CHAPTER 6

BUILDING COACHING SKILLS: THE DIFFERENT APPROACHES

If Big Five coaching is the tree, then what baubles would you like to hang on it? If any? Some people think all trees, including this one, are beautiful in their own right and leave it well alone; they coach using the core elements of contracting, GROW, listening, etc. and do good work. Others add so many baubles and ornaments the tree groans under their weight. Others again just set a single star atop the tree – an approach or guru who illuminates their coaching.

This chapter sets out some of the possibilities, so you can decorate your own tree, or not, as you wish. There are countless different options, so I have grouped them into:

1. 1other coaching models; then approaches from:
2. 2sport;
3. 3psychology;
4. 4neuro linguistic programming (NLP); and
5. 5business – then finish with . . .
6. 6a bit of fun – what are the ‘Top Ten Tools’ in business coaching?!

1. Other coaching models

GROW encompasses so much under its deceptively simple headings that, if you can master that, you have a firm foundation for your coaching. But it is not the only core model in town. Others include:

• ●CLEAR

  Similar to GROW, Peter Hawkins’ CLEAR model structures a session around Contracting (good!); Listening; Exploring; Action; and Review. For more, see www.renewalassociates.co.uk.

• ●Co-Active

  The Co-Active approach has inspired many thousands of coaches around the world. Though not primarily focused on business, it has much to offer us, from its techniques, to its insistence on equality between coach and coachee. See https://coactive.com.

• ●Solution-focused

  A completely different approach, with deep roots in scientific psychology, is ‘Solution-focused coaching’, best accessed by the book of the same name by Anthony Grant, the founder of the world’s first University-based Coaching Psychology Unit, at the University of Sydney in Australia. Many books, articles and online materials followed, and it is now a sub-field of coaching in itself.¹

• ●Metaphor

  Looking through my bookshelves, I came across an old friend, which powerfully influenced my coaching in early days, but I had forgotten: Gareth Morgan’s salutary and beautiful Images of Organization.² One of the problems of the cognitive load I mentioned in Chapter 1 is we, and our clients, develop habitual patterns to cope – we see the world through a particular lens, and aren’t even aware of it. Morgan’s work helps us grasp that what we thought of as truth may just be habit: we are just thinking, like all the other lemmings, in the over-arching metaphor of our time.

There are countless more models,³ but now let us turn to:

2. Sport

The image of the tree applies perfectly to the main originators of business coaching in the UK, Sir John Whitmore, Tim Gallwey, and colleagues. On the surface, they look like, and were, high-performance sportspeople: Sir John Whitmore was a successful racing car driver, winning the European Saloon Car Championship in 1965;⁴ Graham Alexander was junior tennis champion and Myles Downey a world top-100-level tennis player. In the succeeding generation, Adrian Moorhouse won Gold at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and Alison Gill is a not once but three-times Olympian.⁵

But underneath that surface glitter, there is a lot of tree. For some of them it is Big Five – indeed they invented part of it. Others, particularly in the second generation, have blended in aspects of peak performance sports science. Tim Gallwey, as we see below, trained as a Harvard psychologist; Adrian Moorhouse co-founded his business Lane 4 with sports scientist Professor Graham Jones; and Alison Gill, a behavioural psychologist, co-founded board effectiveness consultancy Bvalco.

Someone once said to me, in marketing you ‘sell the sizzle not the sausage’. Their high-performance sports achievements gave many of the early leaders in European business coaching great sizzle, but their work has longevity because of its substance.

The ‘Inner Game’ approach

The ‘Inner Game’ approach may not have been the absolute beginning of the field (scattered references to business coaching go back far earlier in the century) but it gave it a major boost. The first Inner Game coaching training was run in the UK in 1979 at the initiative of Sir John Whitmore, who had trained with Tim Gallwey in California.⁶ Gallwey in turn trained originally as an educational psychologist at Harvard, actually taking classes with the founder of modern behaviourism B.F. Skinner. But while Skinner and his pioneering colleagues to some extent regarded the mind as a ‘black box’ with which one needn’t concern oneself, explaining behaviour and development in other ways, Gallwey’s approach is the complete opposite: he encourages us to look within for radically improved performance.

