As we continue our #thisisforyou campaign over the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you a range of coaching tools to try at home.

Our coaching is all about helping our clients to succeed and achieve in all they set out to do. We want our clients to be at their best and feel at their best. We help our clients to clarify their vision, decide what success looks like and work out a plan to get there.

Why not have a go at one of these coaching tools and get in touch if you’d like to further explore the ideas that you generate.

First up, ‘Circles of Empowerment’*, a great tool to help you to consider the positive or negative influencing factors in respect to a specific issue being considered. When action planning you can use this tool to help you identify and then make more of the positives; reduce the impact of the negatives and manage those issues that could be positive or negative more effectively.

First of all you need to define the issue you wish to look at. For example:

• Career Progression
• Influencing an important decision
• Achieving a specific goal

 
Write this in a horizontal line across the middle of a blank piece of paper.

Next identify as many as possible aspects of your personality, skills, experience, background or influencing factors that could affect the issue being considered

Locate each of these aspects above or below your horizontal line, write each one in a circle – above the line is for positive factors, below the line is for negative factors.

Circles entirely below the line indicate a severe hindering factor; those entirely above the line are enabling of the issue being considered. Those straddling the line have both positive and negative elements.

Here’s an example of what your page might look like:

Having identified each of these elements, think about how you can:

• Make more of the positives
• Reduce the impact of the negatives
• Manage the line-straddling issues more effectively

 
Optional stages for consideration could be to discuss how large the circle would be, the bigger the circle, the greater the impact on the goal, or the further away from central line the greater the positive or negative impact on the goal.

Enjoy your exercise and let us know how you get on!

Emma

Emma Shute

Emma Shute & Jenny Pollock are the Founders and Coaches with Women to Work

We offer one to one coaching, group coaching workshops, and bespoke programmes for women’s development within organisations.
 
 
*Ref: Clutterbuck, D. and Megginson, D. (2005) Techniques for coaching and Mentoring. United States: Society for Neuroscience.