Listen to the audio below of Dr. Katrina Burrows, MCC interviewing Dr. Patrick Williams, Ed.D, MCC on coaching and social change. The interview also covers Dr. Williams’ experiences coaching in remote villages as well as coaching prisoners. This interview is a part of the Excellent Executive Coaching Series with Dr. Burrows.
OR read the 3-part series on Coaching and Social Change – Part one is below:
How Can Coaching Help Social Change! Patrick Williams, Ed.D., MCC (Part 1)
from the Top Coach Blog with Katrina Burrows, MCC
Do you want to coach for social change? Find out what motivated Patrick Williams to coach for social change. He is now training coaches and managers to coach for social change.
This is the first blog from a series of blogs on Patrick Willliams’, Ed.D. fascinating projects in remote villages and his work with prisoners.
Who is our guest?
Patrick Williams, Ed.D., MCC, is founder of The Institute for Life Coach Training, the first-of-its-kind training institute that specialized in training psychotherapists, psychologists, counselors and helping professionals in building a successful coaching practice. He co-authored Therapist as Coach: Transforming Your Practice and Total Life Coaching: 50+ Life Lessons, Skills, and Techniques to Enhance your Practice and Your life and Becoming a Professional Life Coach: Lessons from the Institute for Life Coach Training.
Katrina Burrus, MCC, Ph.D. is the host and Patrick’s interviewer for the Excellent Executive Coaching Podcast. Check out the full interview interview.
Katrina authored When the Visionary is Blinded: Coaching Brilliant and Toxic Leaders and Global Nomadic Leaders: How to Identify, Attract and Retain Them. Katrina is founder and CEO of MKB Conseil & Coaching, a company that helps managers, leaders and organizations to excel. She asked Patrick the following questions:
What was your motivation to teach the coaching approach for social change?
I’ve been a coach since 1990 and coached a lot of top-level executives and then the coaching profession started to pick up steam in the early ‘90s with the start of the ICF and coach training schools. And so, I continued to coach for many years but I just had this inspiration if coaching is this powerful an approach wouldn’t it be great if we could reach the underserved, those that are on the margin of society or if we could coach within non-profits. I saw a lot of opportunities where the coaching approach could help the communities solve its own problems at the local level and not count on consultants to tell them what to do.
As you know in coaching, we don’t tell people what they need. We help them discover it.
We’re not like a Peace Corps coaches. What we teach is the essentials of coaching and we do follow-up with them. It’s part of the program to make sure they’re adding this coaching approach conversation to the challenges at their local level.
Do you change your coaching approach with different institutions?
Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean the ideal format is that we come in and do a two-day training on the coach approach and then do a three-year follow-up. That is the ideal process. We find out what changed from the time they started using the coaching approach. However, often we do not have a large enough budget to implement this process because there are not enough grants. At times, the local communities can only afford a half-day training and we follow up as best we can.
In Kenya, we often didn’t do a live training. Instead we modeled the coaching approach by going from village to village where we had some contacts. We just sat down and had one-on-one conversations or small group conversations. Usually it was with women, that is, women who had learned some trade such as improving their jewelry to make more money. And then the coaching was asking questions such as, “When you make more money, then what? How is that going to change?”
So we use the coaching model and teach the coaching skills depending upon the budget and the mission of the organization and the context in which we find ourselves coaching.
