9/1/2014

COACHING

I received a telephone call a few years ago from a concerned mother, whose son I had recently helped identify influences not recognized but operating in his temperament and behavior. These influences had been unveiled through a comprehensive psychometric profile analysis of his personality. The evaluation achieved a heightened level of self-awareness in her son leading to an obvious change in her son’s behavior -first at home and to his friends around him.

She was calling because she had another son who she believed I could help – given the clear results she observed in her other son.

At our first meeting I was told that her son had been having severe academic problems in school and that his class performance for many years had shown mass failure in virtually all subjects – except mathematics, where his marks were average - in fact she stated that the boy hated reading, his teachers and altogether hated school; she had taken him for psychiatric evaluation several times with the same results – Attention deficit disorder.

An even bigger problem was his destroyed self-esteem due to long extensive failure patterns, going all the way back to the beginning of his education. His parents did not realize that his self-esteem, as someone said, was really his level of mental fitness - a measure of how healthy, hardy, and resilient he was in dealing with the inevitable ups and downs of daily life.

“Your self-estimation, according to extensive research carried out by Executive Toolkit, is based on accomplishments or results. What this means is that your self-esteem must be earned through your results and accomplishments until it forms a pattern consistent with how you want see yourself.”

“Self-esteem is therefore an outcome, a consequence. It is a by-product of effort in the pursuit of value driven goals. It is not something bestowed on you by praise or affirmations but something earned through sheer effort and in most cases failing forward” (see “results rings” below)

Results-Rings by Executive Toolkit research

His life so far totally lacked success patterns – he was a walking message system of failure. When I probed further, his mother then said that his development had been stunted from birth and that he actually started talking at the age of seven years (a pattern similar to Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein and Helen Keller).

Albert Einstein said, “I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.”At our second meeting, she brought the young man. On questioning him, one obvious issue jumped out at me over all the challenges the boy was facing – the fact that the boy hated reading and writing. This hatred pointed to a serious deficiency in comprehension, vocabulary and a natural hatred for speaking and writing. The fact that he started speaking at age seven meant he had been playing catch-up all his life on matters of communication – all pointing to the fact the his real problem was communication – poor spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, poor reading and writing skills. All these for someone who was moving to his senior year in high school (SS2 to SS3).

My recommendation to his mother

I told her that he could never perform in a manner inconsistent with the way he saw himself – that there was a dire need for the whole family to assist in fast-tracking the development of

his vocabulary, comprehension, spelling, reading habits and writing skills. Pointing out to her that this was the root cause of the young man’s problems.

I told her that when the above indices go up, his resilience factor would go up- giving himself a fighting chance with his subjects – of course he would have to repeat SS2 in order to make up for lost time. He would then begin to get results in subjects he failed all his life; these results when consistent would create a pattern leading up to an up shooting of his self-estimation.

The Real Issue

I told the mother that he would have to be put on a reading program, beginning with:

Identifying his favorite books, hero figures etc. For me it was comic books: it was spiderman, Roy of the Rovers, Tiger and Speed, Secrets of the Unknown, Suspense, novels and interesting biographies like Napoleon, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein etc.

Tough love – I told his mother that he would resist the development program all the way but that achieving daily goals had to be tied to eating meals – that if he did not do his daily reading he would not eat. He would be on permanent lock down from television or computer games till he achieved preset reading milestones.

His mother and all his siblings would have to take turns for at least 3-4 hours every day reading his favorite books to him. This in my opinion may be required for at least six months until he picks up the comic books by himself and starts reading them for himself. Mem Fox, a reputable author on the subject said, “If parents understood the huge educational benefit and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent—and every adult caring for a child—read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in their lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation."

His mother would have to purchase a useful audio vocabulary building programme (since he hated reading physical books) – I recommend the “verbal advantage programme series or any other reputable one out there”. This could be complemented with the purchase of an iPOD or smart phone so as to have him listen to new words even while asleep, inorder to utilize the power of his subconscious mind (also called the human spirit) – which never sleeps.

His mother would need my services on a monthly retainership to keep him and his siblings accountable and responsible for his accelerated development.

My recommendation/ comments to the boy

That it was not his fault that he started speaking at seven years old.

I told him that he needed to read the biographies of people who had challenges while growing up, like Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison. (Here his siblings would read out loud to him and then he would later read these books to himself again and again.

That he was not dumb or addled – his high scores in mathematics, on topics which excluded word based problems was evidence of this fact.

That this challenge and its solution would eventually become the defining moment of his life; and that he would most likely spend the rest of his life working towards becoming the kind of person that helped people overcome similar problems.

That I would monitor his problem weekly in order to ensure accountability; but that he also needed to be responsible to our desired future outcomes – which meant that I would also be responsible for ensuring that his siblings meant preset timelines.

That I would like to see him back in six months for a complete battery of psychometric tests, values clarification and comprehensive re-evaluation.

What really happened?

Well that’s confidential, but I can say this much – it worked. Slowly at first; his development accelerated after we were able to ignite his love for stories; which made him begin reading the story books on his own.

Coach Kay

A qualified, experienced Leadership and Career Management Coach, with over 6,000 hours of active career management coaching; An Expert Career Adviser with over 25,000 hours of 1-2-1 career advisory services spanning 11plus years (He averages 2,000+ career coaching sessions every year). His coaching style is provocative and challenging with the willingness to communicate at a deeply personal level.. He has proffered career solutions to thousands - executive assessments, evaluating & interpreting psychometric profiles, managing career transitions, designing the next 10 years, clarifying values, goals etc. - getting individual & corporate clients into alignment using customized BE-DO-HAVE methodologies. Typical clients have included CEO’s, Senior Managers looking to influence and succeed effectively, highly performing leaders wishing to enhance their performance internally, newly appointed Managers wishing to succeed quickly. He has debriefed various assessment instruments (Holland, MBTI, etc.) to leaders that helped them plan and reach determined goals. He also coaches

managers on developing performance improvement strategies that enhance working relationships between bosses and their direct reports .Kayode has extensive work experiences from various Consulting firms and was Group Head, HR, Admin. & Corporate Services, Spring Life Assurance Plc; Head, Human Resources Vigeo Oil & Gas Limited, and a former Chief Operating Officer AGDC, After School Graduate Development Centre – A not for profit organization. A pioneer graduate employability trainer in Nigeria; Founder and Coordinator of Daystar Christian Centre's Career Unit - CareerPlus+ (started in 2003 and responsible for training over 35,000 graduates to date - with an 80% placement rate). A frequent speaker at seminars, conferences with over 80+ articles on Career management and development. He has appeared severally in the media (radio presenter -"Career Fastrack" & TV) as an expert in this field. Kay is a Lead facilitator & Coach with Executive toolkit: Peak Performance Coaches

Contacts : 08037207606, 07013275438. Email: kayode.ayoola@gmail.com