Product reviews for The Five-Minute Coach

Excellent! Another book I wish I'd written!

If you want step-by-step instructions for using Clean Language in a business coaching context, this is the book for you -” whether your role officially includes coaching or not. 

The Five-Minute Coach`model emerged from years of real-world, practical experience.

Lynne Cooper and Mariette Castellino have taught hundreds of people to use their model over the years -” and it shows. The book is full of practical examples, and session transcripts set in the office life you may know and-¦ well, choose your own preference .

I escaped from office life a good few years ago, and I never had coaching as a formal part of my role. But I can still imagine how useful this book would have been to me -” when I was a managing a team for the first time; when I started handling larger “performance issues”; when I was doing staff appraisals and follow-ups; when I was managing my boss.

It would have made my life so much easier -” people would have taken more responsibility for their own work and we'd have all got much more work done.
(By the way, did I ever tell the story of how I had to carry out staff appraisals in Santa's Grotto? But that's another story.)

Lynne and Mariette have written a straightforward how-to guide: clear, practical, effective.

Of course, the book is not for everyone. If you're the kind of person who likes to take a more free-form approach, you might well be annoyed by the relative rigidity of the structure. You might also feel that it misses one of the most valuable parts of Clean Language -” the wealth of insight that comes from experiencing your metaphoric landscape in a waking trance.

But for most, I think it will work well -” not least because the Five-Minute Coach model gives you something to vary from.