Team and personal coaching in general practice

NHS primary care staff can now access coaching for themselves and for managing a team. Dave Hancock explores some of the available options

Service conversation: advisory, relational and transformative approaches

Purpose The marketing literature on service conversation in dyadic services has elaborated two approaches. An advisory approach involves providers giving customers expert advice on how to advance difficult projects. By contrast, a relational approach involves providers exchanging social support with customers to develop commercial friendships. Inspired by the transformative turn in service research, this study aims to develop a third approach, one that helps customers to cultivate their own agency, potential and well-being. Design/methodology/approach The emergent model of service conversation is based on in-depth interviews with providers and clients of mental health services, including psychological counseling, psychotherapy and personal coaching. Findings A transformative approach to service conversation involves the iterative application of a complementary pair of conversational practices: seeding microtransformations by asking questions to inspire new ways of thinking, feeling and acting; and nurturing microtransformations via non-evaluative listening to affirm customers’ explorations of new possibilities. This pair of practices immediately elevates customers’ sense of psychological freedom, which, in turn, enables their process of self-transformation, one microtransformation at a time. Practical implications This study offers dyadic service providers a conceptual framework of advisory, relational and transformative approaches to service conversation for instrumental, communal and developmental service encounters, respectively. This framework can help dyadic service providers to conduct more collaborative, flexible and productive conversations with their customers. Originality/value Three approaches to service conversation – advisory, relational and transformative – are conceptually distinguished in terms of their overall aims, provider practices, customer experiences, customer outcomes, allocations of airtime, designations of expertise, application contexts, prototypical examples and blind spots.

Benefit of Wearing an Activity Tracker in Sarcoidosis

Sarcoidosis causes many disabling symptoms, including fatigue and exercise limitations, which have been shown to improve by physical activity programs. The aim of this study was to estimate the effect of continuous activity monitoring using an electronic activity tracker (AT) on exercise performance and fatigue of sarcoidosis patients, compared to controls (cohort study), and the effect of additional personal coaching (randomized trial) over a period of 3 months. Fifty-four sarcoidosis patients received an AT (Group Ia: 27 with coaching and Group Ib: 27 without). A historical group of sarcoidosis patients (Group II; n = 41) who did not follow a physical activity program served as controls. Exercise performance of patients wearing an AT (Group I) improved compared with controls (Group II), including the 6MWD, % predicted (∆4.4 ± 9.1 versus ∆0.7 ± 5.0, respectively), and fatigue levels decreased (∆−3.9 ± 5.7 versus ∆−1.8 ± 5.3). Patients with coaching (Group Ia) showed greater improvement of exercise capacity over time than patients without coaching (Group Ib) as shown by the Steep Ramp Test results (watts: ∆20.2 ± 33.8 versus ∆5.7 ± 26.4; and SRT, VO2max, % predicted: ∆1.6 ± 2.6 versus ∆0.7 ± 2.3). Sarcoidosis patients wearing an AT achieved improvement of exercise performance and reduction of fatigue. We therefore recommend encouraging sarcoidosis patients to wear an AT to stimulate physical activity and reduce fatigue. The additional benefit of coaching needs to be explored in future studies.

A pilot study of assisting IVF by personalized Endo-Gym® exercises

SummaryAssisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), especially in vitro fertilization (IVF) have revolutionized human reproduction technology, helping millions of subfertile couples to conceive and deliver a baby. IVF, however, is not an easy procedure, as treatment cycles incur heavy financial, physical and psychological burden, yet they result in live birth less than once in four attempts. Based on our experience with 251 women, many in their 40s, here we suggest that Endo-Gym® method (for endocrine gymnastics), a combination of personalized physical exercises, fertility-optimizing diet and personal coaching, can significantly increase IVF success, probably by both reducing distress caused by repeated cycles and alleviating fertility-affecting problems, such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and premature ovarian failure (POF). The program can also relieve other gynecological conditions, such as irregular or painful period, pelvic organ prolapse (POP) and incontinence, and is also often chosen by women as their regular fitness regime for general wellbeing. We provide detailed statistics of success in various conditions and suggest that distinct elements of Endo-Gym® cooperate to exert positive physiological and psychological effects that help re-establish sexual hormone balance and boost reproductive fitness. We anticipate that further, controlled testing will enable to put the benefits of Endo-Gym® on a rational basis and enable to introduce this approach as a beneficial complement of IVF, and maybe also other branches of ART.