One concept from Gallwey that many business coaches find useful is his distinction between ‘Self 1’, the inner critic who can hold our performance back, and ‘Self 2’, the natural ability to perform which if allowed to operate freely (i.e. unimpeded by Self 1) can lead to peak performance. The task of the coach is first to help the client to understand the concepts and see them operating in themselves, and then to develop techniques to allow Self 2 to be in play more often and at key moments. For more, see his classic The Inner Game of Tennis.⁷

Sports science

The Gallwey approach, though formative, has not been tested empirically, but mainstream sports science does infuse the work of many other executive coaches. Business psychologist Alison Hardingham co-authored her book The Coach’s Coach⁸ with three leading sportsmen, including Mike Brearley, former England cricket captain and subsequently a psychoanalyst. Graham Jones was professor of Elite Performance Psychology at Bangor University in Wales and has published on the psychology of high achievers (HAs), whether in sport or in business. In a very useful article⁹ he outlines in clear and easily remembered terms how a coach has to adapt to work successfully with them. He lists common characteristics of HAs, including being ‘self-focused; goal-driven; demanding; a sponge for information’, and how coaches must respond: lack of ‘ego’ in the coach; delivering rapid results; and providing detailed and instant feedback: ‘They are not afraid of feedback. They are more open than non-HAs to you watching them, warts and all.’¹⁰

This is a vast field, still with enormous untapped potential for business and leadership coaching. The best way into it is the fascinating chapter in Bruce Peltier’s book, The Psychology of Executive Coaching, which includes sections on thorny issues like drive, and learning from defeat, as well as practical techniques such as working with video feedback, plus a good list of references for more.¹¹

3. Psychology

Psychology too offers a great wealth of approaches to business coaches. The few examples discussed here, to whet your appetite, are:

• ●professional ethos;
• ●how people change; and
• ●Positive Psychology.

Professional ethos

Of all the gifts psychology can give us as business coaches, perhaps the most valuable is the least obvious. It’s not one of the many approaches discussed below, though they are useful: it’s the professional ethos inculcated over years of training, supervised practice, and peer expectation. Without it being explicitly spelled out, neophyte psychologists pick up strong tacit messages. For example, never over-claim. Be crystal clear about your boundaries and, if something is not within your proper field of training and practice, refer it on. And most valuable of all: don’t necessarily believe what you’re told. Instead of accepting the ‘presenting issue’ at face value, psychologists are taught to build into their quotes for work, sufficient time at the outset to conduct their own analysis of what is going on, in order to come up with their own thoughtful proposed solution.

Putting it another way, in terms of the Big Five, they are taught to be exceptionally strong at contracting, in its broadest sense. (And they’re also very strong on psychometrics/assessment, but that has a chapter all to itself: Chapter 7.)

When it comes to the approaches themselves, there is a super-abundance of choice. In addition to the Whitmore and Gallwey humanistic approaches touched on above, ‘psychodynamic’ psychologists offer us, for example, insight into resistances and defences that may block change; behaviourists challenge us to take close account of what might be reinforcing existing behaviour, and how to structure and reward detailed steps for improvement; cognitive psychologists specialise in thinking, attention and memory; health psychologists have salutary things to say about the need for exercise and proper hydration if our clients (and we!) are to remain at our peak. And so on.¹²

There’s so much, it could be overwhelming, but fortunately there is help at hand: Carol Kauffman’s ‘PERFECT’ model below herds it all into useable shape. But before that, I must mention one other indispensable tool: James Prochaska’s insight, from health/clinical psychology, into how people actually bring about change.

How people change

An important addition to the Big Five that most business coaches will want for their tree is a way of dealing with change, whether for themselves, their clients, their teams, their organisations, or indeed their world.

Science doesn’t yet have a definitive prescription for how we can make people change. (Good!) But one approach, Prochaska’s Stages of Change model, was originally developed to help people succeed at a very difficult task: giving up smoking, where people are battling not just the usual challenges of any behaviour change but also physical nicotine addiction.¹³ Since then the model has spread far afield including to business coaching, where it can make a significant difference in coaching clients through tough change. It is described in more detail in Chapter 11, but I mention it briefly here to prompt consideration of a change tool to add to your tree.

The Prochaska approach has five stages at its core (plus relapse, which can happen, and success, which he calls ‘permanent exit’ – i.e. from the cycle). The five at the heart of the model are:

• ●pre-contemplation;
• ●contemplation;
• ●preparation;
• ●action;
• ●maintenance.

