This is the first of a series of articles on how to coach on specific issues that often come up in coaching.
Essentially the skill of time management is to ensure that a certain number of tasks are completed within a certain period of time.
In terms of coaching time management is often the most common and basic topics that you have to coach on. It can also be very dry and boring so you have to use your presence, skill and resourcefulness to bring it alive for your clients.
First, let`s talk about how not to coach time management. Try not to:
- Lecture the client about how much time they are wasting
- Draw up a schedule for how they should spend their time
- Give them targets for what they should be doing and make them feel bad if they don’t achieve them.
- Make them do boring assignments that they will forget the moment you leave them alone.
All of these approaches are almost guaranteed to fail.
The opposite of this approach is to gently move the client from feeling at effect of all the events and issues they have to deal with to being in charge and responsible, even if everything is still not perfect.
Coach hint. One way to prepare yourself to coach another in time management is to do an inventory of how well you manage your own time. Consider how well you use your time and if you use tools like delegation and/or sub contracting effectively. Look at the items you avoid and if so what, stratagems have you developed to support yourself to face them. And what are your favourite time wasters? What do you do to avoid falling prey to them and how often does this work? If you do this work you will be in a much better position to help your clients in a practical way and also with integrity.
In this age of Facebook and instant messaging the way we can waste time and get distracted has increased exponentially. In fact our brains are being rewired to seek these kinds of instant rewards as we can see from this article. This makes it even more important that the coach and client work together on practical strategies that will support the client in change.
I would say that nearly everyone has some kind of problem with time management and it is one of most common areas where people feel shame and denial. Most people feel guilty about the fact that they are not using their time effectively or have let their task list grow out of control.
As a coach your role is to create a non-judgemental space for the client to tell the truth to you and create self-awareness.Once you have created this space you can then move onto helping the client.
The key to this next stage is to help the client manage their energy and not manage time.
We will show how to do this in the next blog.
The key is to use the right coaching software to learn skills fast and effectively…