Clueless

Coaching Exercises

1. My Coaching Ethical Standards

   What ethical standards do you use with your clients? Use this checklist to identify and ensure you apply them.

2. How My Clients See My Coaching Style

   Answer these questions to identify your strengths and assets, and to determine the abilities you need to develop further

3. Factors that Influence Your Coaching

   Explore the situations where the coach, client, and environmental factors affect your coaching success

4. Case Study—The Competent Jerk

   Thought-provoking questions help you explore the challenges of coaching the “competent jerk”.

5. Coaching Influencing Styles Assessment

   Take this brief influencing style assessment to determine your approach and style to coaching clients.

6. Executive Coaching Evaluation

   Use this brief coaching evaluation with your clients to measure behavior change.

7. Talent Engagement Survey

   Use this brief talent survey to evaluate job satisfaction and engagement.

8. Customer Analysis

   Use this worksheet to help your client become more effective in serving their customers/clients.

9. Self and Team Change Stage

   Use this brief assessment to measure which stage of change you find yourself and your team members in.

10. Executive Coach Evaluation

    Use this brief evaluation to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the coach

11. Sample Executive Coaching Contract

    Use this template to create an executive coaching contract with your client.

12. Coaching Competencies Self-Assessment

    Use this brief self-assessment to measure your coaching skills.

13. Sample Executive Coaching Interview

    Here is a brief inteview guide to use for your first executive coaching session with your client.

14. Executive Coaching Readiness Index

    How ready is your client for executive coaching? These questions will help your client assess their overall readiness to begin working with a coach.

15. Change Stages: Self and Team Assessment

    Assess where and your team are on the four stage of change: Denial, Resistance, Exploration & Commitment

16. Coaching Process Evaluation

    Use this client evaluation to measure their evaluation of the coaching process.

17. Which Performance Coaching Model Would You Use?

    Use this performance coaching model to identify the primary goals and approach to coaching your client based on their current performance on the job and interpersonal competence.

18. Coaching the Narcissistic Employee

    This case study and tips for coaching Narcissistic Employee will provide clues and suggestions to manage these challenging and difficult employees.

19. Communicating Confidentiality in Today's Digital Age

    In order to maintain clarity regarding our use of electronic modes of communication during coaching, the following policies are suggesteed to be modified and included in all coaching agreements with your clients.

20. International Coach Federation Code of Ethics

    International Coach Federation (ICF) code of ethics and standards of conduct.

21. American Psychological Assocation Ethical Principles

    American Psychological Assocation (APA) Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct.

22. Individual Behavior Change Theory

    This document summarizes the Enlighten, Encourage, and Enable theory of individual behavior change discussed in the book "Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don't Get It"

23. The European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) Code of Ethics

    This Code of Ethics sets out what the clients and sponsors can expect from the coach/mentor in either a coach/mentoring, training or supervisory relationship and should form the starting point for any contract agreed.

24. Coaching Completion Reflection

    Use this exercise with your coachee before your final closure session to summarize what they have learned and next steps

Enlighten Exercises

1. Who Am I?

   These questions help your clients explore and understand themselves.

2. How Do Others See Me?

   These questions are designed to help your clients understand how they contribute to the way others see them.

3. My Personal Balance Sheet

   Clients can use this form to identify personal assets and liabilities

4. My Success Scorecard

   This scorecard provides clients a way to look at personal and life success from a more balanced perspective.

5. Organizational Assessment: What Are My Options?

   Help clients explore options within or outside their current organization

6. Do It Now

   With this form, clients identify areas of procrastination and commit to taking action.

7. My Life 10 Years From Now

   Helps clients visualize the life they want to have in the future.

8. How I Cope with Work and Life Stress

   Lets clients explore the ways in which they typically respond to work and life stress, pressure, and challenge.

9. Focus on the Now

   This formula for determining approximate days left to live opens clients’ eyes to the need for living each day to the fullest.

10. Understanding Differences Between Jobs, Careers, and Passions

    Help your clients relate to differences among jobs, careers, and passions.

11. The Changing Career Paradigms

    Use this exercise to help clients understand how generational values and expectations affect their career.

12. Identifying Your Career Path Preference

    Help clients explore the differences among managerial, specialist, generalist and entrepreneurial career paths.

13. Identifying Your Career Stage

    Pinpoint implications for work and life balance and professional growth and development based on career stage.

14. Identifying My Mentors

    Identify insight or learning contributed by mentors.

15. 10 Things to Do Before I Die

    Asks clients to list 10 things they would find stimulating, exciting, challenging, and fulfilling.

