Executive Coaching - A Guide For The HR Professional.pdf

Charlie’s Story 145
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As time went on, I relaxed into the role of true journeyer—allowing
time for reflection, writing, and the emergence of inner voices. This
required my coach’s assistance in muting many of the old
“tapes” and assumptions that I held about the word and work. As an
ENTP, I am prone to tangential thinking. My coach allowed those tangents
but knew when to rein them in when they were becoming
counterproductive.
How would you describe the relationship with the coach?
Did it change over time? Where did it end up?
While I had known this man for many years, our relationship moved
to a new place right from the start. He generously shared insights
from his own journey that allowed me to anchor my own experience.
Since I walked into the experience with complete trust, that was not
an issue.
His knowledge of my past turned out to be a useful thing. In
my coachee mode, I was in a state of wanting to dismantle/forget
everything that had happened to me in the first half of my life. He was
able to help me confront the past in a productive way so I could
come to terms with it.
In the same way, he knew that I could get caught up in
the excitement of new ideas and was in a mode of devouring virtually
everything I read. Again, he set parameters here to keep me in
focus.
Initially, he asked excellent open-ended, exploratory questions.
As we moved though the process, I began to generate more and
more of my own questions and answers that he would help me dissect
to glean the essence from both. In the end, our relationship is
not fundamentally changed. Yet, I know him and he knows me on a
much deeper level. I think we simply became even better friends. But
at no time was the friend/coach line breached. The next time I feel
that I require the benefits of a coach, I would not hesitate to work with
him again.