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June 05, 2008
Challenging the idea of "challenging goals"
During May, I facilitated the West London Co-Coaching Forum on behalf of the Association for Coaching. We had a good turnout in spite of heavy rainstorms and a couple of last minute cancellations because of ill health. Thanks to everyone who came and I think we put in a good evening's work.
Because of numbers, we agreed to work in two groups. In the group I was in, we decided to explore "how to set the client challenging goals". Here are some of my reflections as a result of our work.
We looked at how we might establish and agree on what constitutes a challenging goal for the client in terms of their development -- and if indeed this is what they are looking for. We discussed the importance of spending time exploring their view of what "challenging" means, and how we attend to this. We realised how easy it may be to continue with a coaching session, perhaps accepting "challenging" at face value, without probing its contextual meaning.
We also found that we needed to differentiate between meeting the client's need or aspiration for a challenging goal and establishing the specific session outcome. Does this too need to be "challenging" and if so, what does that mean?
One further reflection I have in all of this is how easy it is to make assumptions about and accept such expressions as "challenging goals". Who says that's appropriate anyway? And what happens if we don't agree "challenging goals"?
The next Chiswick Co-Coaching Forum meets on 10th June 2008 from 6.30-9.30pm. Dates to the end of 2008 are...
24th July
10th September
21st October
11th December
Posted by Alison at June 5, 2008 03:00 PM
