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How to improve work performance? This is a question regularly asked by senior executives, as they seek to improve the performance of their staff. However, the question is one that everybody should be asking themselves. One of the most popular and successful ways of dramatically increasing your performance, is to employ a performance/executive coach. This article will investigate what coaching does and how coaching can increase your work performance.

Coaches look to improve performance. When I say improve performance, I don’t mealy mean that coaching can and will improve a persons working life; it will also boost the persons productivity, enjoyment and fulfillment at home and in other aspects of their lives. The travesty is that most people don’t get proactive when it comes to boosting their own performance. Many people do quite the opposite – they look to get away with the minimum possible amounts of work. The sad thing is that this attitude has held back many super talented people. Most people know of individuals who failed their exams miserably whilst at school. There are however countless examples of such people who for one reason or other, went back to school or college and passed their exams with flying colors the second time round. What changed? The answer is simple; their attitude changed. It is attitude which separates the great from the good. Given the choice of somebody to work with, I would rather take somebody with an outstanding, highly driven and determined attitude – somebody who is hell bent on succeeding – then somebody with a weaker attitude but notably more ability.

Take any list of people who have seceded in their walk of life, people like Bill Gates, Edmund Hillary, Nelson Mandela… do you think they had anything but a completely driven, determined and success orientated attitude?

These people worked extremely hard to get to where they ended up. They pushed themselves to reach new heights, worked on themselves to improve their performance and they won. People with the right attitude succeed: They break records, set precedents, get the big promotions, win the big contracts and make the most money. People with weaker attitudes come just about anywhere but first. So if you really want to improve your performance, you have to be proactive in order to work on yourself. You have to be prepared to invest in yourself. You have to be ready to start performing better.

On our website we have a popular section entitled ‘motivational videos’, and one of the videos featured has a great quote: “The biggest mistake we could ever make in our lives is to think that we work for anybody but ourselves” – Brian Tracy.

Perhaps you are currently running a business or you may know of people within your organization who need support in shortening the learning curve as they settle into a new role or a new environment or there are people who you believe can engage more with their potential and as a result contribute more to the business. Alternatively, perhaps you are an individual who knows that your productivity could be increased. You could be a professional athlete, a senior executive or simply somebody who wants to get onto the road to success. Whatever! The point is that you most likely will have heard something about coaching but you don’t really have enough understanding to decide whether it is a development tool that would meet your needs. So if you read on, my outcome for you is that you will fill in a number of knowledge gaps and as a result you will become more informed to make a choice.

What is performance coaching?

Performance coaching is about:

-Working closely with the executive to improve an aspect of their professional life and helping to promote clarity and action.

-Helping leaders to get unstuck from their dilemmas and assist them to transform thinking into actions and results.

-Helping the executive to gain greater awareness about the outcomes they are seeking linked to their values and beliefs.

-And building on this to help the executive to clarify current performance and limitations so as we can move towards unlocking more potential to enhance future achievements.

Performance coaching is very much based on the underlining principles laid down by Harvard educationalist and tennis expert Tim Gallwey who threw down the gauntlet with a book entitled “The inner game of Tennis” (1974). The word inner refers to the person’s internal state or as Gallwey explains it the opponent within ones own head is more formidable than the one on the other side of the net. Many of us have inner demons which hold us back and prevent us from reaching our potential. You may have a demon or two yourself, they include a lack of confidence, a lack of belief, a lack of motivation and so on.

High quality Performance Coaching is based on incorporating a coaching psychology perspective into the work the coach does with executives. A high quality and experienced coach will understand that we all have created obstacles or habits that get in the way of us performing in line with our real potential, such as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self doubts, exaggerating consequences of things going wrong and under estimating what we can do.

So from a coaching psychology perspective, a coach will work with you to assist you to;

•Grow your awareness about what you do as a leader and what you really want to achieve in your role.

•To encourage you to consider what habits and underlying attitudes are influencing current performance and on that basis what choices you have to grow your performance.