16. Inheritance Exercise

    Help clients understand their relationship to money by asking them to imagine inheriting $25 million.

17. My Ideal Life

    Asks clients to imagine a perfect day in their 10 years in the future

18. My Life Line

    In this exercise clients plot significant events in their lives.

19. How I Want to Be Remembered

    Assists clients to reflect on what would be said about them at their funeral.

20. My Calling

    Guides clients to reflect on their purpose in life.

21. My Work and Life Index

    Clients gain an understanding of how they feel about work and life to assist in determining how to spend their energy?

22. Ranking My Values

    Clients are asked to select and rank their top ten values.

23. Deploying My Signature Strengths

    Helps clients take a good look at how they can use their signature strengths.

24. Pleasant Activity Worksheet

    Guides clients to take a deep look at an activity that they find pleasant and enjoyable

25. My Stress Diary

    Helps clients become more aware of your daily stressors at work and home.

26. Meditation as a Tool for Mindfulness

    Step by step meditation technique for mindfulness

27. Identifying My Emotions

    Help clients establish greater emotional awareness.

28. My Thought Patterns

    Lead clients to differentiate positive and negative thought process

29. Replacing Negative Thought Patterns

    A Cognitive Behavioral Technique for minimizing negative thought patterns

30. 360-Degree Feedback Case Study

    Coach’s exercise for providing effective 360-degree feedback to clients

31. Being Mindful Through Self-Reflection

    Offers a schedule for self-reflection practice (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.)

32. Identifying Your Signature Strengths

    Guide clients to discover and explore your signature strengths

33. How Is My Personality Viewed By Others?

    Use this online personality inventory (Innate) to help clients discover how thier personality is viewed by others

34. What I Like About Myself

    Use this exercise to help clients Identifyy the things they like most and least about themselves

35. My Strengths, Challenges, and Allergies

    More questions to help clients understand themselves

36. Wheel of Life

    Use this chart for helping clients set balanced 5-year goals

37. Johari Window

    Answer these questions to determine how open you to others.

38. Understanding My Career Stage

    Complete this assessment to better understand your current and ideal career stage.

39. Understanding My Career Path Preferences

    Take this brief assessment to identify your career path preferences.

40. Understanding My Political Style

    Politics plan an important role in organizations. Take this brief assessment to determine your political style orientation.

41. Bradley Neuropsychiatric Inventory

    Sometimes humor is the best way to cope with work and life challenges. Take this inventory to idenitfy your work and life psychopathology.

42. Facilitating an “Alignment” Discussion

    This exercise can help you as a coach or manager help your team through clarifying what their goals, ambitions, and motivations are in order to identify discrepancies and create an alignment between manager and employees.

43. Resiliency Stage Inventory

    How resilient are you in coping with work and life challenges?

44. Three Other Lives

    If you could live three completely different lives from the one you are now living, what would you do in each one?

45. You're at Your Best

    This exercise is one of several in published research that increase subjective well-being and happiness levels by having participants focus on what makes them most successful at work or away from work.

46. Three Good Things

    This exercise has been shown in published research to increase subjective well-being and happiness by having us focus each day for a week on three things that went well for us during the day.

47. Mindfulness Exercises

    Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment. It’s living here and now. These two mindfulness exercises are an important part of learning how to practice mindfulness.

48. Time Management Worksheet: 168 Hours in My Week

    If you want to reduce weight, you keep a food diary. If you want to manage your finances, you record your spending. Likewise, if you want to use your time better, you should keep a time log. Keep track of how you spend your time in one week (168 hours) to understand how you are spending your waking and sleeping hours to become more efficient.

49. My Blind Spots

    What do others see and experience in my that is unknown to me? These are referred to as our "blind spots" based on the Johari Window model (Luft & Ingham, 1955). This exercise helps us to identify our "blind spots" by seeking feedback by others and reducing this window.

50. My Legacy

    A legacy is the gift you give to those who follow you or you leave behind. To write a description of our legacy isn’t the same as writing your obituary—it is a description of what you do or can try to do each day that represents your acts and behaviors that leave gifts for your family, friends, organization and/or world.

51. Identifying My Interests

    Based on the Holland Interests typology this exercise helps to identify core interests and occupations corresponding to what people like to do on the job.

52. Focusing on the Now

    Mindfulness, a focus on the present without judgment, has shown benefits for productivity, health and well-being. The following 10- to 15-minute mindfulness exercise narrows attention and broadens awareness of sensations and external surroundings.

53. From Business Card to Mission Card

    Instead of having a business card, define your mission in life and create a "mission card" to summarize your true passions and plans for how to be a change agent for your family, community or world.

54. Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda Exercise

    Do you find yourself focusing on what you should have done, could have done or would have done in life? If so, start focusing on what you will do by completing this exercise.

55. My Ethical Core

    How would you describe your “ethical core” that drives the way in which you work and live? What choices do you make each day when nobody is around that provide a sense of your level of honesty, integrity and ethics?

56. 4 Post-It Notes to Maximize Well-Being

    Use these four post-it notes and place them strategically where you can see them to practice these evidence based exercises to enhance your psychological well-being.

57. Defining My Meaning and Purpose

    Research has found that defining and having purpose and meaning in life is a strong predictor of how long you live and that the association between purpose in life and lifespan is relativity similar for younger, middle-aged, and older adults (Hill & Turiano, 2014).

58. Identifying My 5 Power Ups

    A power-up is any positive action you can take that provides you with courage, strength and confidence.

59. My Skills Analyzer

    Identifying skills you are both good at doing and interested in deploying are often referred to as your “signature strengths.” Follow the instructions below to identify your own signature strength skills.

60. Developing Intimacy and Closeness in Relationships

    These 36 questions have been used in published research by Arthur Aron (1997) to enhance interpersonal understanding and closeness.

61. The Emotions Wheel

    The ability to identify one’s own emotions and those of others is a skill that is related to emotional intelligence. Use this exercise to identify how you are feeling and why.

62. My Pie Identity

    Comparing the balance in one's roles in life between what is expected/required and what is preferred to enhance life satisfaction.

63. My Personal SWOT Analysis

    Taking a personal inventory of one's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats can help map a successful personal and professional development plan.

Encourage Exercises

1. My Work and Life Balance

   Guide to facilitating an effective work-life balance plan

2. Activities I Tend to Avoid

   Get clients to recognize the things they avoid in life, and really don’t want to!

3. Facilitating Change Talk

   A technique for identifying what changes clients are most motivated to make

4. Decisional Balance Worksheet

   Guide clients to explore the advantages and disadvantages of changing specific habits

5. Asking Others to Change Give-Get-Merge-Go Technique

   Step-by-step guide to using this communication technique to influence others

6. Asking Others to Change DESC Technique

   Teaches a communication technique used to influence others without defensiveness

7. How Others Can Support My Behavior Change Effort

   Use to identify people at home and work can support your clients’ change efforts

8. Mobilizing My Future Vision

   A technique for clarifying future desires and getting them in writing.

9. Assessing My Attributional Style

   Help clients determine whether they have an optimistic or pessimistic style of dealing with life situations

10. Building an Optimistic Attributional Style

    Provides a five-steps to building an optimistic style

11. Behavior Change Ambivalence Analysis

    Help clients explore what is stopping them from making a change

12. Identifying My State of Change

    Clients can identify which stage describes your change efforts for a specific behavior or habit.

13. Readiness Ruler

    Use with a client to explore current motivation to change level.

14. Identifying Personal Forces Around Behavior Change

    Identify forces that are supporting and preventing change.

15. Maximizing My Time to Complete My Goals

    Compare your current to desired use of time to maximize your productivity and work/life satisfaction.

16. Understanding My Habits Cycle

    New habits are a function of three things--a "cue", a "behavior" and a "reward." Use this worksheet to create an implementation goal to create a new habit.

17. Creating Habit Triggers

    There is a difference between goal intentions and implementation intentions. Using the worksheet, you will be able to create actionable implementation intentions called Habit Triggers to enhance your skills and behaviors.

18. Can You Really Achieve Your Goal?

    As you pursue either a significant professional or personal goal, it is important to assess and reflect on whether you have the skills and abilities to successfully achieve it.

19. Increasing My Level of Confidence

    Sometimes our own anxieties and fears hold us back from successful performance. Practice this exercise to increase our level of confidence in all situations at work, school and home.

20. Commitment Pledge Cards

    Making our goals public helps facilitate success. Use this exercise to pledge your specific goals to at least three trusted family members, coworkers or friends to help you successfully achieve your behavior change.

21. Wants Versus Needs Exercise

    We all have things we want in life but don't need and things we need but don't really want. Use this exercise to summarize what you want and what you don't want and reflect on what makes you truly happy in life.

Enable Exercises

1. My Professional Board of Directors

   Helps clients identify the ideal people for support and encouragement

2. My Interpersonal Network

   Clients explore their network of people socially involved in their career, family/friends, and community

3. My Relapse Prevention Plan

   Guide to creating a plan for getting back on track

4. Coping With Stress to Avoid Relapse—Meditation Exercise

   Meditation exercise to decrease stress and avoid relapse

5. My Behavior Change Self-Contract

   Leads clients to select a change goal and commit to a change goal.