Learning From Practice: The Value of a Personal Learning Coach for High-Performance Coaches

Multiple actors and roles are now recognized and promoted to support the development of coaches. Personal coaching is an emerging industry in many professional fields yet remains insignificant in sport coaching. The purpose of this study was to document and assess the value of a 12-month collaborative action research in which a high-performance rugby coach, with the support of a personal learning coach, aimed to learn from her coaching practice. This research was operationalized using an appreciative inquiry framework. Personal coaching was conducted according to the principles of narrative-collaborative coaching. Data collection included interviews, video observation, audio recordings of coaching conversations, notes from phone calls, and email exchanges. Results showed that this partnership created a safe and challenging learning space where different coaching topics were addressed, such as reflective practice, leadership, and mental preparation. A deductive analysis of the debriefing interview was completed using the value creation framework developed by Wenger and colleagues. This analysis indicated that the high-performance coach’s relationship with the personal learning coach enabled the development of five types of value: immediate, potential, applied, realised, and transformative. Therefore, it is suggested that narrative-collaborative coaching can complement existing formal and non-formal learning activities.

Workplace Coaching

Workplace coaching is an organizational intervention that is designed to support and enhance individual and organizational performance. This article deals with workplace coaching, not life coaching, personal coaching, or sports coaching, although some publications cited may also have relevance for life coaching, personal coaching, or sports coaching. Workplace coaching is a relatively new field, with most of the research being conducted since 1995 – although a few earlier studies date as far back as 1937, when C. B. Gorby published “Everyone Gets a Share of the Profits” (Gorby 1937, cited under History and Trends in Workplace Coaching). Coaching is now widely used in organizations in a variety of different ways to achieve a range of different outcomes. The term is increasingly being applied to situations and environments that range from leadership development and career transition to supporting health-care interventions and improving safety outcomes. This diversity has led to confusion about the nature of coaching and its boundaries and, arguably, misunderstanding and misuse. Among academics and practitioners, opinions differ about the definition of coaching. Two definitions are offered to help clarify the terminology. In Coaching for Performance: GROWing People, Performance and Purpose (Whitmore 2017, cited under Coaching Practice and Skills), John Whitmore suggests that: “Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them” (p. 8). He notes that “the dual generic goals of coaching are to deepen a person’s self-awareness and to increase the individual’s personal responsibility” (pp. 70–88). Jonathan Passmore and Annette Fillery-Travis in Passmore and Fillery-Travis 2011 (cited under History and Trends in Workplace Coaching) offer a technical definition of coaching: “a Socratic-based, future-focused dialogue between a facilitator (coach) and a participant (coachee/client), where the facilitator uses open questions, summaries and reflections which are aimed at stimulating the self-awareness and personal responsibility of the participant” (p. 74). This article will be of use to academics, researchers, practitioners, and students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, in addition to students in high school.

Manajemen Pengembangan Sarana dan Prasarana dalam Implementasi Manajemen Berbasis Sekolah di MA Al-Falah Nagreg

Facilities and infrastructure are one of the aspect which is needed to be concerned in implementing Management Based School and the foundation is the authority and responsibility of the school. This research is the field research that was chosen by purposive. The purpose of this research is to analyze the results of research relating to planning, implementing, monitoring the problems and efforts to handle the problems in implementing the facilities and infrastructure at school. In this research, the writer uses descriptive analysis method that is started with observing, interviewing, and documenting as the steps of data collection to collect all sources that related to problems of the research. Then, the writer verifies the accurancy of the data using the technic of triangulism. After doing this research, the writer concludes that: Management based school means the changing in taking adjusments from the education center to the school. The planning of implementation the facilties and infrastructure starts with analyzing the needs, doing survey, choosing the main need and implementing educational specification, The implementation of development facilities and infrastructure is carried out through assistance of school’s comitee, students’ parents and government. The supervision of development facilities and infrastructure is done through a directly approach and non directly approach. The hading problems in implementing facilities and infrastructure is the lack of involvement of businessmen in educational environments, lack of the skills in schools; managerial comitee, lack of the competency of the students’ parents and society, and the lack of involvement of the students in the process of maintaining the facilities and infrastructure in the school. The efforts that have been done to handle this problems in implementing facilitites and infrastructure is personal coaching personnel, improving the management’s quality, developing the main commitment with the students; parents and prospective students, and also making the relation together with another school.