More often than not, the answer is not a simple one. Whether it’s ourselves or our clients, changing jobs, habits, behaviours or beliefs which we have had for a lifetime, is one thing, but just making the decision to change can be torture. As a coach I became fascinated in the concept of decisional balance, as a simple(ish) way of seeing whether change was likely or not. I use it in my own reflections when I realise that I am…
We are living in uncertain times right now, but right now I am pondering a different type of uncertainty we grapple with, as OTs who coach. I started to read the Occupational Performance Coaching (OPC) book (mentioned above) and the following phrase jumped out at me: “Getting comfortable with (this) uncertainty has been a key part of the journey to becoming skilful at OPC” The uncertainty that Fiona Graham talks about is to do with an internal shift we need…
As a fairly driven person and having been trained to always look at SMART goals as an OT and later learning of the centrality of goals to coaching, I’ve now come to later life with an increasing realisation that this is only half of the story. This realisation has been more like a creeping awareness that however much I set myself goals and make plans, I seem to rarely achieve them, instead succeeding in other unintentional ways. (I do appreciate…
I often write about how coaching helps us tackle barriers to occupation, be they lack of confidence or self-belief, the lack of a congruent, desirable action plan or the need to un-earth perhaps unconscious drives/desires which scupper our well-intentioned plans. However, I am often still asked “is this occupational therapy?” or “am I being an OT if I coach?” or “if a client figures it all out through coaching, why do they need me?” Of course, these are all complex…
I treated myself to a new book before Christmas, which will come as no surprise to most of you. Unusually for me, as I prefer paper pages, it is an ebook called “The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology” by Gregg Krech. I am very interested in Japanese psychology and philosophy be it our own “Kawa Model” through to “Kaizen” as embraced in my creativity coaching. As Occupational Therapists we are pretty good at identifying actions with…
