00:00:00 Welcome to episode 749 of the inspired, a stewardship podcast. I'm Shannon miles from ballet. I challenged you to discover your calling and find your third option, so you can be empowered to live every day to the fullest. One way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stuartship podcast with my friend and Scott Mader. Because the truth is everyone loves learning,
00:00:31 but nobody really likes being taught people. Don't like to be lectured to. They don't like to be told what to do, but they love to be able to find their own way through. They love to be able to solve their own problems. And that's one of the reasons that polling often helps a client make more progress. I tell coaches all the time,
00:00:51 I don't want to pull a welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact.
00:01:24 And today's episode about developing your influence through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about why coaching can be a push or a pull for people. How coaching is often more pull than push and why that matters for you and the progress that you want to make. You've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books.
00:01:47 But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible. Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via audible. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible
00:02:16 to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast. One of the big arguments, and probably even, I would say misconceptions about coaching is that coaching can only take on one form that there's one right way to coach all people in all situations. And I would argue that coaching is a broad set of skills or tools in a toolbox that can take on many different forms depending on the needs of the client and the specific situation or topic that you're coaching.
00:02:52 In. In fact, I would kind of put coaching in a continuum where at one end is what I call pure coaching. You're asking questions and you're doing much of the, what a lot of people would consider kind of emotional conversations. And you're helping people through being nonjudgmental. And you're kind of holding things open and, and that's a valuable form of coaching.
00:03:15 It's actually very helpful in many situations. And then all the way at the other end is when you act more as a consultant, where if a client has a specific problem, you come in with a specific set of tools or a specific solution or a specific technique and teach them how to implement that technique. And it solves the problem along that same attitude.
00:03:37 What I've begun to take on as a frame is this idea of pushing and pulling as a coach. I've seen Jennifer Hall, who's an executive coach and others write on this topic over the years. And this idea resonates with me in a very real way, because as a coach, there are times that the real value for the client comes from being a push type coach.
00:04:03 And there are times where it comes from being a poll time coach. And so that you have to have versatility and have the ability to identify when those are valuable and flip between the two things about how the coachee, the person being coached feels how their level of competence, their experience level, their commitment, the problem being addressed, how important it is,
00:04:26 all of these things can affect whether or not you need to push or pull as a coach. And so I wanted to talk about some of the different approaches and how, why you might want to take on a push or a pull type of approach. And as a client, this is valuable because if you think about coaching, if you think about coaching yourself or improving yourself,
00:04:51 you often have to find people in your life to do each of these things. This is part of what Braden was talking about when he was talking about developing the board and having some people that would push you as well as some people that would live to up or support you. It's, it's part of that same idea of putting those in your toolbox. And so think about it like this.
00:05:10 One of the simplest ways to look at it is it's the difference between asking and telling if you're pushing, you're telling someone, this is the way it is. If you're asking, then you're pulling them along. Now, I want to be careful here because one of the things I've seen coaches do is ask questions that are technically not really questions. They're hidden statements.
00:05:32 They're hidden tells they're actually a push question, not a poll question. Not all questions are pulling. If you already assume the answer in the question, then you're really telling the person not asking a question, but in good dialogue, you will spend many, much of the time, if not the majority of the time asking questions to find out the position and perspective of others,
00:05:59 rather than just telling people your own perspective, perspective, and position. This works in leadership. This works in coaching. This works in parenting. It applies at all different levels. If you think about looking at just the performance in a situation, that's a push type focus. If you're pulling, you're focusing, not just on their performance, but also on their development.
00:06:25 Both of these things are really important. You need to not just look at doing good at what you're doing today, but also look for ways that you can grow. It's one of the reasons why getting 360 degree feedback where you talk to not just the client, but talk to the people around the client about this situation can be so valuable, especially for executive coaching.
00:06:49 How about looking at weaknesses versus strengths? If you're pushing, you're focused on weaknesses, if you're pulling you're focused on their strengths, and by the way, I love focusing on client's strengths. That's a wonderful approach, but you can not ignore weaknesses. If all you ever do is focus only on the strengths and don't pay attention to the weaknesses that doesn't actually lead the person to develop in a healthy way.
00:07:15 Not that they're ever going to master their weaknesses to the same level of their strengths. You don't want to waste the time and energy trying to do that. But over time, you do want to make sure that you've developed systems or processes or other people or support tools or other things that can shore up their weaknesses. So those don't become the thing that actually derails them.
00:07:38 So it doesn't matter what you're looking at, whether you're looking at finances, whether you're looking at productivity, you have to balance this push and this poll, you have to be honest with your clients that sometimes you're going to tell, and you're going to push. You're going to inject a tool or a technique or a step, ask them to run an experiment or commit to something.
00:07:58 And other times you're going to pull with them so that they begin to move along in the direction that they want to go. And what's interesting is that really matters for the progress that people make, because the truth is, everyone loves learning, but nobody really likes being taught people. Don't like to be lectured to. They don't like to be told what to do,
00:08:21 but they love to be able to find their own way through. They love to be able to solve their own problems. And that's one of the reasons that polling often helps a client make more progress. I tell coaches all the time, I don't want to pull, I don't want to push a rope. I want to pull a rope because the truth is by partnering with the client and finding what's really important to them.
00:08:44 Then all of a sudden, instead of having to quote, make a client, do something and I've had coaches say it that way. And I hate it. The client is achieving what they most want and because of that, they're driven forward and moving forward effectively and quickly and making more progress and quicker progress and better progress than you could ever hope for.
00:09:07 I've had clients that get so much progress that they almost outstrip me. They're going faster than I am. And that is a wonderful thing to have happen. So think about the people around you. Do you have people that will push you and do you have people that will pull you, have you surrounded yourself with aspects that give you both of those benefits in your life?
00:09:31 Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you liked this episode on the stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent.
00:10:08 Or if you're in the us, you can text four, four, two, two, two talent tips. That's talent tips to four four, two, two, two, and get those tips until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world..