 and welcome to The Creative Life, a collaborative production between Big Tech Hawaii and the American Creativity Association. I'm Darlene Boyd, your host today. Our guest Hector Ramos joins us from Kerry, North Carolina. Dr. Ramos has professional international experience in the area of applied creativity and innovation. He often focuses on the coaching of executive individuals and groups in many international companies, including but not limited to Singapore, Indonesia, Dubai, Mexico, and the United States. Hector, I have heard more than once that a great coach is the secret to winning and staying on top. And I've also heard that professional coaches can build enthusiasm and passion where no one else can. It seems to me that there must be some truth in these commentaries given the investments that companies are willing to make in coaching of high-level executives and managers. So am I correct? And also, if I am, just exactly what is executive or managerial coaching and what are the benefits associated with executive coaching? Well, you brought up a lot of questions there and points that are extremely useful to understand coaching. I think it can be understood as helping people solve problems more effectively through a series of questions. But the interesting thing is that you mentioned that coaches bring up more enthusiasm and a passion to people to achieve things. So in other words, it has an emotional impact on the person you are coaching. And so I don't think that's very often you see frameworks including those emotional components. Now, one of the things I can tell you is that people have a lot of potential and in their jobs they don't always use all the potential or the abilities they have, especially thinking abilities. So a coach does this type of work that it's tapping into that the ability is not used and so that people can surprise themselves with their performance. I did not know I could do so much or I could do it so well. So a coach is supposed to do that to facilitate better performance. I like that Hector, I know there's somewhat of a myth involved or I should say when the gossip machine gets going in an institution or perhaps in a corporation and somehow it leaks out that someone has a coach. Immediately the gossip starts to go, well, there must be. I knew there was something that he couldn't do or she couldn't do. I knew that they needed some help. And then the next question that usually or the commentary is generally is how much money are they spending to give this person a coach? So tell me how it's determined as to which individual the real honest to goodness truth as to how is it determined how you identify which individual may need a coach? Well, I would suggest from my perspective everybody needs a coach. So the whole thing here is that coaches are interpreted or understood in different ways in the market. Someone, as you said, will say, well, this person has a coach. Very likely there's something they cannot do. Well, what if they can do everything but the coach is there to help them do it better? So that's a different perspective. That's what you call high pick or pick performance coaches. If they are not coaches that are helping you to solve areas of lack in your performance but maybe to develop your potential and what you can do so much better than you could think of. So that is the key thing. So how much do a company spends employing coaches? It really depends on the type of, this is, it can vary from 50 to last 250, $300 an hour. It depends on the company they engage and the amount of sessions, the amount of people. It's always the package that they can negotiate. But what I know is that there's a great degree of fluctuation in prices out there. But usually the good thing about coaching is that you can test the defects very quickly. So you don't have to go one year doing coaching if in two months or one month you don't see this giving you some sort of hope and some sort of results in terms of where you can get. How available does a coach make himself or herself to a client? Well, this depends on the type of work that the coach is doing and the amount of efforts that the coachy can put into that relationship and getting things done because coaching is always about getting an implementation. It's not about just talking about things that could be and never doing anything. It's about getting some results. So some coaches would coach once a week. I do, my experience has been once a month or once every two months. But again, because he's highly focused, I get a lot of results in very little time. Would it be safe to assume that if you are the coach and you're scheduled for a once a month kind of thing if some kind of crisis would come up in that interim, you would make yourself available. Am I correct in thinking that? Yes. Again, that can be part of the contract that you have with the coach. So you say, well, we'll need you to give this one hour coaching every month. But if we find that we need you, can you become available in two days? Am I giving you two days notice or something like that? And that can be part of the contract. So this is the creative life and we're here to address things creatively. And so tell us how can creative thinking help coaches deliver greater value? So there are a lot of frameworks for coaching. I can give you one very basic one, which is step one, goals, step two, what is your reality? Step three, what are your obstacles? And the step four, what is the way forward? So through questions, you can help people understand or clarify the goals that they want to achieve, to understand the information that is most important for in the terms of the reality to identify or uncover what are the most important