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John worked in Finance for over 20 years in roles that included Head of Risk Management and Head of Recruitment. This experience has informed his coaching approach: commercial rigour and a passion for great teamwork and leadership. John now works with individuals and teams to help them realise more of their potential and passion and so experience increased enjoyment, productivity, robustness and resolve. Through asking discerning questions and using expert listening skills, John quickly gets to the real issues. His pragmatic approach, affable style and a determination for his clients to make genuine progress serve to quickly build credibility and trust particularly for those who have, or are taking on, high levels of responsibility and pressure.
John is a member of the Association for Coaching and is accredited by the British Psychological Society to use various psychometric tools, that help his clients develop new understanding of themselves and their colleagues.
"Coaching is not merely a technique to be wheeled out and rigidly applied in certain prescribed circumstances. It is a way of managing, a way of treating people, a way of thinking, a way of being."
JOHN WHITMORE
- Performance coach, British former racing driver and author of Coaching for Performance
Coaching is a collaborative solution-focused, results-orientated and systematic process in which the Coach facilitates the enhancement of work performance, self-directed learning and personal growth of the Coachee; it is a process that enables learning and development to occur and thus performance to improve by using a knowledge and understanding of process as well as a variety of styles, skills and techniques that are appropriate to the context in which the coaching takes place. It requires expertise in coaching but not in the subject at hand.
Coaching unlocks people's potential to maximise their own performance. Mentoring, training, advising, and consulting puts in advice, content, information. Coaching, by contrast, pulls out the capacity people have within. The suggestion is that people are like acorns, each of which contains within it all the potential to be a big oak tree. We need nourishment, encouragement, and 'the light to reach toward', but the potential to be the oak tree is already within us.
John has a track record for helping those:
who are ambitious and know they have more to offer but are finding this difficult to realise
who are encountering personal road-blocks in various forms which are affecting their performance and effectiveness (either in their personal or professional life).
leaders / managers who are very capable but have challenges bringing their teams along with them.
who find themselves at a crossroad either personally or professionally and want help to work out which way to go and/or what they really want and then the tools and mindset to make it happen.
He does this through:
helping people regain / maintain a sense of perspective by helping them to understand themselves better: their core values, their preferences, style, and the impact they have.
helping people to identify their own barriers to performance and working out strategies for overcoming them.
helping people be clear about their purpose; understand their role and its place in the organisation.
helping people link their objectives to organisational plans.
Being passionate about supporting and helping people to make significant progress towards their Coaching Goals.
In the same way that individual effectiveness of members is fundamental to team effectiveness, team effectiveness is fundamental to organisational effectiveness. The process John employs is one of
Discovering: interviewing / coaching the leader and members of the team in order to find out the status quo - what may be preventing the team from operating in a high performing way
Designing a coaching session / workshop or series of workshops that will address the issues
Coaching the team through the workshops in order to increase awareness of what currently is preventing maximum effectiveness, engaging the collective will to address the issues, and coaching capability out of the team to achieve a revised way of working.
Coaching the leader and other key people as individuals to help them work through and sustain the change needed.
I wouldn't hesitate in recommending working with John. Whether you feel like your life is running away with you, that you have lost control on how to manage your time, that you can't work out what your next step is, or you just want to talk a single issue through, John is not only an invaluable ear but will guide you with unique expertise, experience and insight. You will end up with a clearer sense of yourself, your objectives and how you tick. I found it particularly useful in learning how to make key decisions, which then in turn helped with lots of smaller every day decisions which used to cause wobbles. If you are wobbly, go and see John!
John Nicholson gets my highest recommendation as an executive coach. His unique ability to recognize, understand and work through complex issues has allowed me to change my thinking, and most importantly my actions. Along the way there were surprising (and sometimes painful) personal realisations, but John’s coaching continued to push me to focus on the outcome which resulted in better responses, both at work and at home. The difference maker was that he knew how to help me address them in a methodical way, and showed me the tools to continue that ongoing development.
John was direct and tactful and did not hesitate to point out areas that needed to be considered a different way. He listened, foremost, and helped me identify the challenges I was having. Being an effective leader takes time, desire and hard work. If you are ready to put in the effort, I can assure you that working with John will produce positive results.
I cannot rate John Nicholson highly enough. He has made a huge impact on the way I now approach people and my work. John has the ability to draw things out of me that were personal and emotional in a constructive and beneficial manner. He then gave me practical tools to deal with my emotions and thus avoid areas of conflict within the workplace. I learnt to be more patient and less reactive and this gave me space to deal with some difficult situations and people. I undertook with Senior colleagues a 360 report on me and this revealed some negative traits I was unaware of. I found it helpful to reassess my style of working with someone I trusted. John has a vast amount of experience and he is very approachable, a quality I needed to experience in order to open up and change. He made wanting to change an exciting and easier concept because he is understanding, caring and empathetic, but also challenging and direct.
I am pleased to be able to commend John Nicholson to you as a coach. He has been a fantastic support, listening ear and insightful voice, enabling me to flourish more effectively as a leader and manager of others. John is not afraid to challenge people where necessary but is able to do that in an encouraging and non-confrontational way. He has the gifts and experience to be able to offer practical wisdom and tools that are immediately applicable and easy to put into practice. I have grown personally and in what I am able to offer at work as a result of spending time with John.
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