One of the things you want to do is share your own experiences and share your own advice. The easiest thing in the world to talk about is yourself. You want to share those experiences and hope that others can benefit from them. But my experiences may not help the students sitting in front of me that was specific to me unique to my circumstances, in my situation, you have to step back and make sure that you're focusing on that student, their situation and their problem.
Not everyone reaches their full potential on their own. We need a little guidance, sometimes in the form of instruction, or mentoring. And then there is coaching, be it an athletic coach, career coach, or life coach, knowing just the right nudges to give can make the difference between success and a lack of success. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College, I'm your host, Steve fast. Today we're talking coaching with someone who coaches, the coaches, we'll learn a little bit about when and what we bring to the table when giving some guidance to others.
My name is Julianna Vicus. And currently at Heartland I do two different roles, I teach a introductory oral communication course comm 101. And then recently, I have joined others on the Continuing Education Department. And so one of the things that I've been able to do is work specifically with a coaching workshop, as well in doing things like high performing teams as well as navigating difficult situations. Outside of Heartland I work at Illinois State University in the School of Communication. I've been there for about seven years. At this point, I work as an academic advisor to students who are in the Communication Studies major, and teach a variety of different courses there. So everything from magazine production, and designed to public speaking to an introductory freshman course for how to succeed on campus to gender in the humanities. So a handful, just a little bit of everything.
So with continuing education, when you say coaching, what sort of things are you coaching people for?
So coaching is a very specific skill set that you can use, honestly, anywhere in life, most people tend to think of it as something in regards to a leadership skill set. But it really can be anything that's even more personal in HR. I mean, people make careers out of doing life coaching different skills on that front. But from my standpoint, I use mostly use coaching from a professional leadership perspective,
when you have to coach in the workplace, is that strictly for supervisors? or can that be for people that have to wrangle projects or just interact with their co workers?
So I think most people will think of it as something a supervisor would do, but it really doesn't have to be I mean, you can coach a colleague, you can coach a student, you can coach somebody who's even a position that's higher than you. It really depends on the topic and what kind of situation you're trying to navigate. But coaching is for everyone.
So how do you determine, I guess your best approach to coaching? I've heard people have different leadership styles. How does one discover that I imagine a lot of people go through the process of coaching or approaching coaching without even knowing it. So how do you find the best way to tackle the problem that fits you,
the first thing that people will usually start with is they'll do like a leadership assessment test. And that will tell you kind of what your default leadership style is. One of the leadership styles is coaching. So that's one way that individuals can kind of start to understand that, hey, this is kind of my default, when it comes to working with individuals who are going through some kind of situation or need to navigate some kind of problem. I think others are just inherently good at it. If you have a really good skill set in empathetic listening, or you're somebody who that just takes a little bit more time to really critically listen to people who are sharing their situation or their story, you can be a little bit more predisposed to something like that. I've come by it personally, just having worked with college students for so many years, they've got all kinds of things that they want to share and talk about, and they have a lot of difficulty navigating those things. And so as one of my roles isn't an academic advisor, I mean, I coach students daily, and it took me a very long time to get to that kind of default in my conversations.
Well, you said that some people maybe are natural, empathetic listeners, I would think that's a skill that you'd have to have to a degree, no matter what your coaching style might be. How do you build up that skill to the point where you can use it to provide good advice and guidance?
Yeah, I think you have to be extremely mindful and really start to think about not just necessarily how you're going to respond, the student will just use the student as an example. If a student has a problem, and most of us as we're listening to the student kind of going through their, their problem that they're facing, we're mostly focusing on what's going to be our risk. Once what are we going to share with them? What kind of advice are we going to be sharing, but coaching is different. We're not there to provide advice, we're not there to really give the guidance. That's kind of the art of coaching is to facilitate that conversation. So that way the student can focus on what are my options? And what can I be doing? I'm not there to be the person to tell them what to do. But I want to help them get there on their own.
How do you gauge what the skills are that you want to coach, whether it's a student, an employee, sometimes they will have a problem that you might not relate to something where it's a simple skill that that student, or person maybe just hasn't developed? So how do you be tactful in trying to coach people into building up some skills that you think that they should have come to you with, or you can't relate how they haven't developed them?