obstacles and to select what is the most effective way of moving forward. So as you can see, this way of defining coaching has a lot, it overlaps a lot with creative from solving in terms of defining a problem or identifying obstacles or coming up with creative and unique solutions. So there is so much more than creative thinking can give to coaching because it has the tools to do this type of work. Now I'm not saying that coaching doesn't do the work. I'm just saying that you can use just to give you an example. I went to a school in Singapore, high school and I helped them clarify. I was doing coaching with two people. I helped them clarify a problem and it took me one hour and 45 minutes until they found out what are the key issues that we're looking for. Now, because this was not something was paid, was a favor I was doing some people, I decided to just stretch it and see how far and I'm was going to stay there until they got some breakthrough. But what I'm saying is that I use creative thinking to help them look beyond. And the moment they found out what is the key issue that they were looking trying to solve, then they were so motivated to move forward. So what are we saying, creative thinking sometimes that clarity gives you the motivation to come up with the ideas to get it solved. Yeah, it would seem to me that clarity is quite essential and those viewers that follow us on a regular basis have heard us say before that there is great difficulty sometimes in identifying what the real problem is. Often we think we know what the problem is and you just mentioned the amount of time that you dedicated to get your folks to really focus on what the real problem was. Sometimes it's implicit and sometimes it's explicit. Is it not? Yes, so what happens often is that we get fixated by a way of understanding the problem. And so we need to get some help from outside to say, okay, what have you considered this? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about the connection between this factor or could this be a root cause problem or factors going in this problem and then giving some evidence of why this could be that way. Now, as you can see, that's already is getting a little bit into content, which is something that coaches they don't hate to do. So that's why creative thinking sometimes is probing, is suggesting certain things that when people start questioning themselves the way they view reality, then they can become more flexible in the thinking and say, okay, now I understand why this has become a problem. You used the word about your client or coachee being flexible, which leads me to another question. How ready does the client need to be to receive coaching? How long, give me some of your experience on how long it's taken you to get a client to where you feel that they really truly are welcoming you and listening to you. So what happens is that in coaching you always talk about creating some sort of rapport or relationship with your clients. So there has to be some sort of trust there. One of the big things in coaching is that sometimes you deal with confidential or sensitive information that could be sensitive to company or maybe emotionally charged. So what happens that you have to be 100% non-judgmental and non-biased and so for to do that so you have to be extremely clever or have a very strong relationship where you can come with to places of, okay, let's take a break, let's move more compact, let's see what happened and reflect on the progress that is being made. So what I can tell you is that most people, well, they're never ready to be coached because they have never experienced it. The same way, they're never ready to stream if they have never touched a stream before. But you can help them by creating this relationship by getting to know, clarifying the purpose, the methodology and also by trying a small problem first, not the big problems, the small ones. So then you make it easy to go through the process instead of and helping people getting some what I call even small achievements and small victories that they can motivate them to move forward into more difficult problems. Is executive coaching the same as leadership coaching? Well, I think there's going to be an overlap as well. Executive coaching is very much about performance of executives so they can get everything that they need to get done well, but executives are very often their leaders. So there's going to be some sort of, if you do coaching well, there's going to be a very much of an understanding of what leadership means and an empowerment of people because leaders are as good as the followers who get work done. So to empower people and maybe in that way, coaching can help executives develop the leadership skills. So there's something I've experienced related to coaching and I suspect if I have, then a number of our viewers probably have also and that's the 360. I assume you're, do you use the 360? Well, I've used it before, but yeah, I know what it is. Tell us about it. Okay, so I suppose that 360 is also going to be used in different ways depending on what type of instrument you use. What we try to do is to get feedback from people around the client. So you could have, so imagine I'm coaching an executive and he's leading a group of five people and then these five people have some other people around them. So I'm going to get feedback about this person in terms of performance, relationship, et cetera. From these people, but also from the clientele, from the clients or from other people that's engaged with the executive, with my clients in different ways. So what happens is that I get a more comprehensive data or information about my client's performance and I could make