As an HR or People professional, coaching skills are a fantastic thing to have in your personal toolkit to help you thrive at work and get the results you're looking for.

In this episode of HR Coffee Time, Career Coach Fay Wallis is joined by Charlie Warshawski - Coach trainer from Love your Coaching. Charlie talks through what coaching skills are, why they can help your HR career, how to develop them and how to choose a coach training provider if you decide to take the plunge and undertake some coach training.

Key Points From This Episode

[02:41] An introduction to Charlie Warshawski

[04:30] Charlie explains what coaching skills are

[08:38] How coaching skills can be beneficial in your HR profession

[15:01] Why coaching skills can benefit the whole HR department

[17:48] Charlie offers tips and advice on how to develop coaching skills

• Review your current coaching skills
• Talk to a coach to further your knowledge
• Experience coaching first-hand as a coachee

[20:16] Charlie explains how you could assess your questioning skills

[23:15] Fay refers to both episode 38: Redundancy – why losing a job feels so hard & how to help & episode 48: How to support your colleagues with bereavement at work for a greater understanding of being empathetic

[28:56] Charlie shares his advice on choosing the right coaching qualification for yourself

• Charlie’s article explaining the different coaching training options: Which coaching qualification to choose? It’s a minefield

[31:40] Fay talks through the different accrediting coaching bodies – the Association for Coaching, the ICF and the EMCC

[35:48] Charlie’s book recommendations:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Time To Think by Nancy Kline
• Factfulness by Hans Rosling

(Disclosure: these book links are affiliate links which means Fay will earn a small commission from Amazon if you choose to purchase the book using them). 

[38:26] How to connect with Charlie

Useful Links

• Connect with Fay on LinkedIn
• The Bright Sky Career Coaching website
• Video: how to rate & review HR Coffee Time on Apple Podcasts
• Charlie’s website: Love Your Coaching
• Fay’s article: How to become a career coach

Rate and Review the Podcast

If you found this episode of HR Coffee Time helpful, please do rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

If you're kind enough to leave a review, please do let Fay know so she can say thank you. You can always reach her at: fay@brightskycareercoaching.co.uk.

Enjoyed This Episode? Don't Miss the Next One!

Be notified each time a new episode of HR Coffee Time is released and get access to other free career tips, tools and resources by signing up to receive the free weekly HR Coffee Time email.

Welcome back to HR coffee time with me your host Fay Wallis, career coach with a background in HR and the founder of bright sky career coaching. This podcast is especially for you to help you have a successful and fulfilling HR career without working yourself into the ground. And unsurprisingly, as I am a coach, I think that coaching skills are a good thing to have. But they aren't just good for professional coaches. I think they're helpful for anyone who has a job where they have to interact with other people regularly. And I think this is especially true for HR and people, professionals like you. coaching skills are just a fantastic thing to have in your personal toolkit to help you thrive at work and get the results you're looking for.

So whether you've already been thinking about developing coaching skills, or you've never really thought about this before, I hope you're going to enjoy today's episode and find it interesting. I invited coach trainer Charlie Warshawski, from love your coaching onto the show to explain what coaching skills are, why they can help your HR career, how to develop them, and how to choose a coach training provider if you decide to take the plunge and do some coach training. But before I dive into the episode, I'd like to quickly say thank you to Daniel, for the HR coffee time review you wrote on Apple podcasts last week. I really appreciate it. And I'm so pleased to hear that you've been enjoying the podcast, I know that you're looking to transition into an HR role at the moment.

And I promise, I have some episodes coming up specifically about this, about transitioning into HR. So I hope they're going to be helpful. If you also enjoy listening to HR coffee time, I'd love it. If like Daniel, you'd be happy to rate and review the podcast for me in Apple podcasts or on Spotify. Because ratings and reviews make a big difference in encouraging apple and Spotify to recommend the show to listeners who may not have come across it before. I'd love to help as many people in the HR and people profession as I can through this free podcast. So if you do go ahead and review HR coffee time for me, please do let me know. So I can say thank you.

But now I think it's time for us to meet Charlie and crack on with the main part of the show. Welcome to the show, Charlie, it's wonderful to have you here. And can I ask you to start by just sharing a little bit about your background and the work that you do?

