Book review - The Coaching Habit

Do you spend any of your time either teaching others or trying to lead a team? Are you a mentor to Foundation Dentists or a Clinical Supervisor for students or a postgraduate course?

If so then it is highly likely that you would benefit from Michael Bungay Stanier's book "The Coaching Habit".

This book has so many great ideas. It is clear, concise, incredibly actionable and I think has the potential to help so many people. I have already started applying some of the principles from this book to my time as a clinical supervisor and seen great results so will definitely be planning on building on those initial tests more after the summer break. I would strongly recommend it to all clinical supervisors.

The author tries to use this book to simplify coaching down to 2 key ideas. The first is very nicely described by the author when he said that if this book was a haiku it would be:

The second is to realise that so much of what we do is down to our habits so as coaches we need to understand how to break our own bad habits and help us (and those around us) build better ones.


There are 7 essential coaching questions discussed in this book. A great summary of them can be found here:
http://book-the-coaching-habit.s3.amazonaws.com/TCH_7_Question_synopsis.pdf

Or if you want a different way of exploring this topic there are some good introductory videos available on the author’s website:
https://boxofcrayons.com/the-coaching-habit-book/the-coaching-habit-videos/


The book isn’t perfect (But to quote Paul Kalanithi “You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving”). For instance there are parts that are not amazingly well written so they feel a bit clunky as an audiobook. Also he seems to miss some of the point when discussing Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” by suggesting you should ignore that idea but instead focus on the “What”. While Sinek is very vocal about having a Why, he also explains in detail the importance of rarely asking questions with the word “Why” in them. The understanding part of your brain is quite distinct from the language centre. So it really is better to reframe a question such as “Why did you do that?” And instead ask “What were you hoping to achieve here?”

But those minor foibles aside I really think that it is a fantastic book that would be worth it for so many people to give up just a few hours of their time (or do what I do and just listen to the book while commuting) and get a copy of the coaching habit. If you are new to audible you get this book for free! You can get yours here: https://amzn.to/2MuFF2x

Or if you want it as a physical book go here:
https://amzn.to/2yVRVY7