some sort of conclusion about some of the key things that my client needs to address. Okay, when I said I've had experience, I've been on the side where the coach would call myself, call me as one of several people that you just described that work with the person. And then of course the concern being confidentiality and just how open and how comfortable I felt with the person that would be the coach in the process of interviewing and the way they established their questions. So my experiences have been very positive, not being the one that was being coached but being the one that was being one of many interviewed to see perhaps. So I assume that's to help the coach identify the strengths and weaknesses of the person they'll be coaching. Yes, yeah. Because perception is reality for some people. So you may think that you have very good communication and the people you work with, they disagree with you. So to have this type of information can help you but again, this type of interviewing, you have to be very careful to get to data and not to leave opinions and feelings aside. Okay. And how much time do you spend getting to know your coachy? I'm gonna call them your coachy, the person you're going to be coaching. How much time do you spend getting to know them before you really formulate a plan and how much does creativity play at that introductory portion? Well, so there's a questionnaire that the plan has to fill in. So I can get some information, some data that they can use to ask more questions and then figure out what's happening. So I found out that when I use the questionnaire and one extra hour, I can get quite a lot of information to start working with the clients. But again, this is going to depend on the type of problem and complexity of the problem because the moment you have something that is super complex and you have a lot of people involved, then you will need much more time to prepare. Do you have a schemata in your mind of the types of activities or the topics that you would address with the person you're going to coach? I'm going to assume when you mentioned communication being one. I think that would be rather generic, correct? Or almost any person you're going, you'll address communication. Yeah, so what happens very often is that, and here's where creative thinking plays a part. So the role of a consultant is to help people solve problems by giving them a solution themselves. So the consultant will bring expertise. So a consultant is not a coach. The pure 100% coach is the person that will only ask questions and get the coachy to solve the problems themselves. And in between, you have someone who can add a bit more clarification by probing, employs a bit more of the creative thinking approach, and that's what I do. That's where I find that it can give a lot of value. So the whole thing here is clarifying and identifying the goal. What do you really want to achieve? And then what is the information that you need to know about this in order to get it solved? And I find that very often people they don't have enough information or the information is not good enough. So that's going to be essential. And what happens in creative thinking, sometimes we have thought that just if you identify the problem, you can have it solved. Well, you need to get some data around it as well. So in order to get that data, what tools do you use to get this information? Well, creative thinking, it offers, I use a couple of templates that are available everywhere. I mean, if you get a bit of research on creative problem solving and they're also available online. So it's not difficult to know the type of questions about the when, how, who, who is involved in this and how are they involved? So you create your own questions around the template and then you see when once you're asking the question, you see where you're getting more useful data and then you're digging deeper that way. If you're getting nowhere, then you move to a different sort of questions, asking some more information about maybe also about the past, when did it become a problem? Why was it a problem? And what have you tried to solve it? So a bit of history is also important as part of the information you want to address. Have you tried to solve this and what results have you got? And again, that's part of the question that is readily available online for problem exploration. You make it sound so simple and I know it's not. I'm sure that, do you have a coach? Do coaches have a coach? Do coaches have a coach? Well, it's not that I have a coach all the time. I think my wife is my best coach, but I have had a coach in the past and so I got to understand but I've got to some training as well. I was being a little bit glib about that saying to you but as you point out, your wife, it would seem to me that we all have a coach in some manner and it's probably a special person, that person that you just come home and say, can't imagine the day I had today and it goes into a therapy session for that person. Yes, or someone who's going to challenge you to go beyond. Yes, yes, interesting, interesting. Since we've moved into the emotional type spirit of coaching, it seems that if someone has a coach they have a need. Can the coachee, the client, ever be too needy and if so, how do you can deal with a client that is too needy? And I think you might guess what I mean by that, that they just want to call you every minute and they just want to pour their soul out to you. Yes, sometimes that's going to happen and so the important thing is to know how to differentiate between coaching and psychotherapy. So that's some places where I advise people not to go but to recommend somebody else who can go there and get better