The Coaching School
Welcome to The Coaching School—the podcast where leadership development is taught like a cooking school.
We've reimagined our long-running Coaching Conversations podcast into a practical, engaging learning experience designed to help leaders become exceptional coaches.
At The Coaching School, we believe coaching isn't a personality trait—it's a skill that can be learned, practiced, and mastered.
Every episode gives you another ingredient, another recipe, or another secret sauce you can immediately use to develop your people.
Our Coaching Ingredients are the different types of coaching every leader should know—from one-on-one coaching and group coaching to peer coaching, observational coaching, career coaching, self-coaching, and AI-assisted coaching.
Our Coaching Recipes combine those ingredients into proven, step-by-step approaches for real workplace challenges. Whether you're coaching accountability, motivation, communication, teamwork, difficult attitudes, performance improvement, emotional intelligence, or career development, we'll show you exactly how to structure the conversation.
Then we share the Secret Sauces—the small coaching techniques that create extraordinary results. You'll discover powerful questions, accountability strategies, learning projects, recognition techniques, feedback models, motivational approaches, and practical coaching habits that transform ordinary conversations into meaningful moments of growth.
Every episode is designed to be practical, actionable, and easy to apply. Our goal is simple: help leaders feel more confident coaching their employees while helping employees feel great about getting better.
Whether you're a new supervisor, an experienced executive, an HR professional, a coach, or someone passionate about developing people, The Coaching School will provide you with the tools, frameworks, and confidence to coach more effectively.
So grab your notebook, pull up a chair in our coaching kitchen, and let's start cooking up stronger leaders, stronger teams, and stronger workplace cultures.
The Coaching School—where great leaders learn the recipes that help people grow.
The Coaching School
Why AI Needs Self-Awareness
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Welcome to Coaching Conversations
We have created a NEW and Innovative line of books called Workplace Coaching Books. These books use QR codes with embedded audio and video lessons speaking directly to the reader. Each book comes with assessments and journal based coaching pages where they document what they've learned and what they've applied. In addition each book comes with the self analysis link that prompts them to share what they've learned and what they've put into action leading to greater learner application a
Coaching Talks is a dynamic leadership development speaking series customized to your needs. Need help spreading the value and application of workplace coaching? Let us help:
We provide many styles of speaking services:
- We provide virtual keynotes
- We specialize in 4 part virtual series (we always customize)
- We have a unique feature called "Speaker Tracks" where we send to all audience members reinforcement lessons after the talk (to the pc or cell phone), thus keeping people on track after the talk
Get More Info Here: https://form.jotform.com/241193119118149
I just did a very unique video on why AI needs self-awareness. Think about it. If you have somebody who's negative or resistant to feedback got passed over for a promotion, and when you talk to that person, what happens? The person can get resistant, they can rebuttal, they can say, give me an example, and then they try to explain it away. Ultimately, what happens is people really develop their own lack of self-awareness. It has been estimated 85% of people significantly
Why Self-Awareness Matters
SPEAKER_00lack self-awareness. Truly looking in the mirror and truly being honest. You know, I had a situation years ago where somebody got passed over for a job and she complained about the person who got the job. And I looked at her and I said, I'm going to be really blunt. You were not qualified for that job. And the person was offended. They were angry. And I go, look, you're sitting here out in the hallway criticizing someone who did get the job. They got the job to get you angry? They got the job in spite of you? Should they have sought your permission? And she looked at me and she said, You know, I'm really offended. I go, how do you think that person's gonna feel when they hear the things that you said
A Blunt Lesson After Rejection
SPEAKER_00about her? And all of a sudden the facial expression changed. And I said, Do you know how to turn on a computer? Do you know how to use macros? Do you know how to use pivot tables and lookup tables in Excel? That was a requirement of the job. She said, No. I said, Do you know the person that got the job knows how to use those things fluently? And it's a job requirement. And I just stared at her and she said, Well, I didn't know that. I said, Sure you did. It's right in the job description. Did you read it? Now, while many of you might be thinking, God damn, you're a jerk. Sometimes you got to change your tone. Sometimes you got to change the perspective of the person so they can at least grab the mirror. Maybe they're not ready to look in the mirror, but boy, oh boy, many people don't even own mirrors. I said, you have an opportunity to learn from this experience. But if you are going to dismiss it, push it down, compartmentalize it, you will never, ever get a job like that. Because you know what's going to happen
Changing The Narrative Versus Reality
SPEAKER_00is you're out in the lunchroom here complaining about the person who got the job. What does that say about you? See, what happens is people tell themselves their own story. They change the narrative. They change reality so they can feel better about it. Now comes along this thing called artificial intelligence. Now I use AI, I build AI, I'm all for AI. Yet when it comes to getting someone to really look in the mirror and develop self-awareness, I think we're going to be very hard-pressed to have somebody who's passed over for a job, someone not qualified for a job, somebody who's resistant to feedback. I just don't think AI is going to magically be able to look at someone's facial expressions, know their history, know their strengths, so they can have a contextually powerful conversation.
Why AI Cannot Coach Context
SPEAKER_00That's why AI needs self-awareness. Not only does AI as an entity need self-awareness, AI needs people with self-awareness, much like human-based coaches do to be really successful. See, we don't cultivate this in our school systems. See, we have a society coming into our workplace where the parents complain to the teachers, complain to the theater coaches, complain to the sports coaches. Life is unfair. My kids are not playing enough. So when they magically show up to this thing called the workplace, boy, it's not smooth sailing. The waters are choppy. It's a little rougher out here. Mom and dad can't help me. You know, I think the greatest thing we could do for our kids is to put them into the wilderness for three days with one day's
Teaching Self-Awareness Before Work
SPEAKER_00worth of food and say, okay, you got to work together. You got to survive. We'll pick you up in three days. And then to ask them three really good self-awareness questions. Number one, what did you learn from the experience? Number two, what did you learn about yourself? You're positively committed to improving. And then number three, what actions are you going to take based on this learning that will push you and develop you in the right direction? We don't even talk about self-awareness or emotional intelligence attributes in our high schools or colleges the way we should. And this becomes the greatest roadblock in the workplace. Do you know how often people are not promoted who also have the talent because they're hard to work with? But nobody talks to the person about it. I had somebody who was unbelievably talented in one of our client sites, and somebody said, He's difficult to work with. I'm in a board meeting. And I finally said, I said, Well, how are we helping this person? And nobody could answer
Talent Still Fails Without Awareness
SPEAKER_00the question. We just labeled him, we judged him, we wrote it up on the wall, got it in our mind. He's tough to work with. Let's not help him. And so I had to cultivate self awareness of the people who are complaining about self awareness. AI is not going to do that, everybody. That's why AI needs self awareness.