Yes, thank you. Thank you for inviting me so so I do two things. One is that I coach people, mostly I coach, school leaders and head teachers. And I've been doing that I've got a background in education. And I've been working with school leaders coaching them on all the challenges that they have for the last 15 years or so. Then the other thing I do is that I support coaches. So I run a training company called Love your coaching and what we do, we're an institute of leadership and management centre.

So we offer coaching qualifications at a beginning, intermediate and very advanced level. And then I also I mentor coaches to other qualifications and I'm a coaching supervisor. So I supervise coaches one to one. So I'm about two things, developing and supporting leaders in education by coaching them and developing and supporting coaches by helping them professionalise and become really, really good coaches.

Brilliant, thank you for that excellent introduction. And then before we get stuck into exploring why coaching skills can help your HR career and how to develop them, I thought it would be really useful to just start by explaining what coaching skills are, because coaching gets talked about all the time. But actually, we're not always clear on exactly what it is. And I remember when I very first called you many years ago now, when I was thinking about training as a coach, you helped me realise straightaway that I actually didn't have a good understanding of what coaching was, I had it completely mixed up with mentoring.

I remember saying to you, oh, I coach all the time in my HR role, I do this and this and this and you very gently pointed out that actually, that wasn't coaching at all, I was just telling people what I thought they should do, which is mentoring. So would it be okay, if you just run us through exactly what coaching skills are?

So it's it's a very common misconception. And often when people, when they asked me what I do, and I say my head coach, they say what are you coaching? Or what sports do you coach or? Oh, yes, I coach a lot and then it does turn out that they mentor more than they coach. I see that. So coaching the way that we understand coaching and it is an evolving profession. It's the idea that an individual whether they're in their personal or professional lives, have challenges or have opportunities that they want to talk through and work out their own solution. And what the coach does is it creates a time and the space and asks helpful questions to let the that person come to their own conclusions.

And often, it's a conclusion that's buried either a little bit, or quite a long way below the surface. And the time and the space. And the, the careful listening, lets the coaches have the solutions bubble up and emerge. Coaches do choose to not give advice coaches do choose to let the other person come to their own conclusions, unless there's an emergency. So please, HR managers, if you find that you're coaching someone and and they're breaching series regulations, you just press pause and say like, I need to tell you, you can't do X or Y. That's what coaching is. And it's a skill that is very, very learnable. And it's a skill that is very, very lined up with other skills that leaders have that colleagues have their parents have. So it's very, very learnable.

Mentoring has got lots of different flavours mentoring, yes, often comes from experience and advice. But there are lots and lots and lots of coaching styles of mentors. So you can mentor in this gentle fluid way of of asking lots of questions, seeing what their ideas are, and then topping up their ideas with a little nudge of your own. Or you can mentor in what I'd call an old school traditional way, which is going to be much more, do it my way, do it this way, this is a way it's always worked. So you should do it. So coaching and mentoring do have very distinct differences. But there can be a bit of an overlap in skills approaches.

When I decided to do my coach training with you, I actually chose a qualification that within executive coaching and mentoring. Because as a career coach, I think a lot of the time I would be doing people a disservice if there was no advice mixed in there at all. Say for me, I probably operate as a bit of a blend between the two when it comes to coaching and mentoring. But I predominantly take a coaching approach.

Yeah. And that's, that's been really wonderful to see your growth and your development that in that way. And I think in some ways, career coaches are fortunate because you can really ring fence those two things, you can really say I'm, I'm going to coach you today. And we're going to work through your beliefs, your worries, your fears, your goals, your aspirations, and that's coaching. And then on another day, we can do the interview prep, and you've done CV reviews for me. And that was very mentoring in style very much.

I'll listen. But I'm then going to give you my experience and my advice and my guidance and lots of professionals have there, lots of professionals can coach on a Monday on the topic for your coachee and mentor on a Tuesday on a Tuesday on the technical knowledge they need to know and those two, so long as we keep them separate, they work really well in harmony.

I think that's gonna be really reassuring for anyone listening who is thinking of potentially doing a coaching qualification to help them in their HR role. Because of course, as an HR professional, it's going to be almost impossible to ever say, I'm not going to give you advice, because it is such a big part of your role. And actually, now that I'm touching on that, and now that we've got a little bit, well, hopefully a lot clearer on what coaching is, it would be great to hear from you why you think coaching skills can be so helpful to have if you work in HR. So that would be both for anyone listening for themselves as an HR practitioner, how it's going to help them personally, but also how it can be beneficial as an entire HR department.

