She has been through a coaching and mentoring programme at one of our large financial institutions and has spent much time looking at improving her productivity, communication, time management and goal setting, and she has obviously spent much time on improving her leadership skills and by and large she has achieved well enough to have won many awards for her amazing results. In fact she finds that she now has more balance at work.
The problem is she finds that she has lost her creativity!
I was reminded of how powerful coaching can be. Of the risks that we take when we expect employees to partake in coaching programmes. How important it is that individuals go into coaching programmes with their eyes wide open.
Coaching brings about behaviour change, but we can so often be focused on what we want to improve that we don't focus sufficiently on what we do well. We don't look at the gifts we bring, like in this lady's case, the gift of creativity. She tells that she used to be a great lateral thinker and would easily hop up in the middle of a suit-filled meeting, haul out a white board and find a new product, path or solution to a problem right there and then. Now, even when pressed, she just can't find that creativity.
It certainly seems as if she has ended up masking her gift of creativity with the more cognitive behaviour changes she deemed necessary at the time of entering the coaching arena.
It's a bit like giving all your attention to the naughty dog until the one who is generally quite good starts acting up just to get noticed. Essentially a good coach will help you focus on the balance and if your balance sometimes comes from imbalance, that will be good too!
Debbie Engelbrecht is the CEO of Staff Training. She trains, coaches, and when she can find a moment, she blogs.
Contact Staff Training at info@StaffTraining.co.zaor call (021) 839 3021.