Tonight we had Sam Farina come to
our class. He is a licensed spiritual
coach with the Assemblies of God. He got
involved with coaching to “be a missionary to the corporate world.” He was at a
seminar and was encouraged to get involved by Jane, the vice president of IBM
at one point. He serves in the Dallas,
Texas area.
WHAT IS IT?
“Coaching is pulling
out of leaders and organizations the path that they feel they need to go on,
the steps to get to where they need to go.
Coaching is a vehicle, a partnership, helping people getting to where
they need to go, to overcome obstacles.”
LET’S TRY IT
Instead of just talking about it, we actually had our own
“coaching session” here in class.
Usually coaching is an extended period of time; we only had one session
to experience what it is like. Sam said
that 70% of leaders have no plan to get better, so it was good that we were
able to experience this.
We started by talking about what we wanted to walk way with
from this class. Mine were:
-Practical “how-to” tips on how to
be a better coach
-Ways I can apply this to my
life/place of ministry
-Firm foundation on what coaching
is
By the end of our session, we ended up designing the next
seven weeks of class!
10/29 Definition and exploration
of a disciple (biblically and today)
11/05 Discipling a Christian
11/12 Discipling a non-Christian
(evangelism vs. discipleship)
11/19 Leadership models (with
guest speakers coming)
11/26 (Thanksgiving week) Make-up
for presentations
12/03 Discipleship model
12/10 Finals Week
OBSERVEATIONS ABOUT COACHING
Some
observations I made about coaching was that he didn’t really ever tell us what
to do. He never gave us any explicit
orders at all. He basically asked questions in a way that made us be the ones
who planned out our class. He didn’t really
give many ideas. Even though it appeared
that he was “stepped back” from the conversation, he was still intentionally
structuring the questions he was asking us.
Another
observation is that certain people were dominating the discussion. The coach has to make sure everyone gets
heard. We also observed that when you
come up with your own ideas, there is passion for it. If he had told us what to do, we wouldn’t
have been as passionate about it.
We also
observed that people can come up with their own solutions. Sam said that the coach has to believe
this. This class session showed us that
this is true, and also that there is more knowledge in the room than just one
person.
Something
that Sam kept doing was affirming what people said. This is very important in coaching. In the book I presented for class, Make Your Group Grow: Simple Stuff That
Really Works, Josh Hunt talked about important people skills, and this was
one of them. Same also designed action
for us. He gave us clear deadlines,
goals, and objectives. He also had US recap everything we went over.
Sam also
gave us a few other pointers for coaching.
He said that we should stay away from “why” questions in coaching,
because people generally become pretty defensive. He also said to stay away from “yes” and “no”
questions, as they are not really opened-ended and don’t encourage people to
think deeply.
I thought
that having Sam in class was really good, and he gave us some very valuable
information. I think that he imparted
wisdom that we will be able to use not only in the future, but even now in our
relationship with people.
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