This post will make the most sense if you understand that it is part of The Leader 101 Course: Cultivating Habits of Highly Effective Spiritual Leaders
- Lesson One (June 2015). Cultivating the habit of joy
- Lesson Two (July 2015). Cultivating the habit of praying 10:2b
- Lesson Three (August 2015). Cultivating the habit of looking expectantly for 10:2b answer
- Lesson Four (September 2015). Cultivating the habit of carrying people (especially 10:2b answers) in your heart.
- Lesson Five (October 2015). Cultivating the habit of shepherding your flock.
- Lesson Six (November and December 2015). Cultivating the habit of interactive gratitude.
- Lesson Seven (January and February 2016). Cultivating the habit of attention paying
- Lesson Eight (March 2016). Cultivating the habit of gentile curiosity (Coaching)
*Watch the video and then continue with the assignments below the video (click on the picture to watch this video).
Coaching?
The word “coaching” can have many different meanings depending on the context. Here’s how we, in the LK10 Community, are using the word…
Coaching is one person helping another by asking meaningful questions and listening deeply with gentile curiosity.
Review
- At the heart of the LK10 Community is a characteristic of our God that is vitally important but often overlooked. That characteristic is prevenience which means that He is always at work before we show up.
- Once we understand prevenience, it becomes clear that our first goal, for ourselves and others, is to become “radical attention payers”. The skill set called “coaching ” gives us practical tools to do just that.
- Coaching refers primarily to listening deeply to one person. Facilitating is the word we use to describe listening deeply to a group. (That’s our next topic in Leader 101.)
Three great coaching tools
Experiment with these tools and see which ones work best for you. Share what you learn with your CO2 partner, your house church and your Leader Team.
- BLUR. This is one of the tools Tim talks about on the video. It’s one that he developed to improve his listening skills. Believe. Listen. Understand. Restate.
- GROW. Tim also talks about this tool on the video. It’s a tool that is widely used. See this Wikipedia link for more information. (Also includes a great story about how Tim Gallwey used this tool to help tennis players improve their game.)
- DRAWN. Developed by Dr. Kent Smith, this tool draws more directly on both the desires of our heart and the direction of the Holy Spirit in the process of coaching. D (Describing Desire), R (Reviewing Resources, A (Ask God), W (Weighing Ways) and N (Naming the Next Step.) To learn more about this process go to this link. Then, follow the two links at the bottom of that page.
Why coaching?
In the LK10 Community, we have a high value for seeing people (starting with our own lives) become “conformed to the image of Christ” (Rom. 8:29). We believe that becoming clear about what God is initiating in our lives and, then, becoming clear about how to join Him in what He is doing, is the pathway to this kind of transformation. And, coaching, is a powerful tool for helping each other on this journey.
Our goal is that all of the leaders in LK10 would be growing in the skill of coaching. And, that they would be modeling and teaching this skill to those they are working with. One aspect of a really healthy house church is that many or most of it’s members are effective a listening deeply to each other. We call this “developing a culture of coaching”.