This is The Coaching Inn, a podcast from 3D Coaching. Hello and welcome to The Coaching Inn. This is our book group and I'm Claire Pedrick. And today we're talking about chapter six of Simplifying Coaching, which is about simple endings. And thank you so much to those of you who've taken the time to comment. sending questions and observations.
The good news about the Book Group is that we've managed to create a playlist on a podcast channel so that you can go back and listen to all of the Book Group podcasts if that's useful to you and that will be in the program notes. So you'll just be able to click and go through to all of them, past, present and future. So, endings. I've learnt so much since I finished writing the book about endings.
One of the most significant things I think I've learnt is that if you stick with the analogy of the plane, it takes 30 minutes to land a plane wherever you're flying. So if you're flying a short distance or between continents, it still takes 30 minutes to land a plane. And I think that demonstrates the importance of really paying attention to endings.
Now in chapter seven we'll be talking about partnership and you'll know from the rest of the book that for me partnership is absolutely fundamental to doing great work together. Because if it's not in partnership either I'm passive and leaving them on their own or I'm over involved and doing the work for them. So we must be working in partnership. And you can tell whether a conversation is in partnership by what happens at the end.
Because too often, the person who is perceived to have the power takes control and lands the plane or ends the conversation. So as much as you know inside your head that you are coming towards the end, if you haven't told them, it's not in partnership. And when you build trust brilliantly, which I think, hope, assume, wonder that you do, then they're going to have completely lost track of time.
So you've got to tell them, you've got to count in the end, and you've got to count it in a positive way. So if your nature is to go, we've only got 10 minutes left, and this seems like a very big thing, then you need to start practicing another way. Because you can say, in the 10 minutes we've got left, what is it we need to do? So that turns from something that feels quite pessimistic into something that feels quite optimistic.
Because the thing that I have learned more over the last probably 10 years than anything else, really from demonstrating coaching in webinars and training sessions and all kinds of places, is that when you land the conversation well, when you end it well, the best learning happens afterwards. My goodness, there's a lot to think about there, isn't there? Because I think we have a fantasy that we can do the good work in the conversation, and that's what we're there for. We're not.
We're there to get them to begin to move forward in their thinking so that the good work happens. As much as we'd love it to happen with us, That may not necessarily be true. So one of the principles of good endings is to begin the end even if they haven't had the kind of golden nugget, the insight, the transformation. Because most often I observe that as you say, so in the 10 minutes we've got left, what's the focus we need to be having?
Usually the transformation emerges just after you've said that. So when you don't say it, you endlessly extend the great middle, the simple middle of the conversation, and yet you never quite get to that golden bit. So ending matters. And if you think about the plane, the plane lands, and interestingly, when the plane lands, the tone of the engine changes. So in that last three or four minutes of a plane journey, there's a huge change of tone.
Then the plane lands and then it keeps moving to the stand and then the passengers get off and they continue to travel to their destination. That's why we need to land well, otherwise it's like we're dropping people on a desert island and saying that they can only continue the thinking if they come back to us. Let me just go back to the tone thing. That thing about the tone changes, just a few weeks ago, I was doing a coaching demonstration on our transforming conversations training.
And we were doing some good work and I said to her, probably three minutes before the end, have we finished? And she went, yes, which I heard as no. So I was able to say in the three minutes we have left. What do we need to do to end well? And I think we landed, I think we circled around three times before we landed the plane, before we landed the conversation. And the third time she went, yes. Can you hear the difference in tone? So I observe that when we have landed, the tone will change.
That means that we need to not tolerate or challenge the not quite landed tone that we sometimes get in conversations. And if you work backwards from that, that means that we need to end with three or four minutes to go so that we've got time to circle again. And of course, sometimes they're going to bring up the biggest thing you've ever had to coach somebody with in that last five minutes. But then you can ask them, do you have a safe place to think about that?
And then you've still got two minutes left to work out what a safe place might look like if they say no. So the timing as you get towards the end of the conversation is the thing that really facilitates partnership in coaching. And that has to be timing together. They have to know you cannot keep it a secret. That means you need to be able to see the time all the time.
So if you're face to face, you need to have a clock behind them so that you always know what time it is without looking as though you're looking at the time. I learned that probably 35 years ago as an interviewer, but it's really, really useful principle. Smartphones don't serve us because you look at your smartphone and you don't know what time it is unless you press the button. And if you press the button, you look like you're checking your texts in the middle of the session.
There is an app called Clock. which allows you on a smartphone to get the clock on the screen and it doesn't disappear with the screen saver. anything that you need to do to be able to have the time in front of you all the time so that you can look at it often and not look as though you're looking at it. That's the only way to partner with the time. And we need to be talking about time from about halfway through. always beginning with the end in mind.
So we've got about half an hour left in a one hour conversation. Where are we? And what do we need to focus on so that we've done what we need to do by the end? That's a partnership decision. That's not my decision. And the best bit happens after it's over. And how absolutely totally amazing is that? Interestingly, thank you to the person who sent me a message about their experience of a coach sticking rigidly to a model. And I love what you said.
Every time I returned, the coach would ask, so have you done what you set out to do? Because we always ended the session with a short, precise action list. When you end like that, they feel like obligations. And when the coach starts next time, have you done what you set out to do? Then you feel like they're really obligations. I love your comment that you felt constrained rather than liberated. And each time you didn't do quite what you said, you started to doubt yourself.
What I ask is, what's been the learning since last time? What have you learnt since we met last time? Unless the action was, I have been procrastinating on this thing for five years and the coaching has been about breaking the procrastination and having the courage to do something. And in that situation, I would check, but I would say something kind of slightly light and humorous, like, so did you do it then? Just as a gentle, a gentle thing.
And Yeah. Accountability is one of the principles of ending a conversation well with the ICF. And I think, you know, accountability is about accountability to yourself or accountability to others. It's not about accountability to the coach. And I love that comment about reward rather than accountability, because that's a great shift, really. So endings matter and endings work well when we began well.
And if we begin with the end in mind and we have a clear sense of the right size of the conversation, then the ending is going to be much easier. The ending is very difficult when we began at the beginning with a very unclear sense of what we were doing or when there was no clear sense throughout the conversation. Those people who want to think out loud and resist any kind of right sizing, I would be checking in on forward movement rather than have we done what we need to do.
So I would be saying at the end of the conversation, so has this conversation begun to move you forward? Because again, that's respectful and it also checks in that they're beginning to do something. So that's a few nuggets to share about simple endings. Next time, we're going to be thinking about chapter seven, about partnership. I want to say how long have you got? Because I've learned so much about partnership, even since the writing was finished. And it's my current learning journey.
So I'll pop in the program notes the the playlist channel where you can listen to all of the book group. If you'd like to leave a review on goodreads.com for simplifying coaching, that would be just lovely. Or of course on Amazon as you choose, but that would be lovely because actually reviews make a difference. And I'd really appreciate that if you felt that you were able to do that. So have a good week. Enjoy reading chapter seven.
I will be rereading it again and sitting with the new learnings and talk to you soon. Thanks for listening. Bye bye. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, please share the podcast with a friend who might also be interested. And if you'd like to become one of our regulars at The Coaching Inn, you can subscribe at Podbean or on iTunes. We look forward to meeting you on the next podcast.