When I talk to people about business or executive coaching, many people seem to expect me to have one of two backgrounds:
- The ‘business’ expert – either ex-leaders or ex-HR&OD professionals who’ve turned their attention to executive coaching
- The psychologist – those who know about how people tick
And of course, ideally you’d want a mix of both skills – knowledge of both business issues and human behaviour. More recently I’ve met another coach with a similar background to me – in education, in particular EFL teaching – and it struck me how valuable it’s been as a training ground for core coaching skills and behaviours.
Development and Learning
At its heart, performance coaching is about helping people learn and develop new skills and behaviours, and that’s exactly what EFL teaching is about. I taught many one-to-one or small groups sessions and learned this is where I worked best. I didn’t ‘teach’ as such, I would demonstrate or show and give the students the space to practice those skills in a safe space – the classroom.
Listening…Patience…Silence
As an EFL teacher, particularly with lower-levels, you need to be patient, stay silent, and allow the other person plenty of time to gather their thoughts and speak out loud in another language. These are exactly the skills that my coachees value – it gives them the space and time to really think.
I was also living and working in Japan for many years – a culture where they’re far more comfortable with silence than we are!
Non-judgemental
One of my first students was a 72-year old high court judge in Japan – highly experienced, skilled and respected. But in the classroom he was an intermediate English speaker. Other learners were housewives, office workers, students. Whatever their status outside the classroom, in the classroom everyone was treated equally – they were all learning. I learned not to judge people by their language ability. We’ve all got to start somewhere and everyone is capable of improving.
Feedback and Encouragement
In training, I was taught how and when it’s best to give feedback. You don’t correct someone as they’re warming up, for example. But if they’re practising a new structure, you carefully offer feedback, or reflect back their mistake and ask them to self-correct.
And it’s important to give praise and encouragement. It takes a long time to learn a language and it’s easy to get demotivated. People needed to know they were doing well. Supporting and encouraging others to develop and improve comes naturally to me.
Playfulness
My students were mainly adults, and we had fun! They loved the fact that they could discard their professional persona, talk about themselves, use their imagination, roleplay and experiment. They could laugh at their mistakes.
Empathy
When you teach EFL, you tend to work overseas. I started in a new country (Japan) and had to learn the language from scratch. This puts you in the shoes of your students, and you are regularly reminded of what they are going through. The best teachers remember what it’s like not to know something.
Awareness and Openness
When you live in a different culture, it’s a swift lesson that others do things differently. What you thought of as ‘normal’ (eg eating with a fork) is not their ‘normal’ (eating with chopsticks). There are different ways to look at things, do things, think about things and they may be different to yours. There’s no one ‘best’ or ‘right’ way.
So here I am
And yes, I have a business degree and business experience, and I’ve learned about organisational behaviour and psychology too. But I’d say my EFL background gave me the ideal training ground for the core skills I need to coach.