6. Creating a SMART Development Implementation Plan

   Process for creating a “SMART” plan for a development goal

7. Savoring Our Successes

   Clients reinforce the positive benefits by envisioning a successful completion of their development goal

8. My Allergic Responses to Others Who Impede My Goal Progress

   Explore negative reactions to difficult people.

9. Sample Coaching Evaluation

   Use these questions to evaluate your client’s development progress

10. My Daily Progress Checklist

    Review, reflect and reset daily to stay on track

11. Who Are My Mentors?

    Identify insight or learning contributed by mentors.

12. Coping with Stress to Avoid Relapse—Visualization Exercise

    Use this stress reduction visualization exercise when relapse threatens

13. Mini-Goal Evaluation: How am I Doing?

    Use this coach’s exercise to evaluate your progress with a client.

14. Expressing Gratitude

    Help clients increase subjective well being by writing down and thanking those who have influenced their development

15. Career Planning Worksheet

    Discovering My Passions--Career Development Planning Worksheet

16. My Core Values

    Idenitfy your core values that drive the pursuit of your personal and professional goals.

17. Sustaining New (Year's) Goals

    Analyze and strategize to maximize the success of your new goals.

18. Venture to Succeed at Any Age

    Age isn't a barrier to going for it. Examine what actions you can take to create greatness at any age.

19. Identify Sources of Support for My Goals

    Complete this worksheet to identify social support and assitance to successful complete your goals.

20. Force Field Analysis

    Use a force field analysis exercise to move forward on our behavioral goal.

21. Building Your Social Network

    Maintaining success in the completion of professional and personal goals requires continuously buidling your social network.

22. You are What Your Believe....

    Sometimes being successful in the accomplishment of our implentation goals requires believing in ourselves. Here is a collection of motivating sayings to help all of us on your development journey.

23. Relapse Prevention Trigger Exercise

    Use this worksheet to analyze the triggers for behavior change relapse.

24. STOP Thoughts—Anti-Rumination Tool

    Use this STOP thought technique to minimize obsessive and ruminating thoughts.

25. My Change Plan Worksheet

    Use this worksheet to outline your goal implementation plan.

26. Savoring Pleasurable Moments

    Savoring is a term that refers to the awareness of a pleasurable state and the deliberate effort to make it last. Research1 suggests that individuals differ in their tendency to savor pleasurable moments and that those who do are happier and more satisfied with life, more optimistic, and less depressed than those who do not.

27. Understanding My Responsibilities

    Successful behavior change occurs in the context of the work climate where a clear understanding of one's responsibilities and authority are important to clarify. Use this exercise to define and clarify your responsibilities and authority.

28. Understanding My Culture

    Behavior change occurs within an organizational culture. This exercise is designed to compare and contrast a previous culture with the one you are presently in.

29. Understanding What Others Expect from Me

    Speak to your manager, direct reports and others in the organization and ask them to help clarify exactly what they want and need from you in your current role. Use the three columns below to summarize their perceptions and requirements.

30. My Reaction to Change Plan

    This worksheet will help you work through any personal or work related “change” that requires adjustment and coping.

31. 10,000 Hours to Unconscious Competence

    Use this exercise to explore how you can increase the time you are spending on your important goal to shift it from consciousness competence to unconscious competence.

32. Learning from My Mistakes

    Psychologists have a term for how we can become even more resilient and stronger after life stress, challenge, mistakes and failure called "post traumatic growth." Use this exercise to reflect on what you have learned in life from some important mistakes or failures you have made.

33. Mental Contrasting Exercise to Increase Goal Commitment

    Do you want to increase your commitment and success to a future goal? Current research suggests that mentally contrasting a desired future with impeding reality is an effective strategy to produce commitment to a realistic goal.

34. The Challenge of Habit Change

    This exercise is useful to remind us that we require deliberate practice over time to strengthen neural circuits until the behavior becomes natural (unconscious competence).

35. How We Grow and Develop?

    What are you doing to develop yourself personally and professionally?

36. Exploring the Layers of Your Network

    What does your social network look like?

37. Expanding Your Social Network

    Take some steps to expand and grow your social network

38. Understanding My Goals

    Complete this exercise to understand the relationship between goals that exist and those you want to exist

39. Identify the Bad Triggers

    If you want to get become successful at implementing and maintaining a new habit you have to identify the barriers or “bad triggers.”

40. Employee Engagement Index

    This brief employee engagement survey will allow analysis of factors that might contribute to overall job performance.