What is Self-Coaching?
Self-coaching is the process of learning guiding yourself towards personal and professional growth using introspective strategies and tools. It is about being your own coach, identifying your own goals, and overcoming obstacles without a professional coach’s direct involvement. This approach empowers leaders to cultivate self-awareness, resilience, and a proactive mindset, essential for effective leadership.
The presumption and coaching philosophy that we can solve our own problems better than we think has been supported with evidence from research studies for many years (Biswas-Diener & Dean, 2007).
Benefits of Self-Coaching
While coaching from a professional coach is more effective than self-coaching (Losch, Traut-Mattausch, Mühlberger, & Jonas, 2016; Sue-Chan & Latham, 2004) and is not intended to replace professional coaching interventions, self-coaching is a great additional resource that can highly help you:
- navigate challenges
- develop creative and constructive thinking
- significantly reduce procrastination
- cultivate high levels of self-regulation and self-motivation
- develop growth mindset
The limitation of self-coaching lies in the absence of support, feedback, and perspective of the professional coach in a self-coaching context, so the effectiveness of self-coaching may be subject to the degree of self-leadership skills inherent to the self-coachee (Losch et al., 2016) and the level of skill and presence of the below core components.
Competent self-leaders are usually more successful at self-coaching than individuals with low self-leadership skills.
Core Components of Self-Coaching
- Self-reflection and Inner Dialogue: While self-coaching you assume the role of both the coachee and coach. Develop this skill by setting aside regular time for self-reflection. Journaling your thoughts, feelings, and progress can provide valuable insights and track your development over time
- Constructive Thinking: The ability to solve problems in everyday life at a minimal cost in stress based on your cognitive productive/helpful and counterproductive/unhelpful automatic habitual thoughts, which affects your ability to think in a manner that solves the problems you face.
- The Use of Coaching Models: Coaching models help by providing structure to the coaching conversation and that the challenge is explored thoroughly and from different angles. There are various coaching models that you can use, two are explained in this article.
- Powerful Coaching Questions: Open questions that generate curiosity, stimulate reflective conversation and are thought provoking, surface underlying assumptions, invite creativity and new possibilities, generate drive and momentum, touch a deeper layer and meaning, and evoke more questions.
- Self-Leadership: The practice of understanding who you are, identifying your desired experiences, and intentionally guiding yourself toward them through value-based self-inspiration and self-goal setting. It spans the determination of what we do, why we do it, and how we do it.
Self-Coaching Models
- The GROW Model
The GROW Model is a popular coaching framework that stands for Goal, Reality, Options, and Will.
Here is how it works:
- Goal: Define what you want to achieve concerning the current challenge. Visualization can help you stay focused and motivated and so do vision boards.
- Reality: Assess your current situation and obstacle(s). Explore the current circumstances in relation to the desired outcome including strategies or solutions already tried and problems encountered.
- Options: Explore different strategies and courses of actions for reaching your goal.
- Will: The way forward, determine specific action steps and commit to an action plan. Use mind maps to visualize your actions and the steps you will take to achieve them.
- The Self-Coaching Model by Brooke Castillo (CTFAR)
This model involves five components: circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results (CTFAR). It is based on the premise that our thoughts create our feelings, which drive our actions, culminating in our results. Here’s a brief overview:
- Circumstances: The facts of your situation.
- Thoughts: Your interpretation of the facts.
- Feelings: Emotional responses to your thoughts.
- Actions: Behaviors influenced by your feelings.
- Results: The outcome of your actions.
Visual Aids to Enhance Self-Coaching
- Vision Boards: Use images, quotes, and affirmations to create a visual representation of your goals.
- Mind Maps: Organize your thoughts and action plans visually.
- Progress Charts: Track your goals and milestones with charts or graphs. Keeping track of your milestones and celebrating your successes, no matter how small reinforces positive behavior and builds momentum.
Conclusion
Self-coaching is a powerful tool that can transform you by fostering self-awareness and proactive thinking. By leveraging models like GROW and Castillo’s CTFAR framework, and by consistently asking insightful questions, you can navigate challenges effectively and achieve your personal and professional aspirations. Embrace self-coaching today and unlock your true potential!
