and beyond the healthcare sector.

Her coach-specific training includes a Master of Applied Science in Coaching Psychology from Sydney University and she is a credentialed Professional Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation.

Coaching

With Dr Sarah Dalton, a Paediatric Emergency Physician and Professional Coach and Rita Holland, Director of Capstan and Partners and Professional Coach from the International Coaching Federation

Introduction

Coaching is about exploring your current thoughts, attitudes and beliefs in connection to your professional career. It looks to aid the conversation with one’s own challenges and identify patterns of behaviour that are either contributing to or helping to overcome these issues. This podcast describes some of the general techniques used in coaching, what to expect from a coaching session and the benefits of undertaking coaching either as a coachee or a future coach.

  • Coaching is a concentrated structured conversation that helps explore where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow. It allows the person to build the steps needed to get from where they are now to where they want to be. These steps are strongly related to the person’s passions and beliefs.
  • It is a space to focus thoughts and bring out conversations that perhaps you’ve never had or wouldn’t have brought out on your own.
  • It is solution and future focused to drive towards meaningful goals.
  • Outside of healthcare it is used commonly in corporate environments with high-level professionals or professionals who have potential.
  • Myth 1: Coaching is sometimes seemed to be used as ‘remedial support,’ that is, you’re not performing, you’re the problem. This is false.
    • This is not what most people are attracted to coaching for; coaching usually attracts the best and the brightest.
  • Myth 2: Coaching is for the elite – “I’m not good enough,” “I’m not special enough.” This is false.
    • Yes, it does attract the best and the brightest, but it is also about providing the safe support for a whole range of career development conversations from entry-level people to senior leaders and subject matter experts.
  • Myth 3: Coaching fixes every problem. This is false.
    • It simply doesn’t. Coaching doesn’t change the systemic issues, under resourcing and other problems in organisations, but it does change your approach to what might be a challenging organisational issue.
  • Coaching helps you to get places and reach goals. Medical trainees have a lot of goals they are generally working towards. These goals don’t have to be professional they can be personal as well.
  • Professional coaching is really about achieving things that matter to you in your career or in your training. For junior doctors these goals commonly surround exams or preparing for interviews, but goals can really be anything that you’re working on. Coaching can discuss these goals with you in a safe space, without judgement and where you can be honest about what you care about. Sometimes these conversations are really important around career directions and career choices. For some doctors, there’s even a conversation about “should I even be in medicine?”
  • A/Prof Anthony Grant said that “Coaches are trained to afflict the comforted,” by that he means a well-trained coach and coaching conversation will take coachees (in a safe, supported and nonjudgmental way) to a mildly uncomfortable place or a place where maybe they’ve never had this conversation before. The vulnerability becomes exposed.
  • Coaching is a place where there might be silences, questions that might reflect some patterns that haven’t served you well and perhaps haven’t yet been brought to the surface. To that point comes the affliction, that slight degree of discomfort in facing some of those really useful and often transformational ‘ah-ha’ moments – “wow, I’ve never thought of it like that,” “I feel I can be creative, I can be vulnerable, I can be supported.” If you’re not having that sort of experience in coaching, then you are probably not benefitting to the potential of what coaching can bring.
  • In terms of what to expect, it is okay to be in that place of supported discomfort because it’s likely to bring you the best ‘ah-ha’ moments you may ever have.
  • Stopping to talk to someone and be probed a little bit, being a little uncomfortable when faced with important decisions, milestones or opportunities is actually where the growth comes from.
  • One thing that’s clear in medicine is that there is a long tradition of mentoring. The thing about mentors is that we often go to them for advice and ask, “what do you think I should do?” or “what did you do in this situation?” That is brilliant when your mentor is aligned with your thinking and your values, but sometimes someone else’s solution is not the solution for you.
  • The power of coaching is where the coachee is the expert on themselves and they know what is going to work for them. The coaches job is to work with the coachee and understand what their solution is, what is it they need, and to challenge them a bit to push them out of their comfort zone, but then to empower the coachee to come up with their own decisions and goals for how they are going to move forward.
  • A lot of trainees come to talk with us about exams. We’ve actually stopped and talked about how exams felt, where the hardest parts were and what things could work for them.
  • For example, I remember asking a trainee how she thought through a question that she didn’t know the answer for, and she said, “I’ve never thought about that before.” Then I said, “So, how do you think other people do it when they’re asked a question they don’t know how to answer?” And she then replied, “Well, I don’t know, I haven’t asked them.” And so that then became something that we went on to talk about and that she thought and asked other people about. She then came back and said, “I know what I’m going to do, next time I get a question like that, I’m going to take a brain break.” She came up with her own idea that she was going to take a brain break, which was taking a deep breath in, thinking about the fact that she knew what she was doing, pause for 5 seconds and then answer the question – she came up with that herself.