•For you to decide what you want to do about what you discover and then for you to identify specific outcomes and supporting actions you must take that will move you towards what you want to achieve.

•To work together in a collaborative relationship on your journey including monitoring your progress and for you to notice the effect changes are having on performance

What influences performance?

There are 4 crucial factors that affect the quality of our performance

•Knowledge

•Skills

•Attitude

•Habits

When organizations are asked which aspects they invest most in training and development the answer is usually knowledge and skills.

But when asked which of these are more long-term predictors of performance and make a more sustained change the answer is typically attitudes and habits.

A lot of more typical training and development programs have failed to deliver long-term changes because they do not address underlying attitudes and habits. They have focused on giving knowledge and developing skills but if the trainee at an emotional intelligence (EI) level is not ready or convinced then at best the new knowledge and skills will be only applied in the short term before old habits resume.

What issues have to be considered here?

•Personality is relatively fixed and therefore non develop able (Supported by type and trait theories).

•Personality is not related to performance.

•IQ is also relatively fixed.

•Our ability to think is more dependent on our emotional state

•What we do (behavior) is consistent with and influenced by our attitudes and beliefs we hold about ourselves.

Adopting constructive attitudes and developing complimentary habits is at the core of the work we will do together. This is central to how we manage our personality and cognitive abilities to be personally and inter personally effective.

For example;

What difference would you notice about your performance if:

-You were in control of your emotional state to create a state of feeling positive and confident to solve a problem (as opposed to relying solely on IQ).

-You focused your energy outwards on creating relationships using the qualities you have ( as opposed to focusing on acting like an introvert)

-You practice being assertive by increasing your self esteem (rather than trying to apply new skills which don’t seem to feel comfortable to you)

Working with attitudes and habits provides a framework for explaining how to make change sustainable. Remember, what we think about affects how we feel which affects performance.

What will we be focusing on?

Make your learning experiential.

Talking about change wont make it happen! However, learning to experience the way you respond internally will most certainly affect attitudes and habits so as to re enforce new learning.

Focus on feelings and self

As you will find out during your program we will be focusing on the kind of experiences you are creating on the inside. That is, feelings are experienced within the body and the more we start to take notice of these feelings then the more we will raise self awareness and in so doing the more we can start to consider how we want to respond rather than responding through habit.

Change habits

Most of what we do is unconscious, automatic and habitual behavior. If change is to be sustainable it must, therefore, become habitual. Making a change is one thing but maintaining it is more difficult. All too often we will revert back to old behaviors when under pressure or the initial motivation for change has gone. So we need to focus conscious attention here.
Are you interested in working with a performance coach?

I run a Performance Coaching business Called Inner Vision. If you would like more information about Inner Vision, or would like to read more information about coaching, then please visit ivpc.co.uk. We also offer some interesting motivational videos which could help inspire you to start working on your attitude. I wish you the best of luck in your quest to improve your performance.

Peter Harty has spent over a decade leading the way in Performance Coaching in the UK. He runs Inner Vision Performance Coaching, which has helped countless executives improve their performance. Peter’s passion for coaching and improving peoples performance has driven him to turn to writing, and in a series of articles he outlines the value of coaching and how he feels it can be used to transform your life.

If you choose Inner Vision, you will be coached by Peter Harty. Peter is one of the UKs most experienced performance coaches. He started his practice over 10 years ago and has since completed over 10,000 hours of coaching executives from manufacturing and service sectors. He has worked in senior management positions for over 20 years for several major blue chip companies including Managing Director of a large manufacturing plant and as HR Director.

With a psychology background he is one of the few to hold a Master of Science degree in Coaching Psychology and is recognized by the International Coach Federation as a master coach (since 2005). He is also a member of the Society for Coaching Psychology, a member of the Special Group in Coaching Psychology and a Fellow Associate of the British Psychology Society. Peter is also a licensed European NLP Coach.