Check Out My Hourglass!

Last year, my wife Tracie gave me this beautiful hourglass for my birthday to commemorate my new coaching career. If you’ve been to my store, you might recognize it as a symbol for my half-hour coaching conversation.

What does it mean?

A coaching conversation begins with you, the client, bringing a topic. A topic can be anything that’s been on your mind a lot lately. Often, but not always, it’s a problem or challenge for which you are trying to find a solution.

The top part of the hourglass represents the first part of the coaching conversation. During that time, we explore the topic, figure out why it is important, look at it from lots of different angles, and basically answer some broad questions about it.

Over the course of this exploration, we work our way down to the pinch point of the hourglass, that narrow neck that all the sand passes through. This is where we find something actionable about the topic. Here we decide what we want to walk away with at the end of the conversation.

The bottom of the hourglass explores actions and designs accountability around those actions. What are your options? Which option are you most excited about? How will you be sure to follow through with that?

My hourglass is actually a half-hour glass, because I believe that a lot of progress can be made in just 30 minutes of coaching.

It’s called the “hourglass model”, and this is not the only way a coaching conversation can develop. I use other models for other situations. But I wanted to give you a look at what’s going on “behind the scenes” in many of our coaching conversations.

Looking forward to coaching with you soon!