  • There’s an increased self-awareness, an absolute focus on being honest with yourself that coaching can actually take you to explore, for perhaps the first time, what is really going to be meaningful and fulfilling in making the decisions. You’ve allowed yourself to be intentional about your future.
  • It is really this safe place to say things that bring an awareness of self with honesty, safety and courage that is often not had in the loneliness of other parts of our world. That is often the feedback we get from people who have had a coaching experience.
  • Heightened understanding of the patterns of their thinking, thoughts and behaviors that perhaps have served them well and largely they are successful, high achieving individuals.
  • But invariably there are other conversations that coaching brings out which is where perhaps there are patterns that haven’t served them well. There’s been some of the self-talk that has been self-sabotaging, there are assumptions on beliefs that actually are a bit irrational. So, the ability to identify patterns in thinking, thoughts and feelings have been some of the benefits that have been really powerful in allowing people to change and disrupt patterns to bring them to a better place.
  • Commitments and consequences: where else can you be accountable for those ‘new year’s resolutions’ that don’t actually translate into action? Coaching is about bringing big, audacious, amazing thoughts or goals to action. Chunk it down, bring it into small steps, make it achievable and as previously said, you are the expert of your choices, so let’s make it happen. Coaching is really about holding that accountability and commitment to having it happen.
  • One that I am currently thinking of is when one clinician came through in a non-clinical role that has struggled to deal with very imposing personalities which made feeling heard and feeling present difficult, they are conflict averse.
  • We are working really closely in bringing in the confidence and the skills to have a voice, to choose to be assertive, to choose very carefully the language and the ways at which they are approaching very big personalities in their department; with that, there are many layers that this coaching journey will take, starting from, are they worthy of having a voice? Why would they not feel more confident in speaking up? What are the risks in doing that? Trying to dispel the fact that in order to be a great leader you can’t always be liked.
  • To be a great leader you have to be courageous to bring people to make organisational change in the interest of patient care. Working efficiently as a department means that not everyone is going to like what you do, and for people pleasers and those that are trained to be carers it is culturally and sometimes personally very difficult.
  • It’s an incredible part of the support in working with this individual to be saying, “I actually approached the meeting differently and I asked different questions and questions in different ways, I’m listening differently, and I’m coming to meetings and conversations with that difficult personality in a way that’s actually causing a bit of discomfort but I’m doing something different and we’re getting different results in the department.”
  • Trying something new, having the courage to do that and assess the risks before is part of coaching.
  • I don’t think I can put it better than what’s been said already. It’s about taking you out of your comfort zone, finding something you want to work on and really progressing with your professional development. It can be a technique based thing, like how to pass exams or how to pass an interview but it can also be about your professional development in your non-technical skills like, leadership or communication or any of the areas we all think about as doctors, which are not just our technical or medical expertise.
  • I think there’s a big piece around career decisions as well and having again, as previously said, the safe space to be very honest and to make some decisions with someone who will listen and support you.
  • It’s a fascinating question, because coaching is such an unregulated industry. There is no industry practise and what we do know is that anybody can call themselves a coach.
  • One of the big recommendations I tell people who are considering finding a coach is to look at the coach-specific credentials of the coach who you’re interested in. Make sure they have a recognised coaching qualification and perhaps experience in the sector, such as healthcare. That would be my greatest recommendation.
  • What is also really important is the chemistry between you and that person. It’s a bit like any professional service, talk to the coach that you’re interested in, and speak to them first. If you feel as though there is some rapport and you can build trust with them, fantastic. But if you don’t feel that connection with that particular coach, don’t throw out the idea of coaching, go talk to another coach. Find someone that you do feel connected to because that is an important foundation in the value of the coaching relationship.
  • In terms of gaining coaching skills, a lot of the doctors have them anyway because a lot of it is how do you listen to patients and how you help your patients navigate choices. But, that’s why doctors can learn more about how to lead good coaching conversations.
  • There are lots of ways of learning. It would be easy to start by googling the ‘Grow Model,’ which is a very basic approach to a coaching conversation. There are other courses, but it depends upon what you’re after and what you would do.
  • Be vulnerable
  • Give it a try

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Tags: #accountability,#behaviour,#Capstan and Partners,#career,#career choices,#career development,#coach,#coaching,#commitment,#International Coaching Federation,#mentor,#mentoring,#professional coach

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