For more detail, including coaching questions for each stage, see Chapter 11.

Positive Psychology^*

^* Initially this American term was unpalatable to some in Europe: too ‘rah rah’. With the passing of time we’ve perhaps now become used to it, but if it still sticks in your craw, think of it instead as ‘functional psychology’, an appropriate balance to psychology’s hitherto focus on dysfunction.

The relatively new field of Positive Psychology (PP) – which is not ‘positive thinking’ but rather the science of successful function and peak performance – has brought a burst of energy, research and tools onto the coaching scene. It was developed by the distinguished scientists Martin Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. They noted psychology in its first 100 years had focused on pathology, or what’s wrong with people, and much had thereby been achieved to help relieve suffering. But they wanted to balance that with comparably rigorous research on the remaining 95 per cent of society who aren’t mentally ill, to help them develop and strengthen what’s right: character, strengths, the sound and the positive in individuals, organisations and societies. PP does not advocate a simple switch from negative to positive, but simply to get back to a balanced analysis of people and situations.

Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi raised vast amounts of research funding, because the topics being researched – peak performance, character strength, resilience – are attractive to corporate donors who see them as providing competitive edge. The result is large-scale research studies on myriad aspects of optimal human functioning, and for the first time coaches are at the forefront of the researchers’ minds, as Seligman has identified coaching as one of the core delivery mechanisms for bringing about personal, organisational and societal change. Hence downstream from the research we are beginning to see an outpouring of scientifically validated tools and interventions developed specifically for our and our clients’ needs.

In this section there are just three examples of PP tools of potentially considerable use to business coaches, the second and third of which were developed explicitly for coaching by Harvard Professor Carol Kauffman. They are:

• ●Flow;
• ●4 steps to confidence;
• ●the PERFECT model.

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, now Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University in the USA, and formerly of the University of Chicago, has spent a lifetime researching how people attain optimum performance – the best that the individual can achieve, often way beyond what they can do in their normal state. He calls it ‘Flow’; others refer to it as ‘optimal experience’ or being ‘in the zone’.¹⁴

Many people have experienced flow in their work or personal lives. One client said to me a little sheepishly, that for him it’s building spreadsheets. He can develop them for hours, working even late into the night, with total accuracy, drawing in the complexities, fluidly and fluently building piece by piece. For others, flow comes more often outside work, in sport or hobbies: negotiating a difficult rock climb, or being part of a demanding choral performance. Many people report experiencing flow while skiing – can you think of such times in your own life?

Csikszentmihalyi’s research also uncovered what it takes to get into this highly productive state. His teams used technology to contact thousands of participants around the world at random times. When their pager or phone bleeped, people reported back on what precisely they were doing in that moment, and how they felt. Csikszentmihalyi extracted from the millions of data points generated the occasions when people reported performing at their peak, and analysed them to reveal nine conditions of Flow. Armed with this knowledge, we and our clients can get into the flow state more often and more ‘at will’.

The nine conditions of flow, and a little more about each, are described in the box below.

The first four are the most important for coaches. These are in fact what I call the preconditions of flow: the things that need to be in place before it happens – the things we can make more likely through coaching.

The next four are outcomes, or what happens in the brain in flow. You’ll see many processes, even those we think are core, are put by the brain into ‘quiet mode’ so that our concentration on the task or activity in hand becomes almost total.

So far so good: there are four conditions of flow we can help clients set up more regularly, the flow state then happens, with four conditions showing you’re there. But the final condition is the sting in the tail: flow happens only when we are doing something we find inherently interesting! Does this mean all those people who don’t really like their work are doomed never to be in flow, only ever in the ‘zone’ outside work, in their hobbies – is it pigeon-fancying forever? Or can coaching also help with this ninth condition?

4 steps to confidence

My colleague Professor Carol Kauffman, the founder/executive director of the Institute of Coaching at Harvard, is one of the world’s leading scientist-practitioners in the field. She has developed both of the next two tools discussed here, the ‘4 steps to confidence’ approach and the PERFECT model.

Whatever you call it – confidence, self-belief, self-efficacy, ‘Imposter Syndrome’, ‘fear of being found out’ – it is astonishing how many of our senior business coaching clients, and us, are held back by it. Sometimes, with the ‘insecure overachievers’ the top management consultancies notoriously seek to recruit, it has positive benefits, driving people to work and achieve at almost super-human levels. But for others, lack of confidence holds them back from achieving their full potential.

