Product Description

“The Coaching Manual is the most current, comprehensive, practical, best-illustrated coaching source I have ever seen. It compellingly teaches the mindset of keeping the responsibility on the coachee combined with a powerful, realistic skillset."

Dr. Stephen R. Covey, author of  7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Are you a good listener? A perceptive observer? Or perhaps you know instinctively when something isn’t ‘right’?

We are all born with some coaching ability and the key to becoming a great coach is knowing what your strengths are and building on these.

The Coaching Manual will help you do precisely this. Starting from where you are now, you’ll find all the powerful tools, techniques and guidance you need to take you to where you want to be. Both a complete learning experience and an instant source of fresh insight and tips, the manual is your definitive reference throughout your coaching career.

In this edition, you’ll find:

• The principles, values and beliefs of a good coach
• Becoming a coach - key questions and considerations to help take your coaching forward
• How to plan a coaching assignment
• The ‘Coaching Path’ – a simple structure for an effective coaching conversation
• How a less directive style can produce dramatically different results
• What the barriers to a good coaching conversation are – and how you can avoid them
• Emotional Maturity - how is it both a requirement of you and an improvement you might encourage in others?

The Coaching Manual is the foundation resource for coaches everywhere.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15408 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From the Back Cover

Are you a good listener? A perceptive observer? Or perhaps you know instinctively when something isn’t ‘right’?

We are all born with some coaching ability and the key to becoming a great coach is knowing what your strengths are and building on these.

The Coaching Manual will help you do precisely this. Starting from where you are now, you’ll find all the powerful tools, techniques and guidance you need to take you to where you want to be. Both a complete learning experience and an instant source of fresh insight and tips, the manual is your definitive reference throughout your coaching career.

“The Coaching Manual is the most current, comprehensive, practical, best-illustrated coaching source I have ever seen. It compellingly teaches the mindset of keeping the responsibility on the coachee combined with a powerful, realistic skillset.”

Dr. Stephen R. Covey, author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

About the Author
Julie Starr is a highly respected coach and management consultant who works with both organisations and individuals. She has over 20 years experience within business and change management focusing on the opportunity presented by people. She combines many years of coaching experience with a constant study related to human success and fulfilment, to develop coaching practices and principles that really work.

Customer Reviews

A first rate guide to personal coaching
Finding approachable, comprehensive and practical guidance on coaching, and it's application in a business environment, is pretty near to impossible. The Coaching Manual provides just that, and more.
Having benefitted myself from personal coaching, I was keen to use coaching as a means of improving the performance and productivity of those people who work for and with me.
This book is an invaluable reference, providing me with coaching tools, techniques and tips in a really easy to use format. It is no-nonsense, straightforward and easily read and understood. The main text is broken up by example conversations, regular challenging exercises, and coaching checklists. I particularly liked 'Coach's Corner', which are 'time out' boxes dotted throughout the book, where us coaches can get together and go through our coaching issues!
This practical book has delivered results for me. If you are considering coaching, I cannot imagine a better guide.

You can't learn experience from a book ... even a good book.
An intelligently laid out and accessible manual, designed to review and highlight the sorts of skills a professional coach should be able to display to do his/her job effectively. When it comes to an analysis of practical skills - such as establishing the context for coaching by using comfortable, conducive space, defining expectations, setting the ground rules for contact, etc. - Julie Starr offers excellent, coherent advice.

The weakness of this manual - and any such manual - is in the areas of philosophy and skills training. In the former case, coaching (or, indeed, therapy or counselling) must begin from a position of respect for the individual. More particularly in coaching, the objective is to help the client (or "coachee"), achieve change, achieve goals by internalising the objective and finding their own way there ... rather than being obviously directed by the coach. Teaching people respect for the individual, teaching them objectivity, teaching them that level of empathetic detachment, etc., is not easy, and I have my doubts it can be accomplished simply by using a manual.

Similarly, there are very real skills which come from experience and critical awareness of your own practice. You can tell people how to listen, how to ask open-ended questions, how to feedback objectively, but these skills (and many others) need to be practised and learned through interaction in the field. At very least, you need to role play the skills.

Starr's manual is excellent when it comes to the practicalities and the applied psychology of the professional relationship, but other aspects are decidedly weak. This is most obvious in her chapter on the fundamental skills of coaching: she identifies five core skills - building rapport or relationship, understanding the different levels of listening, using intuition, asking questions, and giving supportive feedback.

Now, I've worked in social work and research for a quarter of a century: I use the five skills identified above ... and I'd recognise their validity in any form of motivational interviewing or coaching. But I'll stake my pension on the fact that you can't learn intuition from a manual.

Julie Starr's "The Coaching Manual" is an excellent book, and good value. She communicates well, her writing is intelligent, accessible, and she makes some excellent points. However, to get the best from this book you should consider working with other would-be coaches or others interested in the subject - maybe role playing some of the themes to give yourself a chance to evaluate your attitudes and communication skills. Experience is an essential skill, one which is acquired, not learned. What the manual can't give you is a critical feedback on your own performance and the adequacy of your own experience and current range of skills. If you are going to be a good coach, a really good one, and not just delude yourself that you know what you're doing, you will need to supplement this manual with a deal of practical experience ... and some objective self-criticism.

An invaluable guide to coaching today
I really value this book. I found it to be written with wisdom and integrity and full of practical sound advice and guidelines. There are many books on coaching and if you have to choose I would say go for this one. It is comprehensive but above all easy to read and use and written by someone who walks the talk.

Sue Knight