Okay, great. Thank you for that. Well, I'll take those two questions separately and give you a couple of answers as an HR professional. Firstly, if if HR professionals don't lead on coaching, who is going to within the organisation, we have trained people who, who are in finance or an admin or marketing or whatever, who pop up and wants to coach you had a couple in your cohort, infective, of coaches learning, but mostly, it's people in the people section of the organisation who who need to be good coaches and then need to lead on it.

I think that HR professionals benefit from being coaches because they often have to deal with people who are either in that growth aspiration phase and really want to do well and need the knowledge and the support and the space. Or they're dealing with people who are challenged and are struggling and underperforming. And coaching can be incredibly useful to help get them up to the mark. It's not the only way. We don't want to just do deficit coaching. But that can definitely definitely be helpful. I think that HR professionals can coach in two different ways you can coach in that really relatively formal way where you agree.

You've got regular coaching clients who come to see you you either walk into a room or you have a nice walk around the park and you coach them one to one or you do what's called Spot coaching. That If someone comes with a problem, and rather than visually looking at the regulation and giving them direct advice straightaway, you sit down with them, and you give them 10 minutes of your coaching time and you ask, what is this issue? And what's the problem? And what's the obstacle from solving it, and what ideas have you got, and so on. And you hold back from giving advice unless it's really necessary.

So I think it's really useful in the day to day running of, of your role as an HR professional, and I'm sharing with you earlier, a friend of mine runs an HR recruitment company, who tells me that, that almost every job, he gets advertised at a senior level, they are looking for coaching qualifications. So it's really important and really helpful for people who apply for these jobs to know that they've got a coaching qualification, because they're likely to get that role. If they don't have it, then they may miss out on that role. So the final piece, I think, is, as an HR professional, having a coaching qualification can really help with your career growth.

Thank you, Charlie, I just want to quickly add in a couple of things that are that started coming to me while you were talking. It's interesting to hear what your friend who's the HR Recruiter said about a lot of senior roles actually asking for a coaching qualification, asides from the fact that that's his experience. I think, from a practical point of view, when you are in a senior leadership role as an HR professional, it is so incredibly helpful to have that qualification. Because I think it can take a lot of the pressure off, when it comes to interacting with the senior team. Because often there can be a bit of a nervousness, like when you're in those board level meetings for the very first time and thinking, I'm not going to know all the answers, I'm not going to know everything.

And actually being able to take a coaching approach and being able to use your coaching skills helps you realise that you don't need to have all the answers to everything. In fact, there's this huge power in being able to ask questions and facilitate discussions that can come up with a collective answer to big important or heavy questions. And if the CEO or the CEO or or whoever the senior leaders are, start looking to you for help and support, because those roles can be very lonely, it often is the HR director or people director or head of HR, they will hopefully feel they can turn to for some support, to talk to you about issues they may be experiencing that don't even necessarily have an HR focus. If you've got those coaching skills, you can be such a great sounding board for them, and to help them feel less alone, which just adds enormous value to your role and the work that you do.

I agree, I think and you're right, you're extending what I said, the idea that you can sit at the meetings and have your coaching hat on so you don't feel the panic, but also Yeah, that you can offer coaching to whomsoever it might not just be for your report, the idea that you are part of a senior team, and you become the trusted, professional friend who people will listen to, I think that's that's a wonderful, wonderful way of seeing it. So it's really rich. And I think the the, if we value coaches within the organisation, that it's got an incredibly important role to play.

Yeah. And if you're listening, and actually you're thinking, Well, I'm nowhere near being in that senior role. So why do I need to worry about this? Does this really apply to me, building on your point about what you said about actually, if anyone's having a difficult time, or wants to progress and they come to you for support? I know that lots of levels in your HR role, one thing that can be a huge challenge is having line managers come to you for support all the time, and they want you to do the work for them. And it can be a point of real frustration. I know so many people say to me, Oh, why don't they just do it themselves? So you know, why do they keep asking me to do these things. And partly that might be down to being new in the role or a lack of awareness about maybe how to handle a particular conversation.

But often it's down to confidence. And so that person will just be feeling out of their depth or they're scared to deliver bad news to people who report into them. So again, being able to use those coaching skills, it can help address the root problem, instead of just saying, Well, you need to say this or you need to tell them that or Here's a letter to give them or you know, all those very directive things by actually asking them some questions and just listening to them carefully. You can help them to realise what is it that they're really worrying about with these conversations?

