The Coachspeaks Blog

So I am now Level A and Level B qualified to administer, interpret and feedback on psychometric tests. But what does this mean?

Psychometric tests are used by many businesses to assist in selection, development and benchmarking of staff. It can be used to coach people in career choices, and help them to find that #1 job match. Being qualified to the BPS standard, means that I have completed a 2 week course, painstaking in detail and rigour to ensure that the standards becoming to such an accreditation are met.

The outcome though is that my thoughts on psychometrics have now completely solidified. I know now where this fits and how I can use them (particularly the Level B – Personality Profiling) in coaching. I also understand some of the pitfalls that the process can actually cause, having actually witnessed this first hand during the course.

As you can imagine, the process of qualifying means some practise. This practise is usually done on fellow course participants. We completed the NEO PI-R. This process considers the 5 levels of personality. This is then split into 6 further additional facets and a ‘profile’ delivered through completing a 240 question survey. For me, it highlighted that I am incredibly creative, but that I was not good at following process. So thinking this through…. Absolutely.

So what was the hang up for me? Being a business owner, I think that you need to demonstrate tenacity for focus and tenacity for completion. The way that I interpreted the feedback however, was that I was not good at that, and that stayed with me for a day until I was jolted out of it by one of my coaching friends. Thinking it through, creativity could be the opposite of process following, but within business, I had created a ’silo’ to get work done so I am absolutely focussing on completion but through a creative method.

Now to the bit that this is getting to. I was fortunate enough to be talking to a coaching friend, and there was a jolt out of the spiral that had caught hold of me so quickly and so unexpectedly. I could have quite easily kept spiralling for days, and this could have actually caused a self-limiting belief. I had experienced something that I had witnessed in many interviews with senior business leaders in that the feedback had created a self-limiting belief.

This has now created urgency for me to do something about it. I am now adding the capability of Level A and Level B to my repertoire but focussing not on the administering of the test, nor on the interpretation and feedback but on what the desired outcome needs to be for the client and ensuring totally, that the feedback loop, which will include coaching sessions subsequently, leaves the client with absolutely no self-limiting beliefs but moreover a greater permission to act and take charge of his or her personality.

• Was this a worthwhile exercise? Yes
• Was the course itself fantastic despite the self limiting belief? Absolutely, the self limiting belief piece was an important aspect for me of the course.
• Would I do this again? Yes and I have indeed signed up for a Level B – Advanced course for 2011 which will allow a different tool to be used.

If you get an opportunity or a space in your diary, go for it. It’s a great CPD event.

What a fantastic day it has been today. The visit to the Morgan Car Factory in Malvern has been in my diary for a few months, and very definitely inscribed in an indelible pen so that it does not get moved or cancelled.

From arriving in the factory to leaving, I felt privileged to witness master craftsmen at work. Each car is painstakingly hand manufactured out of Ash (yes the wood…) and Aluminium. Each element of the frame is painstakingly checked for error and each bolt is gently and methodically placed on the right thread. The panels are finished by hand, and the seats and leather finish are … finished by hand. Even a pedal car, which was launched last year for their centenary is on the same ‘line’, I cannot call it that, it is a unique process. This pedal car is a 2/3 replica of the 3 wheeler that came out of the factory in the early 20^th Century except of course it demonstrates reminiscences of the Flintstones cars with no engine and requiring pedal or foot power.

This attention to detail, this effortless attention to detail means that when a car leaves the factory, it has a personality. It is not just a Roadster, or an Aero. It has a face, a smile and a unique feel about it that people search all their life for. Working in the factory seems a pleasure. I am sure that motivation is challenged when there is a foot of snow on the ground and I can only imagine then that the factory adopts a different feel but I bet that inner glow doesn’t disappear.

Ok, so what has this got to do with coaching? Nothing, apart from it was a demonstration about how a wonderful skill can turn out a fantastic result. The passion and the desire to make something even better than it is better and to maintain high standards appear to be synonymous with my brand and my values.

If you get a chance go for the tour.

I highly recommend it.

