What is Co-Active Coaching?

The Co-Active Training Institute has been around for 30 years and has trained over 65,000 coaches worldwide. The program has been certified by the International Coaching Federation which is the largest coaching accreditation organizations in the world. The Co-action training model is powerful because it challenges clients to declare their values, self-reflect, develop actions items, and commit to change. The model’s foundation is based on 4 guiding principles.

People are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole

The first principle is that people are naturally creative resourceful and whole. In the Co-active model, it is not the job of the coach to fix the client. The client does not need fixing. What the client needs is assistance defining who they want to be, support in identifying negative thoughts, strategies for tapping into internal motivation, assistance in identifying options for improving their current situations, and encouragement to hold themselves accountable for their goals.

Dance in the moment

The second principle is dance in this moment. This principle is rooted in the fact that coaching is not therapy. During coaching sessions, we will only lightly touch on the client’s past. The past is fixed and cannot be changed. Our focus and attention are on the future. During coaching sessions, coaches will talk about what is happening now, and coming up with strategies to help the client move from their current state to their desired goal.

Focus on the whole person

The third principle is focus on the whole person. In the co-active model, coaches examine a client’s life from nine different segments. Career, Family and Friends, Significant other/Romance, Fun & Recreation, Health, Money, Personal Growth and Physical Environment. The reason coaches focus on all these segments is that they are all interconnected. As a client works on one segment of their life, it is important to understand the impact that it is having on other areas.

Evoke Transformation

The final principle is evoke transformation. People work with coaches because they want to experience a change in their life that they have not been able to achieve on their own. Coaches are taught to hold space for clients, so that they can self-reflect, gain emotional intelligence, define their goals, establish and renew motivation and develop actions plans to improve their lives.

Within my coaching practice, my primary focus is helping leaders define what they want from their careers and developing strategies to help them grow. As a former corporate executive and small business owner I know the importance of surrounding yourself by people that push you to be the best version of yourself. I help clients transform by deeply listening to them, asking thought-provoking questions, and reflecting back to them the things I have heard. With the information, I affirm the client's identity, challenge thinking that does not serve them, encourage action, requesting commitments and act as an accountability partner.

In summary, the Co-active coaching model can be summarized as a coaching approach where a coach, helps clients to define who they want to be, and what actions they will take to transform from who they are today, to who they want to be. Part of the magic of the coaching process is clients having the ability to get personalized unbiased help. If you have never experience executive coaching, I encourage you to give it a try. It will likely be one of the first times in your life that you speak to someone for 45 minutes, have their undivided attention, and know that they are exclusively listening to you with the unbiased goal of helping you self-reflect and develop plans to improve your career or business.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

Influencing up: Gain more influence with your leader by building trust

Influencing up is an important skill to master. While there is tons of literature on leadership, there is not a lot on followership. Followership can loosely be defined as the ability to understand a leader's vision and help them bring it to life. Followership differs from leadership in that, as a follower, you have less organizational power, fewer resources at your disposal, and competition for your leader's attention. In this article, we will explore followership and how you can gain more influence with your leader by focusing on building trust.

Executing is the ticket of entry when it comes to influencing leaders.

Leaders of organizations must deliver results. They are held responsible for achieving organizational goals over anything else and must make difficult decisions around people, processes, and resources to achieve goals.

Leaders know that they have blind spots, so they rely on the people around them to give them data and insights to help them understand how business is going and the type of changes they need to make to maintain current performance and strive for improvement. The people they choose to trust and listen to will directly influence their ability to reach organizational goals.

For this reason, leaders tend to rely on employees who have proven records of delivering results and are reliable sources of information, insights, perspectives, and solutions. You must start by executing your role at a high level to gain more influence with your leader. Once you can do this, your focus should also expand to include helping your leader achieve their goals.

How do you become a trusted source?

It takes time to build a trusting relationship with your boss. It starts with you making small investments around being on time for work, doing the tasks that you are assigned, and consistently being forthright about challenges and obstacles. By executing what you are asked to do, you establish credibility with your boss. Over time, this creditability can grow into trust, which will provide opportunities for you to share your opinions, thoughts, and ideas.

Whenever your boss comes to you with a problem, and you can provide a solution, you expand your influence with your boss. Think of delivering results as being like building a bridge of trust. Each time you help solve a problem, another brink is laid, strengthening your relationship with your boss.

When you disappoint, fail to deliver, or provide inaccurate or hard-to-understand information, you damage a brink on your bridge. If you have a lot of bricks, a minor mistake will not disrupt the integrity of your bridge. But if your bridge does not have a good foundation, you could find yourself on shaky ground.

Communication matters

Once you have established a strong trust bridge, you can begin the process of influencing your leader. Having a good relationship is the first step in the process. The next step in the influence process is communicating brief, clear, and compelling information to your leader.

