As a celebration to the amazing group of coaches in our practice, I am dedicating this month’s blog posts & newsletter to coaching. I’ve learned the value of coaching from personal experience – and am intentional about having coaches support me in my business and personal growth. I’ve seen the difference great coaching can make – in both personal and organizational performance.
I encourage you to subscribe to our blog & newsletter – and also to consider if one of our coaches might be just the thing you need to take your performance to the next level.
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A leader I greatly admire is responsible for a global team of professionals. As such, there are frequent conference calls and individual calls, which present unique challenges in driving toward agreement and understanding. The first challenge comes with the dynamics of phone calls – in which we only hear voice and inflection – and miss the normal cues from body language and facial expression. For those for whom English is a second language, using their non-primary language must be like me trying to write with my left hand. It is slower, awkward and not very comfortable. And for everyone, there is the challenge of English spoken with a myriad of accents – from Midwestern twang to Italian to German to Asian. As such, the phrase – Listen till your ears hurt – was coined.
Listening till your ears hurt is a great metaphor for the type of listening one does when engaged in important dialogues like coaching, mentoring, guiding, supporting, explaining, or teaching. It is the type of listening that commands your full attention. That causes you to test what you heard and check for understanding. That makes you slow down and be in the moment with the other person.
That’s one of the wonderful things about coaches – they listen till their ears hurt.
The questions are ones that you ponder and review and come back to – often well beyond the coaching session. At times, they bring to the forefront something hidden that you were unable to see. At times, they make speakable the thing that has been unspeakable.
