In this keynote, Alan Brereton from Kingstown College looks at the language we use every day and how it is preventing us from having the conversation we need to have!
Conversation Habits are the patterns we fall into on a regular basis. It is the role of the coach and mentor to ask questions in a better way so that there is a minimum risk of a pre-programmed response.
We benefit from asking shorter questions’; questions which do not have an answer already baked in, questions that do not suggest an action, and questions that do not transfer an interpretation or emotion that the coach is feeling.
We need to ask Short Objective Questions which lead to Long Subjective Answers. Let your client attach the meaning to the conversation.
Transcript Summary:
The Language of Coaching and Mentoring
Let’s talk to you about the language of coaching and mentoring as a little bit of a checkup for us in terms of how we’re approaching our conversations and our discussions with ourselves, and with others.
The language we’re using is affecting our belief system, if it’s coming from our belief system, it’s all creating how we see the world.
And it’s going to create that perpetual loop until we have a conversation about it. Perhaps we have an opportunity to interrupt that at some point.
Conversations follow patterns. We tend to go through questions followed by pre programmed responses. We have general answers that we go to just to keep the conversation flowing.
No major decision is needed.
So our role as the coach or the mentor is to use the language that’s going to break through our conversation habits.
One example of the habit, is the response you receive from a person from Ireland when you ask “how are you?”. The answer is alway “I’m grand!”.
I was talking to somebody earlier and they said when they moved to Ireland first, they wondered did grand mean you’re big? Does grand mean you had a busy day? Where is this coming from?
But it’s a pre programmed response that we have, to a question that we’re asked all of the time.
And that’s just the first example of so many things that show up for us in our workplace, in our home life, and the conversations we’re having between our ears.
We have answers that are habits. They’re not the real answer.
So our role as the coach, as the mentor, is to dig a little deeper, to get into what is actually going on, what is actually happening for this person, what is truly going on in their mind.
Meaning just happens in your Mind
We also benefit from looking at the meaning of the words we use.
I’m not sure if any of you saw this on Instagram, there was an actor and she was speaking about if someone insulted you in a different language, it means nothing to you.
If they start getting really irate and very animated, you’d probably start laughing at them, even though they’re insulting you. But you’ve no idea what they’re saying.
So it doesn’t land, and it doesn’t have any impact on you.
That’s because the meaning happens in your mind.
That’s where it translates into something that results in an emotion, something that’s going to reinforce a belief, something’s going to connect with one of your values.
The meaning is happening in your mind. It’s how we are associating something in our brain with that word.
And where did that enter our story?
So for us as a coach or for our clients, the language that they’re using, we can have some very interesting conversations there.
Client words with no Definition
We had a wonderful webinar from Rebecca Fraser Till who talked about patterns and gaps in what our clients are talking about.
And she just mentioned some words that she sees showing up quite a lot. And I’m sure all of you would agree as coaches as well, these words show up with no actual definition for the client, like success.
And you follow up with the question, as a coach, “what does success look like”, which results in 30 seconds of silence. “I want to be successful”, but with no actual definition to go with it.
The other one is, I want to have a meaningful work day. What does meaningful look like? “I don’t really know”.
But again, it’s another conversation we’re having, “I want to get a job that’s meaningful”, but we really don’t have anything factual to go with it.
We have no way of grounding it.
These are the question that we really benefit from asking as the coach in those sessions, because that just breaks that conversation habit.
It breaks the loop that’s existing in the conversations they’re having without you in the room with them.
Lessons from the Gym
My personal trainer is Lucas. He is a great person to talk to because he loves psychology. He’s not just about getting the reps in. He’s about having a conversation about how we’re thinking, how we’re showing up.
But he has very low tolerance levels when it comes to the stuff that you might say as an excuse.
And he says this, “I cannot feed the negativity”. I can’t feed it.
“If somebody comes into the gym today and says, I’m a bit tired today, Lucas, if I feed that, he says, we’re not going to go anywhere.”
