Video Transcript: Life Changing Coaching

Hello, my name is Steve Elzinga. And I want to welcome you to the life changing coaching  class. And I call it Life Changing because the activity of coaching can literally change people's  lives, whether you're in a church. In fact, it doesn't matter what arena that you are dealing  with people, the skills that you learn in this class, can change people's lives. But I also call it  life changing, because I think it can change your life too what you're going to learn how to do  is really about leadership. It's really about helping anyone. And it's sort of a new style of  trying to help people become all that they can be. And it can be used in ministry, if you're a  pastor, or a pastoral leader, or maybe you're a leader in the church, you can be in charge of  programs, but it can help you in your business. If you're a business owner or a tent maker,  you work in ministry, but you also are trying to make a living, and you work with people, the  skills that you're going to learn can can help help you actually bring the best out of the people that work with you or work for you. The same skills that you're going to be learning in terms  of applying it to ministry can also be applied to parenting. If you're a parent, you have  children. Some of the skills that you learn in this class are going to help you to become a  better parent, to help bring out the best in your children. If you're married, and you don't have any children, and you want to try to bring out the best in your spouse, the skills that you're  going to learn in this class are going to make a difference for them too. And it's going to make a difference for you. Because you will discover different ways of actually trying to help people  and in the process, process it's going to help you become a better leader. So it's life changing  for the coach, and it's life changing for those that you're trying to help. Now, in order to start  thinking about what what life coaching is all about, I want to start by looking at what life  coaching is not about. I'm wearing a black shirt, but if this was a blue shirt, and the  background was all blue, you wouldn't see me, the only way to see one color is this color  against another color. So sometimes to look at what something is not can help you see what it is. So coaching is not number one, coaching is not pastoral care. Pastoral care is the general  care offered by a pastor or the pastoral staff. It's being there in the good and the bad times.  So as a pastor or a church leader, things are happening in the lives of your the people that  attend your church, there's graduations of their children, and you attend those. There's  people getting married, and you're a part of that celebration. There are people joining the  church, people learning about the church, you're you're there, the good times, but you're also  there in the bad times, when people are going through difficult things you show up and a lot  of pastoral care is just showing up and being there and walking alongside of people. Keeping  communication lines open. Part of pastoral care is just visiting people and staying connected  to people and and letting them describe what's going on in their lives. Pastoral care is,  emergency suffering control. So people go into the hospital and you visit them. And you  maybe share a scripture passage or you pray with them. It's prayer, it's applying the Word of  God to the problems that they're going through. Sometimes people need guidance or they  needed advice. And then as the pastor or on the pastoral staff, you come and you you give  them a little bit of guidance. Relationship issues, comfort challenge. So it's sort of a general  care that a church gives. Clients want to be cared for. The church members want to be cared  for. And we call that pastoral care. Coaching is not this. Okay, coaching is not counseling.  Counseling is more a more professional, specific care offered by the pastor or the counseling  staff. So pastoral care is sort of a general care. But when the care gets very specific, like  someone's marriage is, you know, breaking up, or parents are struggling with one of their  children. And and now you need to get in there and find out what the dynamics of the family  are and or if it's a marriage counseling situation, you you have to delve into how they met  and, and their past and, and what kind of marriages their parents had and and what were  some of the systems that were involved in those. So it's a focus. In some ways counseling is a focus on the past. You know, what, what was your childhood? Like? What kind of parents did  you have? What kind of marriage did they have? What were your early experiences in school  or in the family system, and your brothers and your sisters, and the five family dynamics, it's  a focus on fixing problems through understanding past influences, experiences, experiences,  and tendencies. So counseling is a involved thing. Usually, it's around a specific problem that  people are struggling with. And it's because of their past. And so you have to uncover some of that past a lot of counseling, the freedom that counseling gives it sort of the, the idea behind 

