Making it easy for leaders and managers to have effective coaching conversations

There are two areas I really get value from! Firstly, having a co-founder for life who has alternate points of view and can tease out things I’m not consciously aware of – this is SO helpful when solving hard problems. Secondly, I get to practise coaching consistently in a ‘low-stakes environment’, which is phenomenally helpful to me as a developing manager and for supporting more effectively those who I interact with in my work or personal life. I wish I had it a long time ago – it’s a skill everyone can learn and no one is born good at!

‍

I've realised that when I listen, my brain goes into autopilot, thinking how to reply vs truly listening to what the other person is saying. My go to response with anyone who comes to me to share a problem, is always to try and help and fix the problem - especially when it’s something I’ve experienced personally. But I’m now on a mission to change! To truly listen, ask effective questions and not jump in to try and solve everyone's problems. Super excited for my RunYourself journey over the next 12 months. I know that I’m going to become a better leader, parent and friend!

Why is effective listening not part of the National Curriculum? I've realised I am bad at listening
and it's one of the most important things in life! I am so ready to jump in and try and help with ideas and solutions. There are some crazy stats that effective managers and those who use coaching principles have way happier teams. And so I have signed up for peer-to-peer coaching where I am learning to coach. The solution is often within ourselves but we need time, space, and a listening ear to help us get there. I know that this will help me with my parenting, be a better boss and become a better listener.

One of the main benefits I've experienced is having someone question my assumptions and see problems and opportunities from a different perspective. This has changed how I’ve acted in the company for the better. Our sessions helped us both take ownership of problems and realise that blaming others is unproductive. Accountability is the other key benefit – if I had to write a journal, I would not be as committed (and those commitments compound!). Lastly, sharing with each other simple, practical solutions that we’ve not thought about.

RunYourself has benefited me massively personally and professionally. I have been able to take as much from my peer coach's sessions as from mine. It helped me to prioritise and focus on what is important, and to tackle issues that I may not have otherwise taken the time to consider in so much depth. This brought me a step forward in my personal and professional life. Together we navigated very hard situations without feeling alone and overwhelmed. The RunYourself app and its frameworks have made the coaching experience less daunting and enabled us to identify meaningful topics that we may have otherwise overlooked.

As leaders, our development can be forgotten and we wanted to be intentional about investing in our own skills - especially coaching, which we do so much of in our day-to-day. My co-founder and I also wanted to create space for us to develop our relationship on a less transactional level, so we decided to peer coach each other. My confidence in coaching has grown massively. The RunYourself app has enabled me to learn how to deal with a wide range of coaching conversations. More broadly, peer coaching has enabled that human connection between us and created that time and space to step out of the day-to-day and think strategically.

During the 18 months with RunYourself, I have gained invaluable relationships that have evolved into friendships. I have learned to listen to my intuition more and to allow myself to explore the possibilities and solutions available to me. The support and guidance provided by the RunYourself team have been instrumental in my growth as both a coach and a coachee. The main benefit I’ve gained is learning to slow down the pace at which I feel decisions need to be made. I’ve started to look at the broader picture and reshape my understanding of what a 'good outcome' looks like.

I didn’t really get it until last week - mentoring vs coaching. It was my first session last week where I was being coach. Immediately in my head - oh god - this is going to be hard. First lesson I put into practice was self awareness so I said, this is going to be more challenging for me because I’ll have to fight solutionising so please can you show me patience and compassion if I get it wrong and flip from coach to mentor and can you tell me if you see that happen. I sat on my hands. I asked questions. Practised reflective listening. Pause, distil, confirm. NOW I GET IT. The outcome is different. It’s much better. It’s the skill to fish.

RunYourself has made a significant difference to my personal and professional relationships. I notice myself have more patience and be able to create more space during challenging conversations - I'm able to truly listen rather than interrupt with my own points of view. I'm also able to ask more effective questions, for example in my interactions with clients, catalysing critical thinking and helping them understand what they need rather than selling them on my services. These simple yet so powerful techniques, such as reflective listening, have compounded over time and made things that were hard much easier - feedback is one of them.

I signed up to RunYourself when I first became a VP and knew I was going to encounter challenges that I hadn't encountered before. I worried about how I would be able to coach someone else and that it would be a waste of my time when I had very little time. Looking back, all of them were unfounded fears. The RunYourself experience has been hugely beneficial through a very turbulent period of my life - I've been able to re-examine and correct some deeply held assumptions, I've been able to navigate tricky professional relationships more confidently, and to make more considered business decisions.

The coaching skills I’ve gained through RunYourself have allowed me to take a step back as a leader. Now my team have ownership, they know they can make a difference, and they produce impactful work without my involvement.

I'm a 10/10 RunYourself Net Promoter. My peer coaching sessions have enabled me to dramatically increase my employees’ level of focus and direction. I intend to engage our managers in your program because I think it's some of the better manager training that I've seen.