results. I think that the coaching relationship is very much a close relationship because you need to have a lot of trust to consider not only information but how you assess information and what are your feelings towards that information? Are you being too critical? Are you being too judgmental? What is your belief system? So when you get into all that, definitely there's going to be some sort of a connection of well, this coach is really helping me a lot. So can I have access to this coaching more often? And what I suggest is to teach people how to identify certain things, some tools where they can coach themselves. So you don't need the coach, you have the skill to help yourself. And I think that that's much more valuable than having someone being in some sort of an addiction, an addictive relationship to coaching. I don't know if I'm explaining myself. Very clearly, yes. You mentioned some areas perhaps that you as a coach would not want to enter to. Might you be able to give us an example of some of those sensitive areas perhaps should not be touched on by the coach? And if so, where would you direct the person to go? Well, imagine that the coach has had some sort of traumatic experience that has created some sort of a filter or a way of connecting with people where they tend to be either hypercritical about people or very negative. And through the coaching experience, they have identified one or two things that maybe they have contributed to this. So I would not go deeper and say, and can you just into the history of the clients or the coachy and see, can you tell me a bit more about how this trauma took place? So because that is more of the psychotherapy or the role of psychotherapist. Now what's going to happen is that for minor things, the fact that the people get to verbalize and make some connections, that could bring a little bit of healing in terms of, hey, now I know why I'm such an obnoxious person. I'm going to change this thing. And so sometimes people do change and become a bit more open because the coaching relationship is a place of openness where you listen to each other and that can be exported. Maybe I can connect with other people that way. I'm going to become a better listener and listen to emotions not only to thoughts. Well, I mentioned that we do have a few questions that I mentioned to you that there were a few questions that came in before we began the show. And they're really pretty simple ones too so far. How much do coaches make or how much may a coach make in terms of money? If you create a very good brand and you can connect with people that have appreciate your services, everything, it can go up to $400, $500 an hour. So there are coaches that get paid a huge amount of money. Now I know many of them, they could get paid from $400 to $200. And some people that are starting, they could start with $50 something. So it really depends on the company that you engage and the type of contract that you have. Are you going to engage them for a whole year? It's going to be 50 sessions or it's going to be one session for three months. So I think that that's going to have an impact as well of how people calculate their rate. What if someone would like to pursue, this is a question that was brought into us. What if someone would like to pursue a coaching career? Do you have some suggestions as to the first steps? Well, you have to identify a little bit of research online but also look into, for instance, if you're in a university, look, are there any type of training I can attend? We know that, I know that in my university, professors are teaching people how to coach and they go through a certification. They take two classes and they do that. So that's an additional value. So you may want to look around. The whole thing here is that I wouldn't go, when I start, when you start, I wouldn't go to something so very expensive. And the reason is that a lot of the coaching expertise is acquired through practice. It makes good sense to me. Does it, and this is the last question that I have for you that has come to us, does executive coaching really work? I think. Yeah, I mean, the reason it works because it's an industry is growing. So it's a growing industry and a lot of people engage and getting great value out of this. But in an industry that is not so structured, you could have a lot of people doing half-cooked coaching. So not very good. And so it's not going to work every time. But I think that it will give you different types of value and that's something to explore maybe in the future. But coaching will always provide value, but maybe not the value that you are looking for straight away. I see. Let me just ask, if you feel as a coach that it's just not working, is it your call to pull out or have you felt that someone asked you to really hang in there with the situation? I mean, for me, I haven't had anyone who has wanted to stop. So they all loved it, but it was also part of a training program. I see. But I understand how this could happen. And that's part of the contract. I will suggest make it clear that if you want to stop coaching anytime, you can do it. You could call it. Hector, thank you very much. We're coming up to the end of the time that I have to spend with you. I've learned quite a bit and for our viewers, you have been watching The Creative Life on Think Tech Hawaii with our guest creativity and innovation expert Hector Ramos. We hope that your time spent with us offered you a new strategic perspective of applied creativity as we discussed unexplored areas of professional coaching practices. Join us in two weeks for the next edition of The Creative Life until then, aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.