counseling is that the truth will set you free, then if you know the truth about something, then it will help you go forward. If you have a problem with self esteem, and that's hurting your  belief in your marriage, or in your family, or in your children, you know, where did that  problem come from, and if you can understand that your father didn't encourage you and  never said a good word about anything that you did. And so you have this low self esteem.  But if you understood where, where your father, why your father didn't do that, you know, I  had a father, that wasn't all that encouraging. And I didn't understand why. But eventually, I  heard the story of his relationship to his father. And his father didn't have any time for him  and, and didn't do anything with him. And my father resented that and, but but but so he  didn't get encouragement as a child, and he didn't know how to give it as a parent. Well, just  understanding that, okay, for me, to understand the dynamics that my father went through,  helps me understand my relationship to him. And just understanding it helps, you can  sometimes get over some of these problems. Counseling is often ongoing to takes a long time to uncover the past and, and revisit it and learn how to read deal with it. And then then what  do you do about it? And how do you change your perception of yourself, or the dynamics in a  marriage, if if a person was raised in a family where the marriage wasn't very good, and the  marriage broke up, and there was divorce and brokenness, and now this child is older, gets  married, and they have a problem with trusting, trusting their spouse? Well, you have to go  back and you have to look at all you have to re establish a trust that wasn't there in the first  place. And you have to sort of build it up from the from the ground level. Usually, the client  has a problem or an issue that is causing pain, and they want the pain to go away. The client  wants to be fixed, okay, that's what counseling is. Coaching is not counseling. Coaching is not  teaching training, discipling helping people to learn how to do something. So you're in this  class, and I'm teaching you. I'm not, this is not pastoral care. I'm not doing counseling. I'm not trying to find out your fine family dynamics and how you were raised and whether you have  good self esteem or not. I'm just teaching you some stuff. I'm trying to teach you some skills.  I'm trying to give you knowledge. The focus is on skills. The focus is on behaviors. Okay?  When you meet with someone, this is what you say, this is how you say it. This is how you  think about it. This is how you organize. That's what school is. Most of our learning is through  teachers. We go to school, this Christian Leaders Institute is a school we're trying to give you  knowledge and skills the client wants to learn. Okay, coaching is not teaching training and  discipling. Coaching is not mentoring. Okay? Mentoring is a process of helping someone  acquire skills attitudes. behaviors already mastered by the mentor. So this is like teaching.  But it's it's different in that, you know, right now I'm teaching you, but I'm not mentoring you,  the only way that I can mentor you is to go to your place and to be with you. And to show you some things not just tell you about them. On this video, I'm just telling you a bunch of things.  But in mentoring, I take you along, if you want to, if you were to come to my church, I can  mentor you on becoming a pastor. And what I would do is I would take you along, you know,  when I'm visiting someone in the hospital, and you would watch, and you would see, and you  would learn by what I do. But eventually, I would give you a role, I would, you know, we would discuss what you saw and what you learned. And maybe the next time I would give you a  little role, you might be the one reading the Bible or doing the prayer. And eventually, I would  be transferring the responsibility to you, you would start out by watching me, then we would  sort of share the responsibility. And ultimately I would give you the responsibility. And then  we'd evaluate on how it goes. That's a mentoring process. The focus is on all the positive  skills, traits behaviors found in the mentor. So a mentor has skills and abilities and a way of  doing something. And then you want to learn and be like that mentor. There's a lot of  teaching modeling practice, involved in good mentoring. The client wants to be like the  mentor, that the client or the person you're trying to help sees the things that you do, and the activities and behaviors that you have and how you handled yourself. And that person wants  to be like you. So they hang around you. And you you show them and you direct them, you  analyze thing you do so so mentoring is a broader thing than just teaching. Counseling is not  coaching is not mentoring. Okay, coaching does include Okay, so coaching isn't these things,  but it does include some of these things. Coaching includes caring, you know, just like in  pastoral care, but it's more about challenge than comfort. So a lot of pastoral care is comfort. 

How are you? How can I help you? How can I walk alongside of you when you're going through struggles. Coaching is more about challenging you to do something, it's not just putting an  arm around a person, it's about taking them out there and getting them doing things.  Coaching includes care to a specific need, like counseling, but it's more about the future than  the past. We said that counseling looks at the past tries to understand the past. Coaching  doesn't delve into all the issues of the past, it looks towards the future, what are we going to  do in the future? What are we going to try in the future? Coaching includes teaching training  discipling, but is more about helping the client teach themselves than the coach teaching the  client. Again, teaching I'm teaching you I'm doing all the talking. But in a coaching  relationship, I'm going to try to teach you but I'm not going to teach you by me telling you  things. I'm going to as a coach, try to help you teach yourself that you already have things.  And my job is to help you discover the things that you may already know. Or the the maybe  you haven't put together. And I'm going to help you discover the things that you already  have. You have already the pieces of making things happen. You just haven't been able to put  it together. Okay, coaching includes mentoring, but is less about the client becoming like the  mentor and more about the client becoming what he or she could become with a little bit of  help. So mentoring is, you know, I want to be like you I want to be like my mentor, and my  mentor tells me and shows me and takes me along. In coaching. It's not about becoming like  someone else it's becoming the best you that you can be. And as the coach, I want to help  bring that up. So So you might become a totally different person than I am. And that's okay.  