Joe, I know exactly what you're talking about, because it happens to me every single day. And I think you have to know that walking into an appointment with a 1819 year old college student, they're not at the level that I would sometimes expect them to be in terms of like common sense, or things that they might understand. And so what I've kind of adopted is just this really kind mentality that they just might not have the same lived experiences that maybe I have, they're coming from different backgrounds, they have a different frame of reference, they're just truly may never have been in a position like this before. And so that's something that I've had to work on to is building some empathy for situations that I can't identify with. But just because I can identify with them doesn't mean that they're not facing severe problems. And so it's getting an understanding and a feel for why they're so concerned, and really thinking through what I can best do to help them navigate a situation that I can identify with.
So another issue that you might come up to when evaluating the capabilities of students employee is coaching people up to their potential, but you don't necessarily know what their potential is, how do you start to figure that out?
Yeah, I mean, truly, the longer you work with them, the more you get familiar with, what their skill sets are, you know, we've all done different types of, you know, personality tests to kind of feel like what's our strengths? What are our weaknesses, and that's kind of just a baseline understanding, I mean, but the more that you tend to work with individuals, and the closer you work with them on projects, you start to get a feel for where they might succeed, and where they might need a little bit of guidance, or a little bit of help or more practice. Some students, I do have the opportunity to build a relationship with and get a little bit more time with them. Some students, you know, I might meet with once and if we had a successful meeting, and they walked away feeling like something positive came of it, that's, that's great. But truthfully, it comes down to time and how much time you're willing to commit to that relationship.
How do you determine how and when you should change your approach with someone, you may give somebody some coaching advice, and they might come back that it didn't work, or they haven't understood what you said, and you're kind of going down a blind alley? How do you start to evaluate and mix things up.
So if my if my intention is to go into a conversation, where I'm going to be coaching a student or a colleague, and we walk away, and they come back a day or two later, and they've clearly not gotten anything out of our conversation, it's time to change that default, we can be as mindful and intentional as we want with coaching. But if they're not getting it, or nothing's coming from it, it's time to revisit, maybe that person would benefit from more of a direct leadership style, maybe they need a little bit more of a mentoring approach, where I'm going to share with them, Hey, I was in this situation once and here's exactly how I handle it. Let's talk about that. Or maybe there's somebody who needs a little bit more instruction, you know, they just need a little bit more guidance. So if coaching is not working, and they're not coming to the solution that I think is going to help them in the long run. Yeah, it's time to backtrack and kind of figure out what leadership style might be better in that situation?
Well, as you you mentioned, the different leadership styles that might vary from person to person, how can you change up your style? And how do you know how to change up your style when it doesn't fit to your strengths? Just as the coaching advice might not fit to the specific skill set of a student or an employee, there might be certain different styles that you might have to employ? Are there any tactics or strategies that that give you that kind of flexibility in changing up your approach?
Yeah, it's not easy to do, right? I'll use myself as an example. When I first took the very first leadership assessment kind of quiz. I walked away thinking that I was defaulting to a mentoring leadership style, which that makes sense, right? As an advisor, that's something that I tend to kind of lean on when I need to, it's my default. I like to be able to share with students well, when I was a, you know, Communication Studies major, you know, 10 years ago sitting in this exact seat. Here was my experience. This is what I chose to do. And here's the result of that. And I've learned over time that that's not the best approach. That's just my default. It's been several years where I've had to work at really not sharing my own individual experiences. Because like I mentioned before, we may not have anything more than a similar major in common. And so we've had to think through how best to kind of work with that student and help them think about their own situation and really try to navigate just the conversation. When you're coaching. It's the coachee that owns the content. But as the coach, I own the process. And so that's something that I've really had to be very intentional and mindful of as I've tried to move forward with the coaching skill set.
Yeah, you bring up an interesting point, because this is where the different levels of empathy and empathetic listening come in. Because you might yourself have a certain background that might be completely different due to ethnic background, gender, or personal experience, age, all sorts of things, that your experience just might not be analogous. So you kind of have to detach yourself to a point, is that a very difficult thing for people to do sometimes?
