One of the great fallacies that we expend a huge amount of energy and effort throughout our lives to protect and even cultivate is that the way we see, process and interpret the world is correct. Of course, there are good reasons for this, confidence to function in life requires the assumption that we’re not deluded. The problem is that this is not always true, and what’s more, when we find ourselves under stress for a sustained period of time, our ability to make critical decisions becomes significantly diminished. To put it in the context of leadership, if a leader enters a situation of sustained difficult challenge and emotional exhaustion, they are entering a maze without the ability to get themselves out. What’s more frightening is they won’t necessarily recognise they’re in a maze at all.Neuroscientist Dr Jack Lewis in his book, Sort Your Brain Out, observers that the human brain is biased towards choosing immediate gratification. That’s no surprise to anyone of us who have failed a healthy diet related New Year’s resolution. However, it becomes relevant to coaching when we consider that a leader has an inbuilt bias to choose to placate a grumbling church member than have a deeper conversation about that person’s heart; a leader is biased toward consistently working weekends if that means relieving the pressure from other members of the team to complete a task; and a leader is biased toward maintaining the status quo of a church or organisation in the knowledge that implementing real change is painfully slow and relationally costly. So a leader can be continually be choosing terrible decisions that will only compound the horror of a situation, yet be re-enforced by the brain’s pleasure and reward system that they’re on the right track.So in the face of this inbuilt biased steps in the Gospel Coach. I’m continually reminded by those I talk to about Gospel Coaching, that one of its great strengths is simply being an outside eye, that is not caught up in the emotional maelstrom of the coachee and so is more able to identify blind spots, observe and articulate unhelpful patterns and provide benefit of the long-view or the delayed gratification win, that the coachee is hard pushed to identify themselves.&nbsp;Dr Lewis throws in another facinating observation on the subject of brains, leaders and health; he notes:&nbsp;“One of the keys to success of many high achievers is that, at the time a decision is reached, they keep a note of the main factors influencing their thinking for future reference. Once they know the outcome, if it didn’t go well, they can then go back to their notes to work out where they went wrong and which assumptions weren’t met.”He’s referring to the simple benefit of the REVIEW part of the CROSS model. For Dr Lewis’s point is that if the specific details of decision outcomes (be them success and failures) are intentionally identified and processed, the chances that the leader will deeply learn from the situation and thereby make better decisions in the future is exponentially increased.&nbsp;A fallacy, we coaches, need to challenge is that Gospel Coaching is only beneficial to a small subset of leaders who can’t do it on their own; actually, any leader who takes the wonder and limitations of their ‘human-ness’ seriously, should reflect that by bringing someone in an intentional coaching role alongside them.&nbsp;

Working with a coach isn't a luxury for leaders.i I is essential for those who want to continually learn and improve to have someone who will intentionally reflect on their leadership practice.

Why the Scarecrow doesn’t just need a brain, he needs a coach?

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Why the Scarecrow doesn’t just need a brain, he needs a coach?

Why the Scarecrow doesn’t just need a brain, he needs a coach?

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