But my job is to help you become you not become me. Okay, some other thoughts on  coaching. Number one, coaching is about action, not understanding. So a lot of counseling A  lot of you know, when you come alongside someone to try to help them. It's, it's it's about  understanding the situation, how do you feel what's behind it? Coaching is about what do you  want to do? What action do you want to take? What do you want to change in your life? What  do you want to work on? Number two, coaching is client directed, not teacher directed. So, as  a coach, I'm not coming to you and telling you what you should do. I'm not even suggesting  what you should do. I'm not even giving you the options. I'm helping you look at the options.  I'm helping you think about the thing that you want to do not what I want to do, I'm trying to  leave myself out of it. I'm trying to help you figure out what you want to do. Number three,  coaching is not about getting the client to do what the coach wants. But what the client  wants. Again, it's not about me, it's not about the coach. It's about the person you're trying to help. It's about trying to help them figure out what they want to do. Coaching is not about the  coach's life stories, but the client's life stories. So as a pastor, you know, I have I have almost  40 years of experience. And when I sit down with people I do pastoral care, and they tell me  their problems. There's rarely a problem that I hear someone talk about that I haven't seen  before. Yeah, I know how this goes. And I quickly advice comes to my mind, I want to give  them advice. It's like with your children, if you if you're a parent, you have children, and  they're going through some things, you've been through those things already. So you want to  share, you know, when I was a kid, this is what happened to me. This is how I handled it. And  we're sort of wired to do that. We're wired to give our experiences, you know, to tell our  stories, I have a story for every everything that goes on, you know, every marriage problem, I  can tell you a story. Because I have 40 years of history in the church and working with people  I've seen it all. And so if I meet someone Yeah, I've seen that already. And you know what  happened in that situation might help you and it's true. But see that's counseling, that's  pastoral care. In coaching, the coach that you want to hold back on telling all your stories, it's  not about your stories, it's about their story. It's about them figuring out what they want to do, and not you leading them on, because you want to offer them a solution. But in a coaching  situation, I want the client to figure out his own solution. So I have to hold back, I can't share  all the stories, they can't be about me as the coach. Coaching is not about motivating the  client, it is helping the client motivate themselves. So again, the focus is not on the coach, the coach isn't the one making it happen. It's the client making it happen. My job is just facilitate  and try to help him take ownership for the things that he decides he wants to do. Three things coaches actually do. Again, this is sort of the broad outline of this class. Okay, three things it's very simple coaching really is, as we go through this, you're going to find out that that I'm 

going to be repeating myself many, many times, because in some ways, the whole coaching  process is very, very simple. Very simple to understand. The problem it's really hard to  actually do. And the reason is, because we're always putting guys we went we want to do  counseling, we want to do teaching, we want to give advice. Most of our life, people have  done that to us. And we do it to others, our parenting we know we train our kids, we go to  school, all these things are about, you know, the person in charge, you know, downloading on  the person that they're trying to help. And this is the opposite of that. Okay, so these are the  three things. Number one, the coaches job is to help the client or the person that you're trying to help the person that you're coaching, I'm going to call them the client in this class. They  can be in a church, you can set up your own business, coaching business, that's starting to  happen all over the world. This whole coaching thing is exploding. We'll talk more about why  that is a little bit later. But Okay, so number one, help the client figure out what they want to  do. What is it you want to do? What do you want to change in your life? What is the one thing  you want to work on? And you're trying to help them make a decision? Okay, so what is it that the person wants to change in their life, number two, you help the client figure out how to do  what they want to do. Okay, so once you have a goal, this is what I want to do. Now the  question is, well, how? How are you going to do that? What's the plan of attack? A lot of  times, we have a goal. You know, I want to learn more about God. Okay, that's a broad  general goal. But what's your plan to do it? Well sign up for Christian Leaders Institute and I  want to take this class, well, what class and what order? What are the steps. So you help the  client figure out what they want to do what they want to change in their life. And then  secondly, you help them come up with a plan of how they're going to do this. And then third,  you help the client do what they plan to do. Okay, so you can plan, but that doesn't mean  you're doing it. So the third step is more of a management step. How can I as the coach help  you actually carry out the plan that you came up to reach the goal that you decided that you  want. So these it's very simple, these three things, help the client figure out what they want  to do make a decision, make a commitment. Number two, help the client figure out how to do  what they want to do, come up with some kind of a plan. And finally, number three, help the  client do what they plan to do is sort of manage the process so that they actually succeed at  the plan to do the thing that they want to do to change their life for the better. Alright, so  these three things are sort of the broad overview of the whole thing. Alright, thanks for  listening.