Absolutely. I think it's incredibly difficult. One of the things you want to do is share your own experiences and share your own advice, right? The easiest thing in the world to talk about is yourself, you know yourself best, right? So you want to share those experiences, and hope that others can benefit from them. But like you mentioned, my experiences may not help the students sitting in front of me that was specific to me unique to my circumstances in my situation. So detach is absolutely the correct word, you have to step back and make sure that you're focusing on that student, their situation and their problem.
So as somebody that coaches people now, are there any good examples that you can think of, of yourself being coached that you learned something from, either at the time as something you would apply later, or a light went on later on? When you were in that situation that you thought, Ah, here's something someone did with me, that really helped me do this myself?
Yes. I was first introduced to coaching as a leadership skill set. When I participated in the multicultural leadership program. That's a local leadership program that's run through the Bloomington Normal Community. It's a nonprofit organization. And I participated back in 2014, one of the skill sets or one of the sessions that we worked on was about using coaching in your everyday professional situation. At the time that I was participating, I was working at the YWCA McLean County as their director of marketing and public relations. It was a good job, I loved it, I felt like I was good at it. And then I went through this coaching session, and I was working with a peer during that timeframe for this workshop. And he started coaching me and asking me questions about how fulfilled I was in my career. And walking in that day, I thought, things were fine. Everything's good. I like my job, it's good. And then he had this conversation with me, and I didn't know what he was doing at the time. But he was really skilled at coaching. And I walked away from that session that day thinking, Hmm, I'm not in the right career. I'm not in the right job. This is not where my passion is, this is not where my future is. And so he inspired me just through that conversation to get back into higher education. And seven years later, now I am fulfilled, I'm very happy in my career. So in that situation, I was absolutely the coachee. I didn't see what he was doing. And I walked away with this perfect example of what coaching can actually do. He could see having worked with me for so many months on this program, that I was not in the right position, and that there was something better for me.
No, you mentioned how you do find this role that you're in now to be pretty fulfilling. What is it about it that gives you that satisfaction? What are the things that you see in how you're able to make a difference that make you think that you made the right move?
Oh, yeah, working with students, this phenomenon, very challenging, and very trying at times, but it's phenomenal. I think after having done this kind of role for the last seven years, the coolest piece about it is meeting students for the first time. They don't know me, I don't know them. I don't know anything more about the information that they're sharing with me in that first appointment or that first classroom experience. And then you get to know them, and you get to see their potential, and you get to hear about their interests and see what they're doing in and out of the classroom. And those students go on to graduate. And then you get a card in the mail like a year or two later. And they tell you just how influential or how helpful you were to them. And how they wouldn't have been in a situation like they were now. They wouldn't have been in a career. They hadn't have gone to grad school unless you had conversations with them to get to know them. And I like to keep this shelf in my office of all the little tiny little notes, thank you notes, emails, things like that that students have sent. And it just makes you You smile when you look at it, because you feel like you're in a position, you're doing some good for the university, you're doing some good for the student. And ultimately, you're there not just to collect a paycheck, but you're there because you're actually making a difference in the world.
Going back to that process, is there anything in particular that you found that really turns the light on in the heads of students and clicks that switch to get them to go over the hump of the things that are causing them problems?
Yeah, it's, um, it's an individual kind of situation, certainly. But I've discovered that the more time you spend with them, and the more you listen to them, it's the best thing that you can do. I think lots of students don't really have specific people in their lives where they can just go and share, just talk a little bit, you know, that the fact that students find themselves comfortable enough to just sit down and just talk with me, I think is fantastic. We've always made a joke of it in our office that I'm the unlicensed listener. And so I mean, my my degrees are not in counseling, they're not in social work. It's just something that I've experienced, where people are comfortable telling me their problems. And that's okay with me. Because even if I can just sit and listen and sympathize, empathize with them. If that makes their day better, then that's something that I can certainly do. But over time, the more comfortable you get, and the more familiar and open you are to students coming in and sharing what they're going on, you know, the more I can do to help them.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.
Yeah, happy to do it. Thank you very much, Steve. I appreciate the opportunity.
Giuliana Vicus teaches oral communication and a coaching workshop at Heartland Community College. She is also an academic advisor in the School of Communication at Illinois State University. For more interviews on education, management, and other topics, check out other episodes of random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts, Spotify, audio boom, or wherever you found this. Thanks for listening