The main benefit to me has been having an outlet for a stream of consciousness and clarity of thought. It’s an affordable way to access a safe space that you’d normally find in working with a professional coach or a therapist. On top of that, there’s a sense of camaraderie that builds up over time. In practical terms, it's helped build more accountability and intentionality into my life. I believe that being intentional about how one is spending their weeks and months requires having a good infrastructure in place – RunYourself helps putting that in place.

RunYourself has offered me a structured space to develop a very special and empowering relationship with my peer coach. I gained clarity, confidence and accountability which enabled me to progress my career. I approach personal and professional conversations in a more effective way - I'm better at listening, providing feedback and helping people reach their goals. I have also experienced a clear change in mindset - when I encounter a problem, I start a self-coaching dialogue in my head. The whole issue goes from problem and stressor to opportunity.

Having conversations with a like-minded individual experiencing similar challenges and being able to communicate impartially has enabled me to think more clearly about my challenges and facilitated a rate of change which I would not have experienced on my own. This has led to changes in the business – I became bolder and braver and accepted less the status quo. It’s resulted in me stepping up to the plate, taking extreme ownership and seizing responsibility. If RunYourself no longer existed, I'd be very disappointed!

I've highly valued the opportunity to connect with my peer coach on a deep level, to get direct feedback and guidance on certain challenges that I feel unable to get from a lot of people in my life. I respect their opinion, not just business-wise, because we both think in terms of mental models. This was also an opportunity to hone the skill of coaching – it’s an active experience and you feel it when you do it well. The resources provided in the app, the coaching prompts and the feedback from professional coaches enable that.

The peer matching was excellent – there was an instant chemistry, we have sufficient similarities while also having contrasting perspectives. With that in place, we could trust each other to dig deeper into things. I now know that I have someone who would completely understand what I’m going through and offer me a safe space to process my feelings and talk through challenges. Our sessions also force me to take a step back and reflect on what's going well and what could be better – that’s not something easy to do on your own.

Having dedicated reflection time helps me understand better what I'm going through and to deal better with feelings I'm often not aware of. Having my peer coach ask me questions and share experiences helps me deal with challenges in a way that I feel good about. I can also see how practising coaching in the sessions transfers into the rest of my life – in the past I had a bad habit of interrupting when someone was speaking, now I’m mostly listening and asking questions with the intent of understanding rather than responding.
‍

The main benefit to me has been having someone, to whom I’m not connected to in any other way, be a soundboard and provide accountability. They are detached from from the rest of your life, but care about you. Journaling is powerful but it’s a static page, here you have an engaged human who is acting as a mirror. In practical terms, I have a much better understanding of how to solve professional problems, I understand myself a lot better, and I’m in a much better routine in life (the commitments and a 3 week session cadence help with that).

Our peer coaching sessions have helped me most by making better decisions faster – during the sessions I move from 50-60% to 100% conviction. They've also helped me gain a greater understanding of the purpose behind what I'm doing and why it matters to me. This clarity was enabled by having scheduled time to think with impartial questions from someone else. The RunYourself session structure has helped me to be more deliberate in my thinking, and make actionable commitments to build momentum and progress over time.

The main benefit to me has been the clarity I get around what is going on in my life. There’s a lot of things going in my head so it’s helpful to have someone else who is willing to really listen, care and not be upset or react. That’s not normal in everyday life because there’s so much else going on. It’s different than anything else I do. It’s given me a different perspective on things and helped me process my feelings so I can move on and focus on helpful actions – all through listening and questioning rather telling me what to do.

As a leader of a remote organisation, it’s important to be a very strong communicator and listener. RunYourself has been one of the best ways to learn and practise foundational coaching techniques in a 'low-stakes' environment with someone I have come to trust and respect. The coaching sessions themselves have been incredibly valuable for creating more clarity and conviction around my thoughts. And practising coaching has helped me understand what good listening truly means, which has benefited both my personal and professional life.

I’ve never had a coach, but I feel that peer coaching is potentially more helpful than coaching. Being the listener is as helpful as being listened to – it reminds me that everyone faces challenges and I can see how helpful it is for someone to be able to speak candidly without being given advice. On the other side, it’s giving me the time to slow down and process things out loud – this makes the issues seem blindingly obvious. I’m doing stuff that I’ve been putting off and moaning to my wife for years. It’s really the discipline to 'run yourself'.

The key benefit to me has been getting clarity on how I am personally and thinking through the challenges and issues I'm facing. Because we have this time scheduled, I can't ignore them. Talking out loud adds that extra bit of focus. I also find that being reminded to set actions and next steps is so helpful. And having made those commitments to my peer coach, it means I'm more likely to complete them. Lastly, recording thoughts in the app makes everything easier, otherwise the notes would go into my bank of notes and I'd probably lose them.
‍