Smart Investor catches up with one of Asia’s best master coaches, Ben Koh on his vision to become the catalyst to transform organisation and people through sustainable coaching
Attending the coaching course conducted by Master Certified Coach and Mentor Coach, Ben Koh, has been a rewarding experience. During the 4-days intensive “Transformative Coaching” course held recently in Malaysia, Ben who is also the founder of Coach Masters Academy (CMA), shared his knowledge with would-be and existing coaches to enhance their skills in creating transformative and more sustainable change in their clients.
Unlike a consultant or a mentor, the coach is not an expert in the client’s field. Instead, a coach’s role is to help his clients have a higher thinking capacity to reflect on their issues rather than expand their skills to do the job better. “The environment is always changing and therefore can be quite frustrating. Negative emotions if left unchecked can limit people in decisions and choices that are made,” says Ben. The master coach who has over 15 years of experience across 17 countries in Asia, explains that his coaching framework integrates the science of Emotional Intelligence, NLP and uses positive psychology approach to enhance the learning ability to become a coach. The CMA training method emphasises awareness and clarity. In that heightened state of awareness and clarity, one will be able to look deeper and realise his real internal desires. He will then be able to create solutions that are sustainable when he is able to align his actions to his real intention, according to Ben. One of the things that coaching does is to stimulate thinking and understanding to help the client to be a better thinker- not just thinking for a solution but the ability to think through the situation, he adds.
“Everyone can become a coach”, enthuses Ben, “As you learn to be better as a coach, you naturally become a better person.” Smart Investor spoke to the energetic international coach and trainer about his academy and the profession.
SI: Can you share with us about Coach Master Academy, its program, its journey and its vision?
Ben Koh (BK): Coach Mastery Academy is an academy but it is more of an academy that is propelled by a vision to inspire positive change through mastery coaching. That vision came about when we had the opportunity to help teachers in Kazakhstan to use a coaching approach to manage classroom behaviour for their students. That spurred the deep desire to want to create a new generation, and from that it eventually grew to where we are today- where we went across the globe to help coaches to continue that mission to become a catalyst of change by sharpening their coaching skills.
We have an in-house coaching proprietary framework based on an empirical approach to effect change. The change that we want is sustainable change. What will make change sustainable depends on how the coach shows up during the coaching conversation. One of the hallmarks is being present in the moment – meaning that the coach is aware and able to notice how his own thoughts are influencing the way he communicates with his client, so that he is more mindful in his choice of words. In being present, the second key skill is really the way you listen: how you listen and what are you listening for.
The Coach Mastery propriety framework has positive psychology element, where we help coaches to see greatness in their clients. A coach’s role is to help people to align their intentions with their actions. For many people, their intentions are being buried or distracted by the circumstances in life and they end up with responding to pressing needs or just to accomplish their duties. Through the alignment, we help them to be courageous and bold to their commitment to achieving their goals.
SI: How has coaching industry evolved since you started?
BK: When we first started back in 2011, the need for coaching was much lesser than what it is currently. The industry grew because the world around it understood that in moving forward we need to capitalise on human resources. It is all about human capital management right now-- how you can advance human potential, allowing them to be more creative and putting them in the lead.
Because the economy is dependent on human capital to drive performance, this is where HR is looking for a better tool to support that kind of trend- therefore coaching Is very adequate and strategic.
Although mentoring does provide the edge on how to transfer the experience, coaching has added a new dimension to the whole game of advancing human capital where you draw out the ‘greatness’ in each individual. You then combine those individual parts to create a sum that is greater than the individual, and that is how coaching has added value.
SI: How can coaching contribute to effective leadership that will benefit the organisation?
BK: People who can afford coaching are likely to be in senior positions. Leaders are expensive because they are the people that think for the company. They need someone to talk through their thought processes - what are the things that they know that they did not know yet that they need to know; and what are the things that they know and need to do more of; and what are the things that are holding them back that they did not know.
In this context, what is holding them back or what is causing them to be stuck and not escalating upwards to be effective? In most cases, it is not a functional gap, as they have the experience and knowledge to do the functional role very well. But there is something else that is limiting them - and one of the things we noted is the way they interpret the situation, the way they integrate the situation and how they are being reactive.
These are not gaps but these are awareness. Coaching helps to heighten their own awareness to use their own wisdom to be adaptive, to evolve, and to create a different way of managing the same things better. This is very different from the logical thinking process of analysing, troubleshooting and reasoning, where the motive is to improve the situation. It is about evolving and doing something that they may not even have embraced before - connecting, synthesising, reflecting, linking - these are the roles of thinking. When leaders are able to think better, where we trust that they have enough experience, skills and resources, the organisation will then be able to leverage on them to give a better outcome.
SI: How can coaching help the client (the people being sponsored) align to the organisation’s goal? BK: There is a myth that coaching is for personal development. That is only partly true. Coaching as an industry has a high commitment to the stakeholder because it is a service industry. The coach has a strong obligation to the stakeholder who pays the money - to deliver the result for the stakeholder, that is, to align its people to the organisational goal.
The first thing is the client (the person being sponsored) must have the awareness in term of his alignment to that company’s goal and what is keeping him in the current level of reference. And the beauty of transformative coaching is once you know what is holding you at the current level, we then turn the conversation and ask the client what can you learn from this experience about yourself at this current situation in terms of what your value is, in terms of what drives you, what is important, in terms of who you are and what it tells you about that. Once the client is aware of his own internal motivation, therefore in moving forward, he can then adjust that motivation to be more aligned with the organisation goal. If the client is not aware of his own motivation, we cannot ask them to do things to get them to meet the organisation’s goal. That is just giving out instructions, where the change will not be sustainable. CMA coaching philosophy begins with the fundamental principle that awareness is the first step to all change activity, and out of this awareness, you can then do the learning, out of learning we can then co-create a more effective and impactful outcome.
SI: What are the changes you want to see in CMA graduates?
BK: We would like to see two changes when the students graduate from our academy. Firstly, we want them to hone their own motivation. Why is it they do what they do? We want them to be a change agent that inspires positive and sustainable change.
Secondly, because the vision is true for them, we want them to be fully committed to their learning as a coach because the impact that they deliver for the client will depend on how committed they are in continuing to sharpen the craft, the commitment to learning and constantly pushing themselves towards artfulness and mastery. We see coaching as a noble calling. The coach is a ‘being’ that you represent to give the client the message that we are also growing, that the failures are there to tell us that there is growth opportunity. SI: Opportunity for coaches now?
BK: Coaching is a continuous learning process. You need to be committed to developing yourself as a coach. You also need to be in touch with other new developments in the area of human potential and ride that wave to grow in the industry.
Mentoring is one of those key routines that you must actively engage in where you are being mentored by other matured coaches to enable you to draw strength from their experiences and perspectives.
Going forward, the economy is relying more and more on people’s potential. And coaching is the right tool to help the economy to achieve that.
|