Part 4 of a four part series By Gary B. Henson, Founder and President, BusinessCoach.com

Sponsored by:

This is the final segment in a four-part series looking at high impact possibilities that can affect a coaching mindset and add to leadership conversations. This issues looks at challenging the story.

Challenging the Story

Throughout this series we've looked at the different perspectives of leadership vs. coaching in order see how to use coaching as a leadership tool. Leadership focuses on trying to change an area of performance in an organization; coaching focuses on revealing why the key people in the organization actually believe that the area in question will never change! Which of those two conversations do you think is more critical?

Altering the perspective people have on change is more important than blindly pressing away at change for change's sake. Leadership focuses on changing performance. Coaching focuses on changing perspective first.

The way I train coaches to do this revolves around the concept of The Story. Every person has a set of stories that justify his or her life staying the way it is. These stories are a set of private and public justifications, reasons, explanations and fixed positions that make things stay the way they are, and stand in the way of our being effective. People have them and organizations have them.

We often trade the story for the results we intend. In fact, we rarely consider what would be possible if we were not limited by the story in a particular situation. This is the power and the tragedy of the story.

The Story always locates the source of what's happening as outside of us. It often focuses on making us right and looking good and others wrong. We accept the story as true; we are blind to it. We often skillfully sell the story to others until ultimately we are left with a life or an organization that is almost totally made up of, you guessed it, the story.

But the story has two deadly flaws. 1. It is not grounded in facts, but instead in untested assumptions. 2. The "story" never produces any action leading to change. Consequently, people and businesses governed by their unexamined stories never really work, they just struggle.

Coaching involves distinguishing what really happened (the facts) from the meaning people may have given to what happened (their story). It then requires those involved to take responsibility for creating the story. This taking on of responsibility frees them from the prison of the story.

As I said above, leadership focuses on changing performance. Coaching focuses on changing perspective, specifically the perspective on the story of why performance can't change. Injecting this difficult but always revealing discussion into a leadership conversation can clear the decks for quantum growth in performance.

Why not begin to look for the story in your next leadership challenge as a coach? Begin to ask questions of perspective before offering a prescription for performance. If you do, I predict a new level of breakthroughs for your clients and in your satisfaction in this great game of coaching.

This concludes our four part Coaching as a Leadership Tool Series
If you missed any parts of this series, you can find it on our website at www.choice-online.com, click on the Expert Series Button.

Feedback is welcome at ExpertSeries@choice-online.com

You can also Read Our Expert Series No. 1 HERE. __________________________________________

This email is sponsored by The International Coaching Consortium for Coaching in Organizations ICCO invites you personally to attend the 6th annual symposium, "Leveraging Cultural Differences in the Global World" being held Oct 11 - 13 in Toronto , Canada . There will be conversations about organizations and coaching and how they interrelate. For more details see www.coachingconsortium.org/events- 0507.html.

Visit choice, the magazine of professional coaching Website