Ask for BREAD

Guest Post by Pam Smith

When you think of the best meetings you attended or led, what would you say contributed to being well worth the time?

The meetings most likely had a well-thought out agenda, which means the meeting leader spent time considering what needed to be accomplished and how to ensure forward movement. Pre-meeting preparation is a key component of meeting success.

Likewise, in leadership coaching, whether it is a ministry client or a business client, pre-session preparation is an important way to ensure a coachee receives maximum value from your time together.

My coaching call preparation includes reviewing my coachee’s focus sheet so that I can jot down  possible questions to ask, looking over the commitments made by the coachee during our last session to check on desired progress, and making sure my technology is working.

Once I feel ready, I do one final step: I pray for an effective session.  In a recent training for coaches who work with global leaders, the instructor (Karen Zando of Cru) shared a session preparation tip that she learned from Charles Hooper, Jr., an executive and leadership development coach.

As a result of this training, I tightened up that last step to be more specific. I have started praying for BREAD.

I now have a PowerPoint slide of BREAD at the ready and at times I may show it to the coachee at the start of the appointment. I have found that by doing so, both of us become focused on forward movement.

I also let “BREAD” shape some questions that I might use during our session.

• “What might a Breakthrough look like on this?”
• “What Results are you hoping for?”
• “I am not sensing much Energy from you on this; how important is this issue for you?”
• “Answers” can be getting to a decision that seemed out of reach at the start of the session.
• “Development” might be a new process discovered that will not only help solve a particular issue, but would also be useful in similar situations ongoing.

If I have shown the PowerPoint slide to the coachee at the start of the coaching appointment, we review it together at the end of the session to see how we did. Often, we can identify three to five parts of BREAD we had hoped to experience during the coaching appointment.

If prayer isn’t a regular part of your coaching (or your meeting preparation for that matter), why not add a little power to the process by praying for BREAD?

You can connect with Charles Hooper, Jr. MCC at HooperCoaching.com   charles@hoopercoaching.com