For these people, and more particularly to equip the business coaches working with them, Carol has combed the best research and distilled it down into four simple but soundly evidenced steps to build this crucial resource up to the levels our clients need. The approach is described further below.

1 Reverse the focus

The brain is hardwired to negativity, but focus on what’s wrong engenders anxiety, which limits optimal thinking. The research is clear that positive emotion leads to more productive outcomes: but because of the hard wiring, we have to make a constant effort to switch our focus to it. (And back: the negative needs to be dealt with as well, but in balance.)

So step 1 is for the client to reverse the focus as often as possible, and the coach to model and support this.

2 Enhance positive emotion

Positive emotion is a resource that buffers people from stress and increases health, well-being and level of function. In particular, positive emotion has been shown to enhance performance in many areas, building cognitive, emotional and physical resilience. This links with step 1: if clients (and indeed coaches) reverse the focus on a regular basis they are by definition spending more time in a positive state. For more on how to build positive emotion, and many good exercises to use in coaching, see Martin Seligman’s seminal books, and TED talks.¹⁵

3 Play to strengths

True confidence builds, securely grounded in reality, if we play to our strengths. Again the coach can assist by helping the client identify their own unique combination of strengths (see Chapter 7), then encouraging/reminding/setting ‘homework’ tasks so clients use them more often.

4 Develop hope and access Flow states

One of the strongest predictors of success and overcoming adversity is having hope. Cognitive research into hope has broken it down into two clear aspects: ‘Will’ power, and ‘Way’ power. The first is self-efficacy, or the sense that ‘I can’ and the second encourages people to identify multiple pathways to a goal.

One core way to build self-efficacy is to use the preconditions of Flow (see above), particularly ensuring the right balance between challenge and skill. ‘Way’ power is about routes to achievement. First, it is useful to understand that paths to success are not necessarily linear. For example, when climbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, at some points it feels like you are walking downwards (and you are!) but you are in fact still making progress up towards its summit. (The French call this, reculer pour mieux sauter.) Second, the research indicates successful people have on average around six possible pathways to reach their goal. So not just 1 (because if that is blocked, they’re stuck) – but not 12 either, or they’d be running round in circles. Pathways thinking means coaches should help clients (in ‘O’ of GROW for example) generate enough serious ways of getting to their objective that they have several real alternatives, but not too many.

The PERFECT model

Already the potential toolkit for business coaches is brimming over – and there’s more to come in this book, and infinitely more in all of what you already know, have tried, experienced, been taught and just picked up along the way. With this abundance, and particularly when working with challenging complex clients, or at speed, or under pressure, it can sometimes be difficult to keep a clear focus on precisely which approach to use.

PERFECT is a mnemonic. It isn’t a tool in itself: it’s a toolkit, or somewhere you can store and organise tidily away all the things you use. (In England, we’d call it a shed.) It brings together many different insights and approaches – see Figure 6.1.

The suggestion is that one works from the bottom up. This is not sacrosanct, but it does make sense, even if just as a useful check for the coach to run through in their mind at a key decision point.

Physical

The foundation for everything else: what from their medical or genetic history, or in their current physical or mental health, nutrition, level of exercise, etc. is affecting the client’s performance? It may even be something as simple as drinking enough water; insufficient hydration causes a very sharp performance decline. Business coaches seldom venture into such domains: we don’t feel qualified. But Carol has done us a service with the reminder that the solution can just be good coaching questions, such as:

• ●Given what you know about yourself, what do you need to address on a physical level to optimise your performance and energy?
• ●What would you need to have in place to regain your sense of physical vitality?
• ●What activities energise you?

Figure 6.1 The PERFECT model

© Copyright Carol Kauffman, All Rights Reserved; reproduced with permission.

Environment

The context matters – we say much more about this in Chapter 9. What systemic or cultural factors and forces do coach and clients need to be aware of? Overt ones include governance and legislative requirements and those of key stakeholders and constituencies, less obvious might be where the power lies, and cultural differences.

