Conflict Management Coaching

Coaches from the wide range of contexts regularly help clients to work through their interpersonal conflicts. Related goals may have to do with ways to better manage an ongoing conflict, to prepare for one that is anticipated or to resolve a past dispute that is lingering. Some clients may also want to improve their general conflict competence.

For example, objectives may be about how they react to certain triggers, how to regulate their emotions when involved in contentious discussions or how to enhance their communication skills. Relevant to providing conflict management coaching (also known as conflict coaching) is that the language in the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) has shifted from conflict management to conflict engagement. This is premised on helping people to gain the knowledge, skills and abilities to effectively participate in interpersonal conflict, rather than avoid it or wait until things have escalated before addressing them.

The inherent philosophical shift in this language is significant for those of us who either specialize in conflict management coaching or find ourselves commonly coaching clients about their interpersonal disputes.

Not surprisingly, one important requirement to do this sort of work well is to examine the strength of our own personal and professional foundation in conflict engagement. In this regard, some examples of possible questions to examine the strength of your foundation in this area are:

• On a scale of 1-10, 10 being to a great extent, how much do you view conflict as an opportunity to sort out differences and improve my relationships?

• What do you have to learn and work on to build your conflict management foundation?

• What conflict habits do you have that do not serve you or others well? What are you getting from holding on to them?

• What are your ‘hot buttons’? How come these are ‘hot’ for you?

• How much do you consider and take responsibility for your own contribution to disputes?

• To what extent do you regulate your emotions when you are in conflict?

• What are you gaining from blaming ‘the other person’ in your disputes, when you do?

• What is keeping you from letting go of old hurts that have a negative impact on one or more of your relationships?

• How else may you view your conflicts and ‘the other person’ so that you do not react in ways that are counterproductive?

• What keeps you from apologizing for your part of a dispute?

• For what do you need to ask forgiveness?

These are just some suggested questions to consider in your efforts to reflect on your own conflict competence and examine what gaps there may be in this area of your lives. I welcome your further suggestions.

Cinnie Noble, ACC, LL.B., LL.M. (ADR) is a lawyer-mediator and the Founder of the CINERGY® model of conflict management coaching. She hosts ICF’s Conflict Management Coaching Special Interest Group which holds monthly teleseminars on related topics. Cinnie’s website is www.cinergycoaching.com and she may be contacted at cinnie@cinergycoaching.com.

For your toolkit

If you are looking for a few tools to help grow your business, here are a few that are worth looking into:

Networked Blogs. Want to bring your blog to Facebook (and thus your Facebook followers) without using the Notes function? Networked Blogs is a Facebook app that allows you to promote your blog on Facebook and discover new blogs in the process. The neat part? You can set it up so when you update your blog, it automatically gets posted on your Twitter and Facebook feeds.

To use, simply click on “Go to the App” and then “Register a Blog.”

Another tip: You can add a Networked Blogs widget to your blog to show those followers who found you through Facebook.
Note: You will need a Facebook account to use this blog directory.
Access it here: http://www.facebook.com/networkedblogs

Google Alerts. Want to track what others are saying about you or your coaching practice? Google Alerts allows you to do just that. Came across a piece by Isabelle Bano that sums up how to use Google Alerts; check it out here.

You basically enter keywords that you want tracked (such as your name, your business name, your product name, your Twitter handle, your website, etc.). And then you determine the content (and frequency) you want to receive in these updates. Google Alerts will take it from there by monitoring news, blogs, and live feeds (like Twitter) and send you a comprehensive update.

Clientonomy suggests also including your coaching niche as a keyword.

Another tip: Isabelle suggests keeping track of competitors in this way as well.
Note: You will need a Google account to use Google Alerts.
Access it here: http://www.google.com/alerts

Google Analytics. Want to track how many people visit your website (including such details as average time on your site and how many pages per visit)? Google Analytics might be what you are looking for. This tool on the Google platform can show you your website traffic and will analyze the data for you.

This tool is a little more advanced and may require a bit more time to understand how to use it. Learn more about it here.

Another tip: If your blog and website are two separate entities, you can set them up in Google Analytics and keep track of traffic on both!
Note: You will need a Google account to use Google Analytics.
Access it here: http://www.google.com/analytics/.


Other cool tools:
Use namechk to see if your desired username is still available at many popular social networking sites.

Use bit.ly to a) shorten your links (for posting on sites where character limit is vastly important, such as Twitter) and to b) track your link traffic.

What are some of your must-use Internet tools?

Evoking Coaching Presence with Horses

• How do you bring yourself into presence in a coaching conversation?
• Where do you subtly disconnect, making your client an object upon which you act?
• What might open in your coaching conversations through sensing?

This year's advanced course in Presence-Based Coaching incorporates presence work with horses. Two intense days of indoor work on presence, coaching methods, and contracting skills preceded a day with Karen Head, of Equinection, who has developed a wonderfully nuanced and powerful way of facilitating the interaction between horses and humans.

Horses are being used widely to help leaders develop authenticity. Disparate methods all rest on the fact that as prey animals, horses are exquisitely sensitive to the state of the nervous system of a potential predator. Zebras (horses with stripes!) can tell instantly if a lion is hungry or just thirsty, scattering at the first hint of a hungry lion in the grass, and grazing placidly as the same lion, now simply thirsty, walks right through the herd to get to a watering hole.

