Peer coaching and the One Day Coaching Map

Church Planter Coaching Podcast

In this episode of Coaching Podcast, hosts, Dino Senesi and Jamie Limato, are joined with guest, Josh Turner. Josh is a church planter strategist for Conservatives of Virginia. Listen and learn more about the One Day Coaching Map.

Additional resources:

• One Day Coaching Map https://www.namb.net/Resources/Participants-Guide-4.0-Refillable-One-Day-Map.pdf
• Survive and Thrive by Jimmy Dodd https://www.amazon.com/Survive-Thrive-Relationships-Pastor-PastorServe/dp/1434709191

Transcription:

Introduction: Thank you for joining us on the Coaching Podcast. As part of the Send Network, we are passionate about equipping church planters to live out the call God has placed on their lives. Join us as we talk through healthy coaching practices and why every church planter needs one. Here's your host, Dino Senesi.

Dino: Hello everybody, this is Dino Senesi, and this is the Church Planter Podcast, coaching podcast. I'm the director of the Send Network. I have two guests with me today, and I can't wait for you to talk to them, and on my right is Josh Turner, and Josh is a church planter strategist for Conservatives of Virginia. Josh, good to have you, man.

Josh: It's good to be here, Dino. Thanks for having me.

Dino: Yeah, and on my left is my friend and comrade, Jamie Limato. Jamie is now full time with the North American Mission Board. He is the coaching coordinator. He works in the Northeast, but he works everywhere, and if you guys have been to MAPS or heard us talk about coaching anywhere, you've been exposed to Jamie and been blessed and encouraged by that, but this is a special podcast because we are celebrating 100 one day coaching MAPS beginning in 2013, and I want to defer to Jamie a little bit about that. Jamie, you've been around for a lot of those. What kind of changes have you seen in what we've been doing for church planter coaches since number one?

Jamie: Yeah. So, our training has definitely become more, it flows better, and it's more interactive. It holds more of an adult learning model, and to be honest with you, it's been great to come along for the journey to just, to grow not only as a coach but also as a trainer, and so it's been fun to be a part of it since the beginning.

Dino: Well, and my friend, you have contributed a lot to the development of the material from your practical experience as a champion in D.C. and just your passion for learning. Of course, you have the gallop strength learner, so you love to learn and you've passed a lot of that wealth on to us, so glad to have you on the team, and glad to have your contributions to the kingdom through church planter coaching. So the reason Josh and Jamie are together today is because they were in the first one day coaching MAP in 2013, August in D.C., and they knew each other, but they formed a special relationship through peer coaching, and so I want to start right on the 101 level because the word coaching means everything to everybody, all kinds of things, and peer coaching may not be clear what we're talking about for everybody. So, Josh, talk to us a little bit about what's a peer coaching relationship?

Josh: Yeah, so a peer coaching relationship is where, well, at first, Jamie and I showed up at the one day coaching MAP and we got paired up to peer coach each other, and so ironically, we needed each other at the time and didn't realize how much we needed each other, and so it's basically just almost like practicing on each other, asking intentional questions, and helping draw out really what's already there in each other, and I think we did that well together.

Dino: Yeah, and so, but that was a different skill for you, so Jamie, when you first started that kind of relationship, how was that different than other relationships that you had?

Jamie: Yeah, well, I think it was different in that, just like Josh was saying, it was intentional in that we had coaching guides that we were using, and so the goal of it was to practice asking good questions, and as you would go along in the relationship, you'd begin to ask great questions because we'd learn that the best and great questions in coaching are off of the words that the person who is being coached that they're using, and so Josh did that great with me, and that was what was incredibly different from any other relationship that I have had up to that point.

Dino: And so, Josh, in this process what changed in you because you were one guy coming into peer coaching, probably was accustomed to dealing with relationships one way, and now suddenly it's like a new way, it's like trying to ride a bike without training wheels. It's probably a little awkward I would think.

Josh: Well, yeah. And so what Jamie did, too, was he listened well, and then he identified areas that he could probe and push back on, and one of the things he did well was ask strategic questions about what I was going through, and then the action steps, like what are you going to do about it. What are some things you can do next week? So, anyway.

