Excellence to Eminence

Living Our Values

Coaching and Feedback

Coaching and feedback is critical to success; it helps identify what’s going well, and areas for strengthening. Helping others achieve greater results through coaching builds Openness and Trust, and leads to Excellence. This success begins at the individual level; as individual results improve, college/unit and University results also improve. This leads to progress toward our goals.

At its heart, coaching and feedback is positive. Coaching and feedback is supportive, performance-enhancing, and self-esteem-building. It’s forward looking and offers insights on how to achieve stronger results, rather than focusing only on what went wrong.

Despite its positive nature, offering coaching and feedback can be uncomfortable at the beginning. Here are some tips to help coaching and feedback become second nature:

• Have a healthy mindset. Before offering coaching, a healthy coach checks to make sure she is on the higher floors of the mood elevator. During coaching, she assumes innocence, practices be here now, and listens to understand.
• Build rapport. An effective coach creates an environment of good will where the other person knows she wants to help him, and has his best interests in mind. Asking permission before offering coaching is an easy way to demonstrate respect for the other person.
• Focus on thinking, not behaviors or results. Focusing on thinking creates lasting change; a coach should help his partner gain insight into current thought patterns, and how new thought patterns can lead to greater results.