How to Overcome Fear of Call Coaching
For some call centre agents, call coaching can have the negative effect of decreasing an agent's confidence by pointing out any number of areas for improvement or delivering feedback in an overly critical manner. This article is about how to overcome such fears about call coaching through restructuring the way you perceive call coaching feedback, amplifying positive emotions and embracing the value proposition of call centre call coaching.
If you are a call centre agent you may fear or even hate call coaching. Having someone point out your mistakes can sometimes be difficult to hear. But at the same time if you are closed and negative about call coaching that would be a shame as it is there to help agents be better. Call coaching is an opportunity to receive recognition for what you are doing well and accelerate your learning to improve your work performance. To fully benefit from call coaching feedback its best to try and overcome fears you may have about the process.
The first step to overcoming a fear of call coaching is to understand what fear is. Once you understand the physiological basis of fear, then you will be ready to combat its debilitating effects with a strategy of reframing thoughts and using positive emotions, so that you can fully embrace the value proposition of call coaching.
Fight-or-Flight
Fear arises from the perception of physical or emotional danger caused by some imagined experience or event. It is a natural emotional response that evolved as a key part of the body’s fight-or-flight system.
One of the ways we experience stress in our daily lives is when the body’s flight-or-flight system is activated by common fears such as fear of failure, fear of looking stupid, or fear of losing a job. To overcome a fear of call coaching, it is important to understand how fear and stress operate in the body, and what you can do to counteract those effects.
Imagine how it would feel to walk down an empty poorly lit street in a bad neighbourhood at night. It is dark, and out of the corner of your eye you see someone’s shadow move quickly behind you. All of a sudden you feel a pang of fear as your stomach drops and your heart rate and breathing speed up to pump blood and oxygen to your muscles so they are ready to run or to fight. You totally forget what you were just thinking about as your attention heightens and narrows to focus on the sights and sounds around you.
In this situation, there is a reasonable chance that your safety is in danger, and therefore the body’s immediate stress response would help save your life. However, a life-threatening situation is not the only time your fight-or-flight system is activated, and this type of response to call coaching feedback can stunt the professional development intended by call coaching.
Reframing
Fear and stress arise from a perceived threat, which means you can transform fear through your thoughts by reframing the situation. Reframing is a useful mental technique that has helped people heal from situations of extreme fear and stress such as grief, PTSD, and addiction as well as deal with more common challenges such as public speaking or performance evaluation.
Christine Padesky and Kathleen Mooney are cognitive therapists and authors of the book Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think. This technique can help you overcome your fear of call coaching by restructuring fear about performance evaluation and negative feedback.
Imagine a stressful time on the job or in your life when something happened that activated your fight-or-flight system (e.g. your boss said your work needs improvement). The first thing to do is calm your emotions. Negative emotions like fear and anger narrow attention and prepare you to fight or flee, so in order to begin, take some deep breaths, go for a walk outside or meditate before exploring the thoughts that caused you to become upset.
Once you