Relational

What matters in interpersonal relationships for this particular coaching contract? The coaching relationship itself is a tool some coaches use to help the client: for example, when a client is using a coaching session to do a ‘dry run’ of a board presentation: ‘I’m suddenly feeling confused – it may just be me, but are you making too many points at once here?’ Or the client’s interpersonal needs, as revealed by the FIRO-B® tool (see next chapter) might be key. Or there may be a conflict management issue – there often is! In which case plain coaching just to tease out the real issues to clarity; mediation skills; and/or the Thomas–Kilmann instrument (see https://eu.themyersbriggs.com) can all be useful.

Feelings

Emotions matter; the whole ‘rational markets’ theory of economics has crashed, for failing to take account of human non-rationality. ‘Behavioural economics’ is growing in its stead, but in my view still fails to comprehend fully the deep powerful forces of emotion in individuals, teams and organisations. There is an enormous amount here: one simple beginning, Carol suggests, is for a coach to raise their own awareness of emotional triggers and contagion: which emotions can you observe in a client, yet remain fairly detached, and which ones ‘hook’ you? For example, you might realise you can work with a client who is often anxious, without picking it up, but find a depressed mood or state more contagious. Supervisors can often be very useful in helping identify these patterns and work with them. They might question, for example, if the feelings are soundly based, or the right size for the situation.

Effective thinking

Coaches are often already very alert to this, and GROW helps structure it; what other techniques do you have to help clients broaden and sharpen their thinking? One might be MBTI (see next chapter) which is officially a personality instrument, but can also be seen as a tool for understanding (and hence being able to work with) cognitive style, i.e. habitual thinking patterns.

Continuity

The past, the present and the future – how does each of them impinge on the current coaching topic? While much of coaching is about building towards the future, something in the past may be affecting the present situation more than we realise. With regard to the present, we can help clients raise their awareness of the here and now through mindfulness training and techniques.

Transcendence

Meaning, purpose, reason for existence, mission: again, as for ‘physical’ at the bottom of the pyramid, coaches may shy away from this. Or they may feel it is too ‘airy-fairy’ for coaching. But there is a gathering evidence base in science^* that performance is enhanced when goals are intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated, i.e. when they are linked to what the person deeply values. The VIA Strengths Inventory (see next chapter) offers a practical route into this, as five of its ‘Strengths’ (appreciation of beauty and excellence; gratitude; hope; and humour, as well as spirituality) are aspects of transcendence. If a client happens to have one of these as a core strength, coaching could consider how best to play to it.

^* For example, in Self-Determination Theory (SDT); Kauffman, C. (2010) ‘Editorial’, Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, Vol. 3, No. 2, September, pp. 87–98.

(For more on PERFECT, see Carol’s several YouTube videos on the subject.¹⁶)

Here end the brief dips into some potential approaches from psychology to add to your Big Five coaching. If they whet your appetite for more from this vast field, try Diane Stober’s Evidence Based Coaching Handbook¹⁷ or Bruce Peltier’s The Psychology of Executive Coaching.¹⁸

4. NLP

While Positive Psychology is the established new field, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is the problem child of business coaching: people love it or loathe it. Some, including many life coaches and some business coaches, are zealous advocates; others, including some buyers, are wary or even hostile.

Caution is to some extent justified as the NLP world can on occasion have a ‘cultish’ whiff to it and some of its advocates have been known to overclaim. And it is true that while it was originally based on sound cognitive-behavioural psychology of the 1970s and 1980s, it has long since sailed off in its own little boat far away from the scientific world, and hence also out of reach of mainstream psychology’s checks and balances of empirical research, ethical guidelines and peer review.

However, it is included in this book for two reasons: first, it’s out there in the market and one might need to take a view on it. Second, and more importantly, carefully used, it has many useful tools and insights to offer coaches.

Language

One key NLP demand is that we pay much more precise attention to language. In normal conversation, if we hear an acronym or a term we don’t understand, the social convention is to say nothing, pretend to know it, and keep listening hoping it will become clear. This is not appropriate in coaching: one has to have the courage to say ‘I’m sorry I didn’t understand that term, could you explain it please’. This may be helpful for the client too because in truth they don’t understand it either; or if through your challenge they realise they are in the habit of using jargon others may not follow. NLP also cautions us to stay particularly alert to parts of speech, such as generalisations (‘this always happens’; ‘everyone says’) which can mask considerable lack of precision.

