Speaker 1: Hi everybody, this is Venkat from Simply Coach, and you're listening to the Growth Dialogues podcast, the show that brings together experts in coaching, therapy, and consulting from around the world.

Speaker 2: Hello everybody. Welcome to our latest edition of Growth Dialogues. It's my pleasure and privilege to introduce Tim Holden, our guest today on the call. Hi Tim.

Speaker 3: Hey Venkat, thanks for having me today.

Speaker 2: Tim has a very impressive resume. He's a corporate executive and he also does coaching. There's a very impressive website where he talks about coaching and what specifically attracted his for me was the emphasis that Tim puts on achieving specific goals through coaching. His methodology talks about it and he's blogged about it as well. We'll cover some of this as we go along today, but to start off Tim, I want to understand, you are a corporate executive and you're a coach. So give us a sense about the coaching culture in an organization. How important is it? What's been your experience?

Speaker 3: Sure. So it's a great question, Venkat. So what often happens in a large organization, and this is true of almost all organizations around the world, is as you're going through your career, you're successful as an individual contributor. And then you are promoted into your first manager role. And there's some level of training that goes along with that. It's usually some kind of standard corporate training. Some companies have a really good training program. I'm not saying every company is like this, but most companies have a standard training program that helps give you some of the basics for how to manage a team, but it's different from coaching. A coaching culture in an organization is really focused on helping people develop all of their skills and helping them develop their skills on their own. Coaching is not giving you the answer. It's helping you to find the answer on your own. And if you have a strong coaching culture in your organization, that means that your teams are going to be inherently more collaborative. They're going to be working more effectively across teams, across silos. And your overall performance is going to improve because the team is used to working together in a way that's very collaborative, very open, questioning, and helping others to be successful. You build that coaching mentality of, listen, I'm here to help everybody improve. There's tangible benefits to having an approach, too, where you're coaching more internally. We see that companies that have a strong coaching culture throughout the organization, they have a higher employee retention, they've increased productivity, and their financials are better. It's getting that coaching, getting that feeling of somebody that's there, teams that are there to help each other. You have mentors, you have mentees, you have a manager, you have these teams that are just focused on helping you develop and you feel like almost taken care of more. So that increases that retention. That's going to make you feel more engaged in everything your company is driving. And there's actually some statistics around it. One thing that we've seen from some of the research is that organizations that prioritize coaching and formal coaching programs within themselves have about 14 percent higher five-year revenue growth. So that's a pretty significant number when you compare all the organizations around there that we can see that these organizations that prioritize coaching and coaching cultures really do rise above the competition. And the last part of this is the employees. Employees in these organizations are more likely to engage in what I would call empathetic communication, empathetic self-compassionate thinking, almost where you're understanding how you communicate is going to impact the other person across the room. And you're just basically better able to engage with your co-workers, with your peers, with your customers, clients. And you're also going to have more resilience. You're going to be able to deal with downturns and you're going to be able to deal with failure. You're going to be able to take that failure, learn from it with your coach. How's that to give to move forward? So I may have gone too long there, but just giving you some insights for myself on

Speaker 2: that. It's a pretty long journey as well. So the way you say that this doesn't happen overnight. So it's a long journey that an organization takes, a coach takes, a client, a coaching takes as well. So as you see, as you're coaching people and you see other journeys as well, from your experience, what would be the two or three things that you need to get right in this journey?

Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's lots of things you need to get right. But if I was thinking about the top three, I think the number one, number one is trust. Whenever you're coaching somebody, you need to develop trust and you need to have that confidentiality that they can tell you something and it's not going to be shared or they're going to share information. You're going to store it in a way that it's not able to be taken from you. Because for any coach to be effective, you need to be able to deal with the real person. When you're dealing with your coach, the person coaching you, you need to be honest with them about not putting on masks, not acting like the person you think everybody wants to see, but actually acting like yourself and explaining how you're seeing a situation. And so that trust is the most important, number one thing you have to have to be an effective coach. So again, ensure confidentiality, anything that they tell you isn't going to go beyond that. Creating a safe space, really being open with them about, listen, you can, as we go through this, there could be some emotional topics we get into. There could be, you know, we're going to get into a lot of stories you've been telling yourself for a very long time that aren't true. And it's OK to share them. And when they share them with you, don't judge them. Just talk through it and listen to them in a very open way. And if you don't build this trust, you're never going to be successful. You're not going to have, you're not going to be successful with your clients. You're not going to be successful with the people you're trying to coach because you're not going to get them to a point where they feel like they can really open up to you. So that's number one. I think beyond that, I would say the goals. You mentioned goals earlier in the conversation. You have to have clear goals when you're starting and when you're engaging with somebody. You have to have, you know, smart. We all heard the term smart goals. You need to have those goals that you can measure that that are realistic, that are time based, that you can actually measure. Without those goals, you're going to be talking to things and having important conversations, but you're not going to be able to measure really how how you're moving that person forward, how you're helping them to expand or whatever they're trying to do in that relationship. It's with a goal you can regularly review progress. How are you moving towards that? Is that still the right goal? Having goals is is important, but it's OK to change your goals as you go through it, because I think as you go through a coaching program, you can learn more about yourself, you can learn more about what is it that you really want, because you may be getting closer to the goal and you're close to achieving it. But Sam, you know, that's good. This is this was great two months ago when we started. But now that I'm actually closer to it, I say I actually don't want that. So then you'll adjust. So, yeah, I think goals is probably the second most important thing to have as you go in any program and as you're as you're working with anybody as a as a new coach or a coach in general. And then the last part is the number three would be just that continuous feedback and opportunities for development. So giving that feedback and again, in a very honest and sincere way, there's going to be difficult things that you're going to bring up. And that's OK. There's going to be times when you need to challenge the person that you're coaching. They're going to say something and you're going to say, let's talk more about that. Or is that really it is that is that really true? If you think about that, what are the facts behind that? And you have to be able to challenge them, give them the feedback they need to grow because you're the outside observer. You're the person that's there to kind of see some of the things that they're saying that aren't accurate. You know, a coach. A coach is their own worst coach, so we can't coach ourselves because we're too involved and we can't see it, but you're there, your role is to help them see those things. You need to give them the feedback and you need to be giving them the feedback in a way that they come to the answer. That's that third item right there about the really good feedback. It's also one of the most difficult because you need to do it in a way that you're not telling them, hey, you need to do this. You need to do it in a way that you ask the question and get them to find the answer, because when they do that, I know from my own experience, when I found the answers on my own by being guided by a really great coach, it stuck with me. It was transformational. It's things I still remember back to today and it drives me every day. So as a coach, you need to get them to kind of make those their own discoveries while you ask the right questions to lead them there. So those are my three.

Speaker 2: Absolutely, I think the completely resonates to me, especially the trusted part between the coach and the coachee and providing the safe space. Yeah, I really like the fact that you're doing both because one of the things that I have seen in the past, there are coaches who say that you just need to have a free flowing conversation with the client. And it used to be very fashionable for a time that just chat for an hour and you go on and you look out back after six months, you wonder what you really achieved. So I like your emphasis on goals and the fact that you're not wedded to those goals. You change as you go along. The last point, yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 3: There's actually a quote and I'm going to mess it up. So I'll just try to get the gist of it. And I'm not sure who said it. For some reason, I'm getting in my head, The Rock said it. So I'm not sure if Dwayne Johnson is the coaching model. But something like confidence is the ability to make changes in your plan. Confidence is the ability to to adjust and not be set on one destination. It has to be that. So confidence is the ability to change your plan. I probably messed up that quote, but that's that's a that's a rock saying it in his

Speaker 2: voice would be right. So, yeah, I think the feedback, but I think all three points resonates very well with me as a practicing coach. I think it's something that I would love to follow. So as you do this at scale and you're doing it with many clients, where does technology fit in into this equation? So how do you embed technology in your coaching? Is it an aid? Is it essential? What sort of benefits do you get out by using technology?