Dino: So when you say strategic questions, and I'll give you a second to let your brain roll just a little bit, but kind of give me at least from a topic, what are some of the things that you did talk about, or would typically talk about in a coaching conversation?

Josh: Yeah, so in this particular coaching conversation, I think and believe we were talking about staff members, just staffing, different strategies and different challenges with staffing and so Jamie would say something like, what are three things you could do this week or next week or when are you going to do them? When's the best time to do them, and so we would set a date, and then I knew that the next time we met that that needed to happen, and he was going to ask me about it, and so it was very strategic, very intentional.

Dino: So high level of accountability in coaching whether you're coaching a peer or not, Jamie, we get, some of us think, some people think that we're a little bit soft. We coach guys, but talk about accountability, how does accountability work in a coaching relationship?

Jamie: Yeah, so the whole goal in the coaching conversation is to arrive at an action item, and one of the ways that we do that is by asking when questions. When will you do that? And then, they might say, I'm going to do that next week. Well, when next week? And they might say, Monday or Tuesday. Well, which of those would be better, Monday or Tuesday? And so, now we start to get down to a very identified goal and an identified set of action items that help us achieve that goal, and Josh did that incredibly well all while still targeting the heart because what we were both dealing with at the time were both heart issues. Yes, they had staffing issues related to it, but really, they came down to the heart for both of us.

Dino: Yeah, as you're thinking about that, I thought of a word I haven't thought of before. I think about coaching, and that's annoying. Annoying because a good coach is persistent. You know what the relationship's like. You've agreed to be in this kind of relationship, but that doesn't eliminate it from being a little bit annoying at times, but we live our lives in the aspirational level, and Eddie Hancock was training recently, and I heard him say, too many of our goals are never, ever followed up on, and so what kind of things do you think you accomplished in the relationship, the peer coaching relationship, Josh, besides just strategic stuff? What kind of personal things maybe happened for you?

Josh: So, what happened with that peer coaching relationship is it became intentional as well with the other parts of my life, like being a senior pastor. I started coaching my staff. I started coming home and asking questions to help my kids get through something that they were going through, not giving them the answers, but they realized, wow, I've got the answer through asking questions it was drawn out, and then being strategic and discerning about what, as Jamie mentioned, a real issue is because a lot of the times what we say is the problem is not really the problem. So coaching helps bring that out and identify that. It really solves problems.

Dino: Yeah, we like to talk a lot about symptoms because symptoms are also those annoyances in life, and some of them never get resolved because we just want the pain or the aggravation to go away without going into deep waters, deep waters of the heart. Jamie, for you, you work with systems all over North America. How important is peer coaching and how does this affect the health of coaching in a city?

Jamie: Well, I would say that peer coaching is incredibly important when it comes to establishing your coaching system because you cannot become a great coach until you become a mediocre coach, and until you become a pretty good coach, and the only way you get there is through practice, and so if you want, if we want to deliver great coaching to every church planter, we need individuals who will pair up, and they'll go through the training, number one, and then they'll pair up and engage in a peer coaching relationship where they experience the benefit of coaching, but then they also are ready to begin that coaching journey of growing as a coach, and they've practiced that in safety. One of the other things that happens in our Send Network peer coaching system is we also do a peer coaching look in, which Dino, you did with Josh and I, and the result of that is we're able to get feedback on the coaching that we have done.

Jamie: And so we're able to hear from someone on the outside, the things that we've done well, the things that we could improve upon, and how those things relate to the competencies that we learned at the training.

Dino: Yes, and you might be happening on this podcast today, and you're a church planter. You don't have a coach. You may be in the Send system, and one day you're going to be called on by a coach. You don't know what it's all about, and you might be a little suspicious. Well, I hope you would know today that we work hard on developing coaches to be great to help you fulfill your unique kingdom assignment, so coaching is about you, on our seat on the bus and men like Jamie and Josh invest hours and hours coaching planters and developing coaches, so that you could do what God's asked you to do, and ultimately that you could fulfill the mission of God where he has assigned you, so listening in on a conversation like this, you're seeing just a little bit up under the hood about how serious we are about the great coaching part.

