Coaches Corner with Lynne Cooper

1. Who or what inspired you to become a coach?
Judith Lowe of PPD Learning, who is an exceptional NLP trainer - and an exceptional human being!  Witnessing the quality of her attention, her curiosity and gentle but incisive questioning of individuals and the transformations that resulted, was the trigger.  Starting to work with people to change their thinking and achieve more felt like ‘coming home’.

2. What is your favourite thing about being a coach?
The wonderful diversity of people’s thinking, behaving, reacting and communicating that I have the privilege to work with.  Every person, every team, is unique and utterly fascinating – and provides me the challenge of working to best effect with each and every one of them.

3. What is the thing you find the most challenging as a coach? 
My coaching work is mostly within an organisational context, and my more challenging experiences have been working with individuals in organisational cultures that are disempowering, political or downright toxic. This can change the purpose of the coaching to self-care and survival (or managed exit) for the coachee rather than achieving career goals and reaching potential.
 
4. What’s the biggest lesson you have learnt in recent years? 
The power of being fully present, using silence and listening to enable the coachee to reflect deeply and uncover new thinking. And that it is really useful to sit, as the coach, with not knowing what to say, what to ask, or where to direct the coaching process next.
 
5. If you could wave a magic wand and have one wish for you or your coaching practice, what would it be and why?
My wish would be to increase the access to coaching across all aspects of society.  My mission with the Five-Minute Coach is to enable coaches to coach more quickly and effectively (albeit in longer than five minutes!) and create the time to reach more and more people with their work.