Speaker 3: I get huge benefits from using technology and all of us that are coaches or doing any sort of business should be using the technology that's available for us. So a couple of ways in coaching, I think it's really important. Number one, it allows you to have somewhat of a standardized experience. And I started using that Simply Coach program because I was looking for something to allow me to standardize some of my interactions. I could line up my assessments I like to use and have them go out tied to a very specific, you know, first meeting, second meeting. I could have very specific documents sent out. Also, it's important as we talked about trust and transparency that you are trust and confidentiality, that you have a place where you can share information that's secure. And I think that's that part of that secure environment. That secure environment is very important, especially in today's day and age, that there is going to be a lot of information that we share that sensitive and we need a secure way to store that. So that's how it helps me from a business, from an overall business perspective, that as well as scheduling, it really we're all so busy and that's one of the things as coaches we're trying to help people with. But we're also busy having programs that can like Calendly and some of the other programs we use and simply coach being able to pull all to get together all the different calendars and be able to show when are you really available. It's really important to have that. Now, that's what I would say is like the basics, the structure of how you run, how you run your business that helps you with that. But there's lots of other benefits you get from it, specifically around artificial intelligence. I use AI extensively. I don't use it to do the coaching for me, but the way I use it is so I do I use Zoom a lot as my platform for for my for my video meetings and they have an AI companion on there that will summarize your meetings. So when I'm in the meeting, I can take less notes. I can take just a few focus notes I want to make and not be constantly writing the entire time because at the end of it, I'm going to get a very detailed summary. And then I have a habit now when the meeting ends, a summary comes over within a few minutes and then I just go through it and I make adjustments because AI is not perfect. But it's going to summarize how that meeting went and then you can jot down any adjustments to it to make it really clear about, you know, what do you want to take out of that? That's one way I use it. I also use it for my content that I create, whether it's I'm creating something for a tool or an assessment or some sort of document I'm creating or a relic that I'm going to share with a team member or with a with a with a coaching client. I will write up what I'm doing and I'll explain, you know, I'll do my paper in Word or whatever program I'm using, but then I'll run it through an AI to just say improve the prose and make sure this is clear and try to improve the writing for that. Recently, I've been using Copilot, my personal account for Copilot, to actually take some of those documents and turn them into PowerPoints and not saying that it's, you know, you can skip learning how to use PowerPoint. You still learn how to use some of these tools. But, you know, our job, you know, our job as coaches is to to help people and to help, you know, to help them find their purpose, to help them have bigger impacts in the world. Our job is not to know how to make PowerPoints beautiful. Our job is not to know how to do certain things like these administrative tasks perfectly. So that's the way I use AI. I use AI and a lot of the technology to just create those documents and make them look nice, much nicer. I wouldn't save myself four or five hours. So that my time is focused on the person I'm working with and helping them grow and helping them get to where they want to be, not on building all of these beautiful PowerPoints and Word documents.

Speaker 2: Push on that point a bit, Tim, there is a body of thought that says that if you can do so much, you can actually have an AI engine coach a person. Why do we need the Tims and Venkates of the world to coach? There's enough intelligence that can be gathered and the intelligent machine can coach as well. Where do you stand on that conversation?