Visual, auditory, kinaesthetic

Another useful concept from NLP draws a distinction between people with ‘visual’, ‘auditory’ or ‘kinaesthetic’ preferences. The NLP world claims that approximately 70 per cent of us have a visual preference, with the balance mostly auditory, and a small percentage kinaesthetic.^* Each has a preferred vocabulary – ‘I see what you mean’; ‘so, without wanting to put words in your mouth . . .’; ‘my gut feel on this is . . .’.

^* Science disagrees, saying perception is vastly more complex – true, but in practice I have on occasions found this ‘rule of thumb’ very useful.

Again, the value is being made aware and on the alert. Many people with the majority ‘visual’ preference, for example, who can imagine clearly in pictures and use visual words, find it hardest to communicate naturally with those with a minority kinaesthetic preference, i.e. those who, according to NLP, process primarily using their feelings, or physical sensations. Making a conscious effort to adjust their language to that of feelings and physical sensations can improve matters very quickly.

If you wish to explore NLP further, a good place to start might be Sue Knight’s book, NLP at Work,¹⁹ and courses on the approach abound. (This, indeed, is another of the positives of NLP – it has taken cognitive/behavioural approaches to a far wider audience than would have been reached by academic psychology alone.)

5. Business

New friends are exciting, but old friends are true. So when seeking to identify your own particular suite of approaches to coaching, don’t forget the ones you had already: perhaps a deep understanding of strategy, or doing business in China, or the particular complex culture, jargon, promotion and equity structures of the legal sector.

This is hard for us to see: we take it for granted as it has always been there. But it is crucially important as it is often this shared experience that wins us the initial trust to coach. Whatever our particular background is – private equity, manufacturing, FMCG – it gives us a general business understanding that an outsider doesn’t have. We know the broad rules, the jargon, the structures and the no-go areas. If, for example, a client mutters, ‘this is getting towards being a matter of advice to the Stock Exchange’, we realise the gravity of what they are saying. We know the rules, the pecking order, some of the unseen codes, pressures and pleasures. This tacit knowledge gets us in the door, enables us to pass the initial ‘sniff test’ with prospective clients.

And as well as that wealth of tacit knowledge, people whose careers have been in business, in public sector organisations or as entrepreneurs, also have a plethora of explicit tools as well, perhaps for business planning, post-merger integration, employment law, succession planning, financial analysis, or whatever it may be. That sense of ‘this person understands’ is a powerful beginning to good business coaching, and the approaches and tools you brought to your enquiry into coaching, may in the end be just as important a part of your ‘tree’ as anything new you learn. Furthermore, there is your own individuality: ‘Big Five’ is different in your hands from anyone else, and your unique background and personality may be exactly what a particular client needs.

Ah, personality: that is a chapter to itself, and we go on to consider this in Chapter 7.

But first, a little fun to finish off with and to draw the threads together: my personal list of the ‘Top Ten Tools in business coaching’. It’s not definitive, everyone’s list will be different, but rather it is to provoke your thinking: what is your list to be?

6. Top Ten Tools for business coaching

1. Silence

Silence can be companionable – waiting while the coachee thinks something through, both of us relaxed. Or it can be assertive: they know I am going to sit it out for their answer. But it is top of my list for a third reason; consistently allowing a tiny gap after the coachee speaks yields gold on those occasions when they breathe in and say, ‘actually . . .’.

2. Big Five

See Chapter 5.

3. MBTI

The most widely used method for calibrating how best to adjust to each new coaching client, but not the only one; some coaches use a Strengths approach. For both, see the next chapter.

4. Spark

The unique personality and business background of the coach. This differentiates us from coaching machines: some unexpected spark of our individuality might be exactly what the client needs to help the work along.

5. Ryan and Deci

Builds motivation: see Chapter 11.

6. 4 steps to confidence

See above.

7. Prochaska

See Chapter 11.

8. Ibarra

See Chapter 10.

9. Flow

Another trusted standby: whenever there is a block to progress, one good place to start is the first four steps of Flow – and often one need go no further than the first, ‘balance between challenge and skill’. With the world changing so fast, many business people are just not equipped with the skills they need to tackle their many challenges. No one but a coach is going to voice that; doing so can be very liberating.

10. PERFECT

Good for integrating all our other approaches, and as a check we’ve not forgotten anything essential.

Got all that?! Now let’s look at it from a totally different perspective, that of individual variation.