My favourite coaching tools: Visual Individual - Squiggle Completion

Caveats:
None. You can do this for group work as well, and I have used it quite successfully for Agile Retrospectives.

Required:
5 minutes to draw
5-10 minutes to explain (per coachee/group member)
Paper
Pens/pencils/colours or not
Quiet space

Step 1:

Take the paper and draw a quick random squiggle on it. In a group everyone can draw a squiggle on a piece of paper.

Eg:

Step 2:
Pass the paper to the coachee, or in a group ask the members to pass to the left/right. Ask the recipient to look silently at the squiggle. Depending on the context, you can choose to ask a question for instance "How has this past week/month/year been for you?" or "How would you like the future to look?" or "What does success look like?"

Step 3:
Ask the coachee or group members to now complete the squiggle they have received as appropriately as possible to reflect their context or their answer to the question raised. Timebox this to 5 minutes - the results are more useful if cognitive thinking has been reduced and instead subconscious knowledge is accessed.

Eg

Step 4:
Now ask the coachee to explain their picture to you and/or the group. The insights from this exercise are extremely varied. Remember to make no judgements, nor allow any in the group to make judgements. Visualising knowledge is extremely subjective and it's up to the drawer to interpret along with guided questions eg: "What does that represent for you?", "That seems far away from this?", "Did you choose red on purpose?", "Who is that big figure?", "The waves seem to grow?" etc

The data gained from this coaching tool is useful for individual coaching plans - sometimes there is the discovery of a motivational factor or an anti-motivational factor. And the insights for a group who use this have a team building effect - especially when people take their masterpieces back to their office spaces with them and leave them on display. Especially if, over time, you use the tool a few more times for different or the same question.

Thankyou for reading! Let me know how your practice goes!

My favourite coaching tools: Free online wheel of Self

Caveats:
Like all self-assessments, especially with scales, assessing your Wheel of Self reveals different results depending on when it is completed and how you're feeling and what you've been recently reflecting on.

Requirements:
Internet access
Quiet space
15 minutes to complete initial assessment
5 minutes to transfer to the second wheel
15-30 minutes to discuss

Step 1:
Give this link to the coachee: http://www.new-oceans.co.uk/new/wheel2.htm. Encourage the coachee to be as honest as possible, and not to think too much - go with their first instinct. The more honest they are, the more they will get out of this tool. Again I think the best time to complete this assessment is in the morning, before work really starts.

Step 2:
When the assessment is complete, you will have a "radar chart" / "spider graph" of various aspects of life that most people find important (Health & Well Being, Personal Growth, Achievements, Work-Career, Friendship, Security, Energy, Self-Esteem, Fun & Recreation, Home - Family, Relationship, Finance).

Discuss what the results mean to the coachee. Do they think or feel they should strive for more balance or are they comfortable? What do they think the outcome would be if they were willing to reallocate some of the time they spending on an outlier activity to lesser area? What prevents them from rebalancing? Would rebalancing take a long time? What are the rewards? And so on.

Step 3:
Another way to represent a 12-segmented Wheel is actually the Zodiac Wheel. Whether or not you believe in astrology, or your coachee does or does not, the Zodiac Wheel actually clearly shows opposite pairings (Career vs Home, Mental Explorations vs Communications, Death and Regeneration vs Possessions, Marriage and Partnership vs Self, Service and Health vs Self-Undoing, Creativity vs Hopes/Wishes and Friends). Thus usually it is clear if you overscore on say "Career" according to the Wheel on http://www.readingsbylafaye.com/12-Houses-of-the-Zodiac-Wheel.html you will underscore on "Home" and thus it is quick to create a prioritised plan to shift towards more balance ASAP.

Using both these wheels together (by transferring the scores from the 1st to the 2nd) make for a very interesting view for your coachee to look at themselves and understand themselves better. A lot of the people I work with for instance spend more time on Career activities or Home activities - a tiny minority actually feel they have balance between these two. And the same with Creativity or Friends - very few people commit to quiet times for themselves to engage in creative processes and thus recharge a different aspect of themselves for a more fulfilling life.

You now have more material, and perhaps a simple prioritisation mechanism, to help the coachee with setting up a coaching plan.

My favourite coaching tools: Csikszentmihalyi's Flow (psychology)

Caveats:
None for using, but please be sensible whenever thinking and applying a model of thought. It's all abstract and in that experiential space - nothing is perfect for everyone in every context.

Required:
This is a "chat through" session with a coachee or a group
30 minutes and more, dependent on the group's size and engagement
Read the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) and be sure to click on all the segments in the picture which are links to a bit more detail which you will need to know and understand.

Step 1: I either draw something similar or show the coachee or the group the following image (available in the public domain from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Challenge_vs_skill.svg)

Step 2: Most important - do not cast, nor allow any group member to cast, any verbal or non-verbal judgements! This is self-perception stuff, so with a group, as facilitator of constructive listening and volunteering of important "self" information, the session must be managed sensitively and sensibly.

Step 3: And as the picture is quite self-explanatory, especially having read the background reading available on wikipedia and other sources, the conversation is quite easy to have. I ask for examples of what tasks the coachee or the group members perform that are Low in Challenge Level, and Low in Skill Level.

I then ask for examples on each flanking side, 1 sector at a time (ie, Medium Challenge Level with Low Skill Level, Medium Skill Level with Low Challenge Level) until finally reaching Flow.

Typically the sectors before Flow are quite quick and easy to find good examples for, though it is always interesting for me to see how house/admin chores such as sweeping, filing, dusting move around between Apathy-Boredom-Relaxation. And the same for what kind of tasks such as public speaking, waiting for feedback from a client proposal, writing a proposal, move between Apathy, Worry and Anxiety.

Often teaching, managing and mentoring type activities appear in the Control sector.

And sporting, extreme sporting, and "breaking the ice" with someone that is liked appears in Arousal sector.

And then, the tough one is discovered, and the real soul and past experience searching begins: Flow.

Step 4: Helping identify tasks that represent true Flow state requires covering the information found on wikipedia, summarised here:

1.The person must be engaged with something that has clear goals in order to provide direction and structure (aka Vision)

2.The person must believe that they have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task and their own perceived skills - they must be confident.
3.The clearer and more immediate feedback the person receives whilst engaged, helps the person get into this "super state" and then stay there for longer
 
Flow psychology provides a great tool for explaining the enjoyment people report when they embrace modern/agile software engineering practices like Test Driven Development, Pairing, Collaborative Design and more.

I have not read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience yet, but I find the graph he drew above incredibly useful when talking to people about their experiences of work - what they have really loved in the past, and helping them understand what they are experiencing currently. This tool helps provide some motivational energy to help people make a decision to try something new.

And for team building, this tool provides great insights into the kinds of work individuals really want to do, to feel alive, to contribute as much as possible whilst at work, to be themselves, and to be with others, contributing to team success based on capability and capacity rather than role.

I like bringing this tool into discussion with the results from Belbin (see Coaching with Belbin), the Free Strength Finder (see Coaching with Free Strengths Finder), the preferred learning styles VAK (see Coaching with Free VAK (Learning Styles Visual Auditory Kinaesthetic)), and the positivity ratio (see Coaching With Free Positivity Ratio Tool). Together they provide a couple of very useful views on people that allow for the creation of great coaching plans, team plans, and ultimately greatly enhanced self-awareness.

Thankyou for supporting! Let me know what you think!