Effective Feedback

Wow! This course is a stumper for me. I totally get what effective feedback entails. I feel like I can give effective feedback based on the criteria in the notes: not personal, opportunity finding, fact based, objective, focused on the future, constructive and neutral. I am one that can be objective and fact based. It is easy for me to keep my emotions and opinions to myself in a coaching situation. The thing that still has me boggled is the part about asking to give feedback. I accept that it is a polite way to enter into feedback giving or a segway into giving feedback, however, in my perspective feedback is the crux of coaching in a lot of ways.

In the little coaching that I have done up to this point it seems to me that the client is continuously seeking feedback. They want to either affirm that the steps they are taking are appropriate or they want to know other things they can try. I’m trying to picture in my mind a coaching session without feedback and feel that I wouldn’t want to be paid if I wasn’t offering feedback. So for me, although I get the “effective” part, the part about asking to give feedback seems real foreign to me. I will continue to ponder this aspect to try to figure out what is missing in my understanding of this.

The other section of this course focused on role-playing. I like this technique and have been able to use it in its simplest form…conversation. I have had clients that fear a conversation and just talking out how the conversation could go, with different scenarios, is an effective tools to helping them feel more confident in going into those conversations. I will continue to use this tool at different levels in my coaching.