Coachable Moments and Personal Vision

Coaching with Compassion: Key Takeaways

"Helping People Change" by Richard Boyatzis, Melvin Smith, and Ellen Van Oosten focuses on the idea of positive emotion attractors, which help people to thrive and flourish. By keying in on this aspect of emotional intelligence, coaches can help people creating lasting change in themselves. Having a vision, however, is essential to the process of personal long-term change. Companies can facilitate change in workers by relying on personal and professional coaches who understand this key principle. By embracing coachable moments, and offering safe spaces for reflection and openness, coaches can help people to reach the ideals they hold for themselves.

One of the key takeaways of the book is that when coaching is done with compassion, clients will be able to reaffirm and articulate their own personal vision. This will include being able to identify, understand, and express their personal dreams, ambitions, goals; knowing what their true passion is and how to live it; having a sense of purpose and embracing their values. Following this, change must occur: thoughts, feelings, and actions will all change to be more aligned with the dream, passion, vision, and ideals that the person comes to have. This change, moreover, will be positive in that it moves the individual that much closer to realizing the personal vision. Finally, this will all culminate in the maintaining of a resonate relationship with the coach and with other people in one’s support network.

Another key takeaway is that the coach should not focus on the gap or the problem that needs fixing, but rather on the personal vision—for it is from the vision that people are more likely to draw sustaining strength and energy. When one merely focuses on the gap preventing one from getting to the goal, one typically comes up with very little energy to close that gap. The long-term vision, on the other hand, can sustain a person through the change process so long as one focuses on it daily.

Coaching for compliance might help a person achieve a short-term goal but it does not, according to the authors’ research, facilitate long-term change. But by coaching with compassion, i.e., helping the person discover the different ways he or she would like to change and helping the person come up with the process to change and supporting them with positive encouragement along the way, a coach can bring about long-term change. That is the overall goal.