• Being brief is important because the higher your leader is in an organization, the more people pull on their time and attention. Your ability to summarize complex ideas into a 5 to 10-minute conversation is essential to getting your leader's attention and getting them to care about the information you have to share.

• Being clear is important because your leader likely does not have time to help you flush out your ideas or help you refine your logic. That is time and work, which can be seen as an additional problem to be solved instead of the solution you want it to be. Test your ideas with a trusted peer and ask them to help you refine your thinking before presenting a new concept, idea, or solution to your boss.

• Being compelling is important because there are always competing priorities and perspectives. Your idea needs to be better than others your leader is presented with. If you want buy-in, you must present solutions that feel like no-brainers because they are easy to understand and can provide a qualifiable benefit to your leader.

Summary

Building your followership skills is essential in growing your capability as a leader. It may seem counterintuitive, but all great leaders started off as great followers. Being a great follower can give you more face-time opportunities with your leader, greater influence within your organization, and incremental opportunities to take on important, high-profile work.

Being a great follower starts with executing your role at a high level and then providing insight and perspective that helps your leader and organization perform at a higher level.

One word of caution: not all leaders deserve great followers. Do your due diligence in identifying leaders to follow that align with your ethics, values, and beliefs. If you are going to go all in on supporting someone else success, you want to be confident that it will be a mutually beneficial relationship.

Share this article with a peer or an employee who would benefit from this message.

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Thank you for reading this blog

I am a father, husband, executive coach, and former retail executive. My coaching expertise comes from 21 years of leading operation, sales, and marketing teams. I understand what it is like to feel stuck, undervalued, and underappreciated.

I also know what it takes to invest in professional development, climb the corporate ladder, and find fulfillment at work.

Your career path is a scavenger hunt. Each opportunity prepares you for the next. Allow me the opportunity to help you clarify your path and accelerate your professional development.

Grow your career

Have Feedback Send me a note at

Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

Are You Ready for Performance Review Time

As we move into the 4th Quarter of the year, it is a great time to look at what you have accomplished so far this year and determine what action you want to take over the next 3 months to help you end 2022 strong. A lot of talent management decisions are made in the 4th quarter, so you want to finish the year strong to position yourself for opportunities in 2023. There is no time like the present to build some wins that can help your career advance. Locke & Latham (1991) state that three variables can impact an individual’s success achieving a goal, direction intensity and duration.

• Direction-the actions that are necessary to accomplish the goal

• Intensity-the amount of energy and resources required

• Duration-the time required

As you set your goals, it is important to be clear on what you are looking to accomplish, your current set of skills, the energy you must give, and the time you are willing to allocate. During my career the biggest variable that separated those that were successful from those that were not

• Was their clarity of goal

• Having realistic expectations

• Awareness of their strengths

• Willingness to solicit help

Before you define a goal to pursue, it is important to take inventory on your current skills, competencies, resources, time, and energy. By defining these, you are better able to set realistic goals. Research shows that establishing realistic goals is critical for maintaining motivation. For example, if you are a leader within an organization, and you are looking to improve employee retention in the 4th quarter, you want to start off with being clear about your goal. You can start with reviewing employee retention rates ytd. Next you can set a realistic target. It is helpful to bench market your performance compared to peers and competitors in the industry. Once you have this information, you can consider what skills, talent, time, and resources you can put towards improving employee retention.

As you determine your goal, it is important to identify what task you are currently doing that you can reduce or eliminate to make room for the future actions you will take. This is a critical step for preventing burnout, and ensuring you have the energy to accomplish your goal. Leaders often add new task, without eliminating previous task which is the first step to losing work-life balance. To move towards a new goal, we must move away from a previous one. Making this decision upfront will increase your odds of obtaining your goal.

Finally, think about who can help you in accomplishing your goal. Defining who will be involved in the pursuit of the goal, will help you to be realistic in what you can accomplish. Soliciting help, can aid you in accomplishing more, but will likely result in you moving slower at first. Consider whether you can accomplish the goal quickly on your own, or if you need assistance based on the complexity and scope of the goal. There is an old African saying that if you want to go fast, go by yourself, but if you want to go far, go with a group. In establishing your goal, know how far you want to go, how fast you want to get there, and who you want to bring along on the journey.

Once you have set your priority, benchmarked, established a goal, identified what resources you will shift towards your goal, and identified who you will partner with to accomplish the goal you are in a great position to start action planning. You have 3 months left in 2022 to make this a year to remember. Take a moment to reflect on what you have accomplished this year. Celebrate your wins, learn from losses, and establish a goal for ending 2022 strong.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

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References

1. Locke, Edwin & Latham, Gary. (1991). A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance. The Academy of Management Review. 16. 10.2307/258875