Relaxation is so key in the recuperation from the daily activities. So here are my top 7 ways to ‘chill’

1. Listen to some music that promotes a calming reaction in you.
2. Take a bath and pamper yourself.
3. Do some breathing exercises, try breathing in while counting to 7 and breathing out counting to 10. Do this for a minute and you will feel more relaxed.
4. Take some exercise. The enzymes created in exercise will make you feel better but be sure you do not push it too far and be aware of any personal medical issue you have.
5. Create a place of tranquillity in your mind. A place of calmness and stillness where you are both happy and relaxed. Develop a way of connecting with this calm state through anchoring with your coach.
6. Listen to your body. If it is screaming at you that you need to slow down or stop then do it and snuggle up for a quick 40 minute nap.
7. Take yourself on a walk in the country. Observe all the great wonders of the countryside. Listen to the amazing chorus of the birds, and smell the moisture of the fresh nature surrounding you. It is amazing what you miss when you are running soooo hard.

There, feel better….

Interesting couple of weeks I have had. I am lucky enough to be taking the level A and level B occupational testing course later this month. I feel that this is really important for people who want to use psychometrics in earnest in their coaching, and more importantly make sense of the outputs that standard tests can provide. I can see some real value in helping people to deliver this concept in a true coaching way as it will enable the coachee to receive greater insight into how they act, are perceived, manage with situations etc…

Part A appears to be the statistical grunt work. A real rework of some of the MBA standard deviation considering confidence margins. Necessary to frame the accuracy etc.. Part B appears to be more about interpretation and the real understanding of the client that I want to understand more about. What is it that this client has shown through the test, are there any biases to allow for, are there any sabotage as they call it. This is the real output for a coach. A discussion point about what this means for the individual in their environment, or there space.

Initial short views but something that I am really looking forward to exploring. Watch this space

There is nothing more to focus the mind than running your own business.

What to buy, when to buy, when to replace, what is essential, what is critical, what is just a nice to have, what do I need to really run the business, what is a legal requirement ????????

So here I was, working on my touch screen laptop and it failed. No warning, nothing that I could have predicted. Just out of warranty and I was not happy. This was my workhorse, something I worked on when I travelled, and something that had served me well through my MBA.

Do you know what though? I was paralysed. It was like someone had amputated a limb and I was missing this flexibility and productivity workhorse.

Within 2 days, it was replaced. It has just demonstrated to me how lucky I am being able to make decisions quickly and not to pontificate. It has also demonstrated the real need for some technical awareness. Luckily I had also got a complete backup so from getting the new laptop to getting up and running was a matter of hours.

So to the question….

What do you rely on so heavily that you really need to manage a contingency for?

1. Use online free storage such as sugarsync.

2. Use a digital pen to capture your thoughts and blog.

3. Do remote and get mobile access sorted through i Phone or Blackberry.

4. Use a server to sync files to        tapers with.

5. Buy a navigation device. Beat especially

        one with a traffic capability

Being a coach is great. It allows you to work with some amazing people, and use lots of different tools and techniques appropriate to their requirement.

A particular visual aid allows for exploration of the Human Givens ideas as proposed by Mindfields. Human Givens is a really great way of understanding how balanced a client is against privacy, intimacy, team closeness etc., and suggests that any ‘gap’ between the preferred personal level and the actual real life level could be a source of stress. By using a visual technique, or scale of 0 – 10, one can assess each of these and then explore what is going on in the gap.

A discussion then ensues to help the coachee realise the bite size changes required to achieve this rebalance and lose stress.

Ask yourself :-

1. Do I need to do this task!
2. How can I automate it?
3. What benefits am I really getting from this task?

About a month ago, my tablet PC which had served me so well in doing my MBA packed up. Being just out of Warranty! it was going to cost me some £270 to repair so I was not going to do that.

I looked at the market and even to a tech head, it was confusing. Should I go for a notepad, laptop, mac, iPad, phone,,, the list is endless. What this did and thank you for

making it so difficult, was to make me think about my real requirement.

Yes, I needed something that had power, but also not so small else I would be pressing many keys with my fat fingers. It needed to hold a decent number of apps, and link into my network at home. It needed to be portable, light and have enough power for a 6 hour journey without charge.

This honed me to a laptop but what was the most important factor for me!

POWER

Without power, e.g. a decent battery length, then no application would run. This was the main criteria. I checked some of the reports on Pc pro website and then considered 3 laptops.

A Toshiba, an HP and an Acer.  Well my tablet was an HP and I had a bad experience with that. The Tosh was good but a 7 hour battery life on the Acer 3810 TZ won out.

It has since proved to be the right decision.