We say, oftentimes in our training, or I'll say, we could have said, Josh, we're going to deliver good coaching or we could have said, we're going to deliver kind of good or okay coaching or mediocre coaching, and we just couldn't find a word. We wanted to put a qualifier there, and we say, let's make it great. Let's put that bar in front of us because as someone said recently in our training, it's a great commission. Surely it deserves great coaching. And so, that's really the heart behind all of this. Josh, if someone doesn't have a coach, give them some advice on how to set up a peer coaching relationship. What would you do if you were in that situation?

Josh: Yeah, so if you don't have a coach, the first thing I would do is just desire to have one. I mean, and realize how important it is to have a coach, and then just find somebody to coach, somebody else, another peer, another pastor or someone else that is interested in helping coaching and get involved and just start doing it. I think that's an important thing. Just do it.

Dino: Yeah, getting those coaching reps in is critical, having those conversations will not only help you in the moment, but it'll help you develop your leaders and develop disciples just a little bit. Jamie, I want you to make reference back, too, because as a planter thinks about a coach, a lot of times a planter says I've already got a coach or I've got multiple coaches. Talk a little bit about the voices and how that fits together and how that might inform a planter. What is the exact function of having a coach in their life?

Jamie: Yeah, one of the things that we talk about is helping us to understand what coaching is different from. It's different from counseling. It's different from advising. It's different from teaching, and it's different from mentoring. All of those particular voices are pouring in. They're pouring into the life of the leader, and we have plenty of those as church planters, and if we thought about it long enough, we could have a long laundry list of pouring in voices, whether that's podcasts or community leaders or people in your core group or people in your small group, and the reality is, is all of those voices can become, to get to a place where it's really noisy, and you don't really know what your next step is, or if you know what your next step is, you being to compare your next step with someone else's next steps, and so what a coach is able to do is come alongside the leader and begin to draw out what God has already placed in there.

And to begin to help hold them accountable to the action items that they come up with. That was what was so life giving to me in my relationship, in my peer coaching relationship with Josh, and as I've coached other planters, it's been life giving to me as well in that he was able to draw out of me what God had already placed in there, and at the time, I had lots of voices speaking in, and the last thing I needed was one more voice telling me what to do. What I needed was a voice to draw out what God had already told me to do.

Dino: Yeah, I always think about the book by Jimmy Dodd, Survive or Thrive, six relationships every pastor needs. So, there are voices that are critical to you, and it's not just the coaching voice, but the coaching voice complements all the other voices, Josh, because what you're being told by multiple people eventually you have to sort it out and make decisions, so that coaching voice is critical for that. Josh, what advice would you have for a church planter based on what you've seen? What do you think, what kind of voices do they need and how would you advise them?

Josh: Well, I think they need several voices. I mean, there's mentoring, there's just different avenues, there's podcasts, there's all kind of places that give advice, but I mean, as Jaime mentioned, everyone, every leader needs a good coach, and I think you say that all the time. Every leader needs a good coach to draw out, as Jaime mentioned, what God's already doing, and so I'm, I mean, I think that's key in church planting.

Dino: Very good. We need a shepherd of our soul. Well, we have in the show notes, we will have six coaching guides for peers, so if you want to coach, find a friend, and check the show notes and get the six coaching guides, and this'll get you started. They're nothing dramatic. They're just simple questions that you would ask through a coaching conversation. Have an hour meeting. Let your coach, coach you for 30 minutes. You coach him for 30 minutes, and see how God uses that to help you get clarity, to reflect, get some space, and get some accountability in your life. Josh and Jaime, it's a thrill to have both of you. It's been fun, and thank God for you. Number one, you were at number one, and so we're at number 101, and it's amazing to think about all that's happened over those years of working together. So, until next time, keep coaching.

Closing Remarks: You have been listening to the Coaching Podcast, a resource of the North American Mission Board. Are you a church planter in need of a coach? Visit namb.net/coaching to learn more.