Peer Coaching is a fundamental part of the iPEC Coach Training Program, offering hands-on experience to practice coaching skills and raise your awareness when you are a client. Here’s how to address some of the most common issues you may encounter:
1. Scheduling Conflicts
The Challenge: Most of the time, setting up regular times for your peer coaching sessions is straightforward and simple; however, you may experience an occasional scheduling conflict.
The Solution:
- To create the smoothest experience possible, get a clear understanding of your schedule and responsibilities and communicate early. Reach out to your peer as soon as you receive your assignments to establish a consistent weekly time. You may also wish to have a few “backup” times ready in case a scheduling conflict occurs.
- Even our busiest students have found success with flexibility, so don’t be afraid to consider creative options such as early mornings, lunch breaks, or evenings to find a suitable time. Keep your energetic approach in mind and aim for a Level 5 win-win.
- If your peer hasn’t contacted you within a week, you may email them asking to schedule your session. If there’s no response after 10 days, contact Student Support via the HubBot.
2. Personality Differences
The Challenge: You observe a personality mismatch or difference of opinion with your peer coach or client, making it difficult to connect.
The Solution:
- Many coaches have seamless peer coaching experiences, but occasionally, a challenge arises between peers around differences in personality, viewpoint, or values. This is a powerful opportunity to raise your consciousness. Coaching individuals with different perspectives helps expand your skills, build resilience, and understand yourself and others better.
- When you feel your “buttons” being pushed in a peer interaction, pause. See if you can access a perspective of curiosity rather than judgment or labeling the experience and people involved (you and your peer) as good/bad or right/wrong. From that space of curiosity, see what insights come forward for you and what you’re learning about yourself. You can also explore any Interpretations or other GAILs present.
- Consider the Foundation Principles: “All experiences are opportunities for growth” and “Each person we meet is our teacher and student”. Challenging pairings, once explored with curiosity and Anabolic Energy, often lead to the richest learning experiences.
3. A Peer Without Coaching Topics
The purpose of peer coaching is for the coach to practice the skills, tools and processes they are learning during the program. When it’s your turn to be the client, bring a topic or two to every practice session. Although peer sessions are 1 hour in duration, the coach may choose to use a session or two of their 12 sessions with their peer for skills practice and ask you to provide up to 5 minutes of feedback on the use of those skills. (Ex. You might ask your client for buy-in to coach them on their chosen topic for 30 minutes and then practice a variety of tools or skills for the remaining 30 minutes.)
The Challenge: Your peer client says they have nothing to work on.
The Solution:
- Perhaps the perspective “nothing to work on” is the coaching topic of the day! It’s very possible a GAIL is present.
- Remind them that coaching isn’t about fixing problems but exploring possibilities for growth and alignment.
- You might try a tool like the Wheel of Life or Ideal Image to explore areas they might wish to enhance or optimize in some way.
4. Feeling Unprepared for a Peer's Topics
The Challenge: At some point, your peer client might bring up a topics that feels personally challenging for you, and you might feel unprepared or tempted to jump “into the box” with them. Know that this experience is completely normal and an excellent opportunity to grow as a coach.
The Solution:
- Rely on your fundamentals: Use the T-GOAL model to create a strong coaching agreement, ask open-ended, empowering questions, acknowledge and validate, and listen deeply for GAILs. Many students feel unprepared for a “deep” topic, but when they relax, embody presence, listen, and focus on practicing excellent Core Energy Coaching skills, they find even the toughest topic becomes simple!
- If you find you are “too close” to a topic, you have an excellent opportunity to practice the skill of detached involvement. It’s an advanced skill, so focus simply on listening for the energy your client is bringing to you rather than the details of the story or what you’d do in a similar situation.
- Remember that this is a training program, and the goal is to practice, so we invite you to play full out.
Final Thoughts
Know the difference between true and Truth. What you experience as a challenge someone else might experience as an opportunity. It all comes down to Energy and you have 7 Levels of Energy to choose from when considering a solution. Nothing has meaning until you assign it a meaning. So, what meaning will you choose to assign?
When you remain unattached to the outcome, and open to ‘what is,’ you get to experience a sense of ease and flow, have a more enjoyable experience, build your coaching confidence and learn a lot about yourself in the process. See what we did there? Planted a seed.
Enjoy your journey, coach!