He says, I almost have to ignore it and move on and say, “you’re feeling tired? Great! Let’s go have a session in the gym today. Let’s go. Let’s do it.”
So he said, he has to break that loop.
I just thought that was a really interesting thing to share.
I had some conversations with some people putting together this keynote and some personal trainers were a great idea because they’re all about actions and about moving forward. So maybe it’s an extreme example for us to think about as a coaching and mentoring community.
I asked another personal trainer, tell me some things that frustrate you from your clients, and she said this
“if everything goes to plan, I’ll try”.
Now, if you heard that at the end of a coaching session for Actions, you’d be thinking, a lot of wiggle room in there, isn’t there? We might need to tie that down a bit.
Even with difficult language, I think we all, as coaches, find ways of asking things maybe in a little softer way.
We might replace the word problem with challenge.
Questions
When it comes to questions, the one question we don’t ask is the ‘why’ question. We try to replace that with a better what question.
But having the strong relationship with the client could means you can be less specific about softening your language because they have the trust there in the first place.
If you have an opportunity to go back and look at Paula’s webinar about transference, you will know that expressions like this are not the most helpful thing to show up into a coaching or mentoring room with.
“That must be awful for you”.
Well, was it really? Have we just made that decision aboutthe circumstances or about what’s happening?
Or a question I heard on the radio, the interviewer asked;
“tell me about that process and how difficult it was”.
How about you just ask the question in the simplest way possible, which was, “tell me about that process” and let your client attach whatever they want to the answer.
Because in some ways you’re building in an answer to your question, and you’ve automatically removed some options because your client’s trying to process the question and give you the answer that you’ve really asked for, to a question you probably shouldn’t have asked in the first place.
So what we’re really looking for is this.
We’re looking for short, objective questions that are going to result in long, subjective answers.
That’s it.
So think about your competencies from ICF.
If we look at competency seven, we’re looking about evoking awareness. And we see this little commentary in there, which is about remaining unattached.
So to be to be asking questions without attachment, so that we are not attached to the answer that we’re going to get, that it confirms what we’re thinking or it doesn’t, that we can ask the question in a way that allows our client, allows our coachee or our mentee to attach what they want, what they feel, at that moment in time.
Not what you think it is.
If you think about what we do as a coach, 80% of the time, we’re listening. So the other 20% is largely asking questions.
Tidy up your questions. Ask your questions in less than ten words.
What we sometimes start to do is start to ask more than one question at a time.
Or transferring your view of the world or including assumptions are leading questions.
Simplify your questions.
Navigating Rank in the Military
The privilege of teaching the certificate of mentoring to the Irish Defence Forces last year and we just had some conversations around the challenges around the hierarchy in the organization and getting to that point of the session where we ask for feedback. Typically we’d ask a question, “was the session okay for you?”
Now, if you’re sitting with somebody who’s two ranks higher than you in the organization, you’re going to say, “yes, sir, it was fine”, or for the
So we need to think about how we’re asking the question in those circumstances.
We checked is there a better way we can ask that question?
So we thought about it and it came down to almost placing an order in the question, which was, “Tell me one thing I could do better in this session”.
So if you’re the superior officer asking that question in a mentoring relationship, even though we’re trying to remove rank from the room as much as we can, by asking the question that way, we’re asking for the one thing and we’re doing our best to remove the risk of the feedback question at the end falling into the rank trap of ‘I need to agree’.
Patterns and Habits
We have habits and patterns. Habits to remove the need to make decisions.
We’re doing that in our language. We’re doing that in our conversations. And it’s hurting us.
It’s hurting our progress. It’s hurting our relationships.
As the coach, we figure out a way of adjusting our language in order to create the breakthrough and have the conversation they will benefit from.
Conversations follow patterns. That was where we started with this conversation.
Think about how you’re showing up in conversations. Think about the wording you’re using.
Think about your questions, tidy them up.
Because that will have a huge impact on how you show up as a coach, and it’ll have a huge impact on how you show up as a person in the world, living out all those things that we teach as a coaching community, those competencies that will benefit us in the long run.