And how can they build up that confidence so that they can operate independently and they don't need to lean on you quite so heavily. So, hopefully, that's reassuring for anyone who's listening thinking well, I don't know if I ever want to be an HR leader and I miles off of that. So I just hope that that's going to help them realise If it's relevant for them to

absolute, and I think that that builds on the second part of that question you asked earlier, which is the benefit for the organisation? And you're absolutely right that HR people sometimes feel a bit dumped upon a bit like managers who are in their role who don't feel that they have the people skills to deal with their challenging colleagues, it will get pushed up the line to HR. Well, I think that, yes, definitely coaching these managers to help them solve their own problems is a big thing. I think that there's a couple of other really big wins, that we can look at.

One is if if HR managers, HR leaders, HR, business partners are all coaching regularly, then that's some fantastic role modelling. That idea of actually, this is how we go about things around here, what we do is when we work with our teams, we're not we're less directive, and we're more coaching in our style. And we set that as a default. I mean, we do read the language, a lot of about coaching and cultures. And I think they need to be created deliberately, they need to be put working on them to make them happen. And I think HR will lead on that.

The second, I think, really big win. And this is something we've been working on for about a decade now is transforming the Performance Management appraisal system to make it coaching in style, that it's, it's almost universally unloved, please, if you love your appraisal system, right to me don't right to buy. But I find that lots and lots of lots of organisations don't like them. Big companies like Dell and Amazon are busy bidding them off, we don't think that they should be better off because often they don't get replaced with anything good.

What we think is that if you train all of the appraisers, all the line managers to have enough coaching skills to be able to appraise with a coaching style, still with a bit of direct input and a bit of challenge, but with predominantly a coaching style, then you're more likely to have people who love the appraisal system, and that the appraisal system will lead to performance growth and organisational growth. We've been doing it for a decade, we've done it in about 400 different schools, and we see real value individual approach and I think on its own, a coaching approach to appraisers can transform both Leadership, Culture, and performance. So I'm a big fan of taking coaching from HR into that bit of a system.

Now, hopefully, after hearing all your passion and enthusiasm, when it comes to the importance of having coaching skills, it will have led anyone listening to think Oh, right. Okay, I need to start thinking about this then. And if that's the case, then what are some of your tips, what's some of your advice for them as to how they can go about developing coaching skills.

So before you even think about signing up for hours or someone else's course, hours, preferably, there are three things I think you can do. The first is when you have a good understanding of what coaching skills are, review what your coaching skills are like already, although they are learnable, we they are also not outside of good people skills. So if you're a leader, if you're a son, or a daughter, a brother or a sister or a parent and neighbour, your work in the community, you're likely to have these good skills of questioning, of listening of holding the space of appropriate but not ruinous empathy, those skills are going to be there. So check in and maybe ask some people, you know, what am I like went on with you.

And find out what your coaching skills are already, like, have a chat with a coach. I know hundreds of Coach 1000s In fact, and I'm sure you know, many hundreds as well. Talk to a coach find out what it's like being a coach. And probably the most important is to get some coaching experience be a coachee. My, one of the things we've introduced in the last couple of years and in all of our coach training programmes is a requirement for you to have some coaching before you come on the course or in the very early days.

Because if you know what it's like to be a coachee you see the benefits. And you might see what you like and what you like less. And then you can see whether is this something for me? Would I like to be the on the other side of the table? Would I like to be what I like to enjoy working in this way they will be the first things that I would do before you even go anywhere near a book or qualification.

I don't want to now give you loads of work to do, Charlie, that as you were speaking, I was thinking Yep, this is all absolutely fantastic advice. But the point that you made around assessing your own coaching skills, there were a few things you just mentioned. So you mentioned questioning, listening, holding the space appropriate but not ruinous empathy. So it would be great if we could just have a little bit more information about those so that if someone is listening they will really can go away and take that practical step and think, Okay, well, how do I know how good I am at questioning? How do I know how good I am at listening? What are some great tips you have around how they could assess their questioning skills, for example?

