My Coaching Notes: The Map - Navigating the Coaching Path

This year, I’m dedicated to improving my coaching skills by carefully selecting a few recommended books to guide my development. I plan to thoroughly read, re-read, and take detailed notes to distill their concepts and techniques into an easily accessible format. My goal is to use these insights on a daily basis to refine my coaching abilities iteratively.

This year, I’m focused on enhancing my coaching skills. Given the overwhelming number of coaching books available, I’ve selected a few, with recommendations from my colleagues, to steer my development. These books will serve as my constant guides. My strategy involves thoroughly reading and re-reading them, diligently taking notes, and aiming to distill the concepts and techniques into something easily accessible and referable, and essentially using it iteratively on a daily basis to hone my coaching skills.

Books, My Coaches

The book I will focus on this year as a foundation is Developing Coaching Skills. I have used its framework as a background scaffold to build upon skills and techniques from other books. The other books with which I will integrate this framework are The Coaching Habit, Coaching Hacks, Helping People Change, and Co-active Coaching.

Different Names, Same Concepts

What I’ve found about many coaching books is that they often use different names for the same concepts. Sometimes, the concepts may not be exactly the same, but they still refer to very similar things, which can sometimes be confusing. Hence, the motivation behind this is to create foundational terms and then build upon them with other coaching books, ensuring that we don’t miss the valuable insights each book offers.

Practice Makes Excellence

Ultimately, practice is key to improving at coaching. That is definitely my ongoing effort this year as I prepare a curriculum and framework for myself. This is very exciting! Join me in exploring the value of these coaching books and in getting better at asking discovery questions.

The Visual Coaching Concept

What I have found in Developing Coaching Skills is that it outlines four processes: effective coaching, essential coaching skills, the coaching process, and coaching tools. I have used this as the foundation and have tried to incorporate other books that I think fit these topics. The picture above is color-coded, with blue representing the processes/concepts. Green indicates the books that offer tips, tricks, and insights into these processes. Notice that both the coach and coachee are in the middle, with circles of equal width and at the same level. The idea of coaching is not that the coach possesses some sort of knowledge or wisdom that the coachee does not have. There is no hierarchy between them. The magic, in my opinion, happens when all these concepts are skillfullt utilized, offering the coachee a safe and encouraging external interactive environment for self-discovery.

Our First Path

Our first journey will be embarking on Effective Coaching, where I will take notes from both Developing Coaching Skills and The Coaching Habit to create a cheat sheet I can refer to during my coaching sessions. Let’s go!

FYI, the framework above will evolve overtime as I take more notes. If you find this helpful, please make sure to look at the most recent Coaching Notes for more uptodate framework.

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