Speaker 3: Sure, so it's an interesting conversation. So I deal with AI in a lot of different ways, as I talked to you about some of the examples that I use it for. The problem with AI is that it works with what's in front of it. It works with all the data that's been given, but it isn't necessarily going to have the insights. It isn't necessarily going to have the insights on what's going on with that individual and how to get them to where they want to be. You have to be able to read a bit behind the lines. You have to be able to ask the right questions, to get out the right, to get to the heart of the thing. There's so much we as humans do to hide who we really are and what we really want because we feel like we're either scared or we're ashamed or for some other reason, we're not showing up as who we really are. So it takes a lot of work to dig into that and find that out. I don't see an AI that's anywhere near the ability to do that. I see AI that's great at, you know, hey, can you research this specific topic? I'm working with somebody on the difference between urgent and important. Can you just find me some, can you quickly run down the research, the latest research on this, and it'll help my conversation. That's what it's great for. The ability to actually have a coaching conversation that's going to take some person on a transformational journey to get to where they need to be. I don't see that yet. And that's kind of one of the higher levels of AI that I haven't necessarily seen. And I don't think it's there yet. That also kind of fits into the idea of broad AI versus narrow AI. If we can get into a whole AI discussion, I've got lots of training on artificial intelligence and for my other role. But yeah, it's too narrow to be able to do that, my perspective.

Speaker 2: That's fine. I think it's an evolving thought and I see passionate discussions on both sides of that. Just a couple of last things to round off this. So a lot of the viewers of this podcast are also aspiring coaches, people who may be in corporate world, like you're thinking about becoming a coach. What would be your two, three ideas, inputs, advice to aspiring coaches? Should they become a coach?

Speaker 3: So number one, you have to be great at listening. You have to develop those listening skills. And that means a lot of time not talking. We've all heard the term, God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. So you just need to get better at listening. And you can hear I'm not the best at it because there's a couple of times I've tried to talk over Venkat here. But you need to be really good at listening and taking the right notes, listening for the right words to ask the right question. And you can't be so focused on the next question that you're not listening. So really listening, developing strong listening skills is critical to being a great coach because there's going to be gems that are hidden and all the information that's being sent your way that you need to identify so you can really help the person you're talking to. That'd be the first one. The second one is embrace technology. You hear it from me. I talk a lot about the different technology I use. I use technology because it helps me with my balance. I talk a lot about balance in coaching. I talk a lot about balance isn't about the perfect number of hours here and the perfect number of hours there. It's about the intention that you do the things you say you're going to do. You explain to the people that are important to you while you're doing them and you make sure that you're listening to them and doing those things. Without technology, I would not be able to do all the things I want to do because technology allows you to do it. I see it as a great way of helping you to do more in a shorter amount of time and do it more and do it effectively. So embrace the technology that comes out. Look for opportunities to use it. And last one is network. There's a great body of knowledge out there and there is a great community out here of coaches and I have been amazed by how open all the coaches I've worked with are and I've talked with. Everybody's been very open and willing to help and give ideas and suggestions on every topic in the whole coaching area. So if you want to get better, you got to talk to the other coaches in the area. You got to learn from them. You got to ask questions and you got to network.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. I think all three are worth repeating Tim. I think active listening, I like your two ears and one mouth analogy. I think active listening, absolutely. I think very, very essential and very often coaches forget that they need to be a mirror. They not expect to provide the answers. I think it resonates a lot. Technology, yes, we should be using a lot, lot of technology and the network. I think networking with other coaches, potential clients, you don't know where business comes from. Absolutely, Tim, I think it resonates a lot and I wanted to end by, is there some favorite coaching quote? You did say something which we could attribute to The Rock earlier on, but is there something else, something that you would like to share with our viewers?

Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. So a couple. So my favorite one is from Whitmore, from John Whitmore. It's really that coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance. It's helping them to learn rather than teaching them. So that's what that's my favorite quote. Yeah, it's probably my favorite because that's really what it's about. And that's. Yeah, that's really what it's about to helping them to make those discoveries and helping them to learn about themselves and where they want to go and how they're going to get there.

Speaker 2: That's a great note to end this conversation, Tim. Thank you very much for being a part of our show, sharing your experiences. I'm sure a lot of our listeners would greatly benefit from listening to this. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3: All right. Thanks, Venkat.