So if we take question intent, there's two, two rounds of questioning and listening, which are probably the things that, you know, we really lead on. If we think about how many questions we asked teachers asked 400 questions a day, as parents, we ask 1000 questions a day, mostly? Why did you do that? We asked many, many, many questions. And I think what you can do is start reflecting on the quality of our questions. And we can tell if our questions are any good because we get interesting replies like, Oh, I didn't think about that, or we get a big long flow. So we start to develop some rules of thumb about our questions are very simple. Are they understandable? Do people not ask us to repeat them? Because they're too complicated, which kept them nice and really clean and crisp? Are they singular?

Well, one of the classic things is, and I did this when I was first coaching, you ask this question, and then you ask it again in a slightly different way, and then a third version of it, just to make sure that they really don't understand it. So simple cingulate clear. Do they come from a place of curiosity? You know, is it an I was wondering type of question, rather than what's wrong with you type of question from that non judgmental place? If we can follow a few of those, those sort of standard rules, then it means that our questions are likely to be strong. But I think we can trust the fact that we have probably asked 1000s and 1000s of questions in our lives.

But then the classic expression of we are listening to understand rather than we're listening to respond, we're not sitting there waiting for our turn, that we feel calm, we feel unhurried, if we get stimulus, from our own thoughts from what they say, we don't really respond to that. We remain curious, I would suggest that advanced listening is the thing that's a that's a lifelong bit of work, and be confident that we already got some very good listening skills. And there's times that we're probably doing it well, you know, perhaps when we're sitting with a dear friend, or someone who's struggling or with a parent or a grandparent, and there's lots of times when we all get distracted, and we all we all sort of lose our focus one of my children, their favourite thing to say to me is Dad, you're not listening, and you're meant to be a coach, they really

can always rely on our children back down to. Brilliant. So we've looked at questioning, listening, as far as appropriate, not ruinous empathy. I'd recommend anyone who wants to be able to dig a bit more into that I have other episodes that I've released, that would be really helpful to listen to. So there was an episode with Michelle Smith, which I think was episode 48, which was actually all about bereavement, so supporting colleagues in the workplace who are bereaved. And in it, she really explained so helpfully, the difference between sympathy and empathy, and has some helpful advice, really helpful advice that I've implemented immediately, and keep on trying to work on to build your responses so that they are empathetic rather than sympathetic.

And there was an earlier episode as well. I'm just looking at my phone now to see if I can find exactly what number it was. Here we go. It was actually around redundancy. It was called redundancy. Why losing a job feels so hard and how to help with my guest, Emma Tomes, and again, she talked at length, about the difference between sympathy and empathy and responding appropriately when you're supporting someone. So as far as that skill is concerned, if you're listening and thinking, I want to have a go at this to start thinking about how strong my skills are here. Then please do go back and listen to those episodes. I think you'll find them really helpful.

And that's great. And it's really good to really think about that because I think it is a worry for lots of new coaches. What do I say if they present a big issue? What do I Say if they cry, what do I do if they present these big emotions and the idea is not that we become cold, heartless fish and said we're not allowed to express, you know, we're humans and, and we respond in a human way. And there's a careful balance between that. And then us taking over and us, preventing them from having those feelings.

Someone that I've trained relatively recently, she turned up on the beginning of Coach Training. And she'd been bereaved. Quite recently, her Mama died in the last couple of weeks. And she said she hadn't managed to had one single conversation about her mom passing without someone gatecrashing, you know, and saying, oh, yeah, well, when my mom died when my dad died, or when the dog died, or whatever. So, actually, that that belief that we're sharing our common experience as a way of shared humanity, sometimes that's not what people need, they need this space, they need to be able to talk it through to feel it. Yeah. So I think redundancy in bereavement, I think that there are really two big spike areas. And as coaches, we can learn a lot from how professionals in those roads work.

Yeah, I was really grateful to have them both on the show, even though I've obviously been doing outplacement work for years now, I learned so much from having them on, and hopefully everyone who was listening, learn to look to and then the final thing you said for that could be helpful for assessing your coaching skills, or developing your coaching skills is around being able to hold the space. Could you just talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah, I mean, space is a strange old word. I think the idea that, that firstly, I feel psychologically safe. So the real basics of no interruptions and, and some contracting that says there's no judgement here. And I'm not going to take over to your earlier point about mentoring. If the coachee understands fully that we're not going to get crushed their thinking by advice or suggestions or judgments or leading questions, then they're more likely to talk through and then more likely just to be in a flow, so they know they're not feeling judged.