Our bodies have the same exquisite sensitivity (after all, our ancestors were prey!) However, our fast pace and the requirement for cognition-intensive living have, for most of us, cost us access to the rich realms of sensation that are essential to our aliveness. Recovering this aliveness, and the presence and authenticity that comes with it, is part of the promise of coaching. Horses are simply another way in, instantly reflecting our inner state and inviting us to be authentic and present with them.

The centerpiece of the day is what Karen calls "the approach." Each coach has time in the ring with a horse. The horses respond to incredibly subtle changes in our nervous systems, often before we ourselves are aware of them.

When the human is present, available, in relationship, the horse responds. When the human is disconnected from herself, anxious without acknowledging it, or seeing the horse as an object or something to be manipulated, then the horse loses interest or moves away.

I experienced this with Karen and a huge powerful horse named Ceili. Being in the ring was complex for me; I have anxiety about horses from a scary experience when I was young. I wanted to be good at this horse thing. I wanted Ceili to come to me, and was afraid he wouldn't.

Ceili stood, ignoring me, seventy feet away on the far side of the ring. (Being ignored is my worst fear in life!) As I became aware of the emotion of vulnerability, and acknowledged that feeling to myself, Ceili turned, walked directly to me, and put his enormous head in my hands, resting his soft lips and nostrils (a horse's most vulnerable place) directly in the cradle of my hands. I wept.

Then, my physicist genes kicked in and I began to think of experiments. "What happens if I put my right hand on his cheek?" In that moment, I made the horse an object, and broke the spell. Ceili sensed the difference before I moved a muscle, and pulled his head back and away. When he showed me I'd left, I softened again, and his warm nose dropped back in my hands. That switch happened three times. (OK. Got it, Ceili! Thanks!)

Presence-Based Coaching rests on being fully present in the relationship. Our client is not someone we "put through our methodology." We do not experiment on the client to see how she will respond to this technique or that.

Rather, we enter each conversation mindfully. We are present with ourselves, aware of our emotions, our sensations, our thoughts as they arise and pass. We are connected to our client, sensing what is the right pace of approach, sensing when the biological organism that is our client is pulling back, when she is opening. We sense our connection, remembering it is the quality of the relational field that exists between us that allows coaching to happen.

Thank you, Ceili.

Posted by Doug Silsbee, PCC, author of The Mindful Coach, and leader of the ICF-approved Presence-Based Coaching training program. For other posts, or to comment on this one, visit http://dougsilsbee.com/blog/horses.

Getting Our Energy Work Together With Coaching

Congratulations! We completed ICF’s first Energy Work & Coaching SIG today. Thanks to all the coaches who participated and who stayed on the line despite the grueling sound effects.

One of the participants asked me to note the resources to which I referred. The big word today is embodiment. I linked embodiment and centered presence, which helps us expand our capacity to see, coach, heal. You can review the ICF core competence on Centered Presence. I have found that embodying oneself is crucial to learning how to work from an energetic, compassionate stance whether I am healing or coaching. 


Rhona Post, MCC



Becoming embodied is a commitment as it involves connecting with and learning from the sensations and stored memories in our bodies. My years of study with Dr. Richard Heckler, founder of the Strozzi Institute, provided the awareness and skill to learn how to stay centered, and how to find my way back when I was triggered by an event or emotion. With the somatic background, I can more easily presence myself energetically with clients. I have taken these skills into my healing work where I can move quickly and easily from my physical body to beyond my own physicality to work from my expanded capacity (energetic structure). 

I suggested reading and doing the exercises in Stuart Heller’s book, Retooling on The Run, as they open the door to a deeper awareness of the relationship between body, mind and spirit.

We’re all in different places on this continuum. The addition of a healing protocol helps me do the deep transformative work with clients. This kind of healer coaching is not for everyone. But my clients, whether executives or families, want clarity to end their suffering now!

Future SIG topics for Energy Work & Coaching include: Identifying and Working with a Person’s Emotional Drivers, Cultivating Body Awareness, How Coaches Use Intuition in Coaching, Healing: What it Means for Coaches and Clients. If you have a special interest in this topic, please e-mail me your ideas at rpost@thehealercoach.com. See you next month, March 21, the third Monday of the month, at 11:00 a.m. (New York) and each third Monday, thereafter.

For more information on Healer Coaching, contact Rhona Post, rpost@thehealercoach.com or www.thehealercoach.com.

We are ICF

To date, more than 18,000 coaching professionals from 100+ countries have chosen to be a part of the global community of the International Coach Federation.
 
Why? There are a possible 18,000 responses to that single question. Here’s one:

"Honesty and integrity are important to me. I can't imagine why I would want to be part of a profession and NOT be affiliated with the peer-review association for that profession. To me, it speaks to the value I put on coaching, the profession and holding myself to a higher standard. I also feel the community aspect is important, too. I really want to be engaged in my profession." —Tom Maher, ACC (United States)

A member of the ICF since 2010, Tom coaches musicians and performing artists and is a member of the Minnesota Coaches Association.

Other reasons people choose to be a part of the ICF will be shared in future blog posts.

Want to learn more about becoming a member of the ICF? Click here.