When talking about mental health with staff and students, how do we know when a supportive conversation would benefit from a coaching approach? When is it appropriate to give support, advice and encourage to seek further support from professionals?

These are questions we are asked all the time.

So, you want to be a coach. You think there is a better way to help people achieve what they want to achieve. You believe if you learned coaching skills, you’d help unlock people’s potential. There’s great appetite to become more coach-like and the hunger has only increased in recent years. If you are hungry, you are not alone.

If you’re currently convinced by the power of coaching, you might be asking yourself a very important question: how do I share coaching’s impact with others? One of the greatest challenges we’ve experienced over the years is that the proof is in the pudding. And, unfortunately, the pudding is often subjective. For colleagues who need more than your transformative personal anecdotes to be convinced by coaching, research can help your plight.

What comes to mind when you picture a waterfall? As someone who grew up around meandering rivers with gentle falls and the occasional dam, I picture a babbling stream in the valley below from my childhood home, later dammed by beavers who’ve long since abandoned their project, leaving a marshland in their wake.

When we started Graydin in 2012, we asked one of the founding fathers of coaching and our good friend, the late Sir John Whitmore, to share with us his thoughts on education.

“Education needs to be modernized. For too long we have focused on quantitative knowledge and technology as the way to utopia, and neglected qualitative wisdom, that enables us to use our knowledge wisely.”

If you haven’t read our post about defining The Waterfall Effect, start there for context. These ideas were inspired by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant who wrote Option B.

Adversity comes in all shapes and sizes. The death of a loved one, divorce, unemployment, homelessness, disease – not only is the magnitude radically unique, but the impact on the person experiencing the adversity is significantly different.