Secondly, I think the idea that we are unhurried that we're definitely not going to interrupt them. The great Nancy Klein has just written a book called the promise, I will not break, which is a promise to not interrupt. If we think about in our lives, how often we do get interrupted how often someone finishes our sentence or elaborates our thoughts or takes over or changes the subject. If we can say in that coaching hour, that's not going to happen, then we'll finish their thoughts. And even after they finish their thoughts, we still will sit there silent. And we will wait. And they might have another four. Or they might tell us after 10 seconds. Not okay, I'm done.

And then we ask another question. So I would suggest that a combination of some sharp, nice helpful non judgmental questions. So I'm really careful listening and creating this very centred other person, other person, favourite space, and three things together, are likely to make someone feel so relaxed, and to really value what is going to be the hour of their week.

That's incredibly helpful. Thank you for letting me dig down a little bit deeper into all of those things. And I guess that brings me on to the next question, which is okay, so if someone has gone and followed her advice, they've had some coaching themselves, so they get to really appreciate exactly what's involved and understand and got a feel for it. Is that something that they want to learn more about? They started trying to work on these skills, and they've done a little bit of self assessment, and they think, right, that's it. I definitely want to do a coaching qualification. What advice do you have for them on how to choose the right qualification for them? I know for me, this took me ages to settle on, oh, which is the right one because there is a lot of choice.

And yours is a very common experience. Most people who, who call our inquiry line and ask you about coaching qualifications are already befuddled there. I've been looking for days I've read this, I've read that I don't know what's going on. It's all very confusing. So I've written a short paper which I'll share with you the maps out the different qualifications that are available in the UK. And they do really range from the non qualification courses, you know, the free weekends and the webinars and all that through to a 10 grand course at Ashridge or how business school so you can pick different places along the line.

We have chosen the Institute of leadership and management for a number of reasons as the qualifications that we offer the cert the qualification that you hold for a number of reasons one, because there are different levels. We can do a level three for very, very new probably people in their 20s if we met first into leadership type of thing. And level five there are people who are experienced leaders but they've never coached are a level seven for people like you who already have coaching skills, who are ready to push on and advance. Because they're practical, you learn skills you get assessed, you're coaching at an advanced level, but they're also a bit theoretical, which means that you do do some writing, you may remember the essay or three you had to had to produce.

So it means that that Writing helps you focus on doing the background learning, then it gives you the opportunity to write about it. And it really helps for your ongoing career and perhaps if you're developing strategies and processes and so on. So it's, I think it's a really good combination of, of both coaching skills and a bit of theory, the training that we offer, obviously, we make it completely practical, we don't we don't get busy sharing slides and, and making very, very theoretically based. And we do see people coming out at this qualification at a really, really advanced highly skilled level. If you think about the six of you on the course are you are they're incredibly skilled by the time you've finished. And actually, you're all out there pretty well running your own coaching businesses and and thriving with coaching.

The other thing about the Ireland that's really important for HR is it sits very, very well in the UK community as credible. So things like in the NHS, they're approved coaches list, you have to have an Ireland qualification for CRPD. There's an accreditation along with them. They are they are very, very strong. Most local authorities when they train, they look for ILM qualifications. So I think it's it's very, very useful, and it works really, really well. So I would encourage people to look at ILM qualifications.

Okay, so ILM is clearly your favourites, and it's the one that you train around. The other thing to mention is that it can also be a pathway into getting your coach accreditation through one of the main coaching bodies. So this is another thing that I just found mystifying when I first became a coach. And that was the fact that there are different coaching bodies, and there are different kinds of accreditation that you can have. So it's not essential that you get credited as a coach at all. But if you're thinking, I actually do you know what, although I love working in HR, I think I would like to now start working on my coaching skills, in my current role, get my coaching qualification with a view to potentially just working as a coach.

And I've coached people who've wanted to do that on my career change coaching programme, actually one of my most recent people, she had a very successful HR career, but she kept getting this idea that she was interested in potentially maybe being a coach. And so that's eventually what she's decided to do and take the plunge. So if that is the case, then it can be helpful to have that accreditation. I'll just quickly for anyone listening who's not sure about this, talk through the main coaching bodies where you can get accredited.

