Coaching

 In one form or another Barbara and I have been coaching for over four decades.  For nearly thirty years most of it was in the context of Christian ministry.  We have also raised five children.  That is a coaching experience to be sure.  Parenting should be the most profound coaching role of all and, in fact, it is for good and sometimes ill.  I have been a Little League baseball coach, ad hoc softball coach, and coached in a variety of venues and circumstances.  In the last ten years we had a coaching business along with other forms of consulting as well as coaching clients for a personal growth and leadership development company.  I am currently working as a strategic consultant for a Fortune 100 company and am enjoying “coaching” in a completely different context along with all the challenges it presents.  To paraphrase a friend of mine we are all coaching someone even if it is only ourselves.

I have made some colossal blunders and still cringe a bit when I think about some of them.  Each mistake was a lesson, if owned and learned from.  Over the years I have developed a pretty healthy list of “won’t ever do that agains.” There have been times when I have known incredible successes, many of them much to my surprise and in spite of myself.  I still am often surprised when a thought or suggestion proves to be the key to unlock deep potential in another of God’s kids and I absolutely love it when there is relational energy that unlocks understanding in the one being coached and me as well.  To be sure there are some great principles and techniques but the coaching of the greatest value is creating a context in which the One who leads and guides us into all truth is alive and active in a relationship between the coach and the one being coached releasing the mystery and miracle of the Master coach of all.

I have some friends, one in particular, who are starting their own coaching “careers.”  I applaud them, and in fact encouraged one of my children to engage with a coach paying the money to do so.  That prompted me to start this series about coaching.  I have always endeavored to coach from a Biblical perspective.  One of the highlights of our coaching career was when Barbara and I contracted with the leadership development company.  There were four levels of training available through that program and by the time someone had completed all four levels they had a significant investment in their own growth and development.  Though the company was not a “Christian” company it was owned by a Christ follower and attracted other Christ followers.  In the course of completing the company’s programs others became followers of Christ.  We were engaged to coach those who had completed all the levels of the company’s training and were marketed as “Christian” coaches.  Our job was to ground our clients in the Biblical truth around what they had discovered in the “secular” program.

In both that journey and our journey through life, ministry and the corporate world we have discovered some concepts that can be helpful to others.  The purpose of this series of blogs will be to share some of those concepts with others.  Back to my friend who is starting her coaching career.  I was always looking for sources other than myself to recommend to my clients to re-inforce what we were exploring together.  This can be one of those resources.  One of the classic coaching questions is what success will look like?  Success, for me, in this effort will look like others (1) using the material to reinforce and underscore something they are working on in their coaching relationship.  (2) Questions from you and any other readers about specific ideas they would like to explore together.  (3) Others contributing their own thoughts so that the blog becomes a compendium of wonderful voices exploring and discovering life together.  In short, I will deem this effort successful if it becomes a vehicle for conversation for all who are in the search for healthy relationships with themselves, their neighbors and their God.

Here we go…..