So there's the ICF, which seems to have become the most well known one, and the one where the majority of coaches who I know seem to get accredited with that stands for International Coach Federation. And I know that your ILM qualification when I did with you level seven puts you on the path to be able to then apply for accreditation with them.

Yes.

And then there's also the Association for coaching. So the very first coaching qualification I did, which was for career coaching, that would have enabled me to go down the Association for coaching accreditation routes. And then there's also the emcc, which I always forget what that stands for, is it the European mentoring coaching counselling, actually, I'm not sure if I've got that, right. So again, just for anyone listening who's thinking, Okay, I think it wants to a qualification. I just wanted to try and take some of the mystery out of the answers.

So that if you are looking at different options and trying to choose, you can think oh, okay, does this fit training lead on to accreditation, if that's what they want to do. And again, being a member of one of those bodies can be a good idea just for your continuous professional developments as well, because they tend to run all sorts of webinars and mini courses and things that are great top ups to your foundational coach training that you would have done.

Right. And thank you for that. It's a really good and clear explanation. And the reason I think the reason we see all of those professional bodies as like the second stage is because of the number of hours required for their first qualification. So the ILM level seven asks you to do 20 hours of Coach Training coaching to get this qualification which is not very many we we triple that by making sure that you do an hour planning and also an hour review. So It's like each session gets triple value, the ICF, emcc, and AC all ask for 100 hours.

And so when we're training head teachers and HR directors to find 100 hours of your time, which is really 300 hours of coaching to get a first qualification feels too onerous. It's like signing up for another degree, really. So I think they're wonderful qualifications, you and I both hold them. I think that they are, they are hugely powerful, beneficial, but they are a bit coaching specialist industry, and they definitely feel like the second phase.

That's a really helpful insight. And as we are drawing to the end of our time together today, you know that I'm about to ask you the question I asked all of my guests, which is what is your top nonfiction book recommendation that you're going to share with us today?

That's probably the hardest question when you send me the list of restaurants, oh, god, how am I going to pick one from the many, many, many? So I've got three here, if that's right. So 2 relating to work and one, one relating to the work so, so Thinking Fast and Slow, I think is my favourite non coaching book that I've read in the last 10 years written by Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, but he's a behavioural psychologist. And it really made me understand that fast and slow thinking systems, it was one of those books, four pages a day for about six months, it took me forever to read it, and I'm still writing um, notes from it. It's really good.

So. So that was one time to think by Nancy Klein. This is the transformative book that lets us stop talking and start listening. I read it when I was already an experienced coach in it. And it blew my mind it was incredibly, incredibly useful. So I'd recommend that for anyone whether you want to be a coach or not, it would just help you become a better listener. And then from a bit of an understanding of the world, a book that really opened my eyes is called fact fulness by Hans Rosling. If you don't want to read the book, watch his TED Talk, incredible book, just a realigning of how the data about how the world is not in such a bad shape as we thought it was. The strapline is the world is bad, but getting better acknowledges through data, how we have made progress these last few 100 years, they will be my three.

Thank you very much for sharing them. And I will make sure that I put links to all of them in the show notes, along with the paper that you very kindly said that he would share, which explains all of the different coaching qualifications, so people can refer back to that as well. And for anyone listening, who is actually thinking of becoming a career coach, I wrote a whole article ages ago, on how to become a career coach, because I used to get contacted about that so often. And I would send these essay length emails back to people. But in the end, I thought I'll just write down everything that I know. And then I can easily send that out.

So although the focus of our time together today hasn't specifically been around career coaching, I know that some people may be interested in that. So that wraps everything up. All I have left to do is to say a huge thank you to you, Charlie, it's been lovely to see you and to catch up and to have you share all of your wealth of expertise and knowledge with the HR coffee time audience. For anyone listening, who would love to get in touch with you or learn more about your work. Can you just quickly tell us before you say goodbye, what the best way is of them doing

so the easiest thing is to either go onto our website, love your coaching.com or email me Charlie at love your coaching.com. And I'll happily respond. Our contact details are on the website as well. There's lots of information, lots of fliers, we've got lots of people you can talk to who've done courses, like you who is talking to many of our prospective clients. Thank you for having me on. I've really I from when you first started talking to me about this. I knew how professional this was going to be and how organised and I've listened to some of the episodes as far as it's been a real delight. We've worked with so many people in HR, and and this coaching thing can make such a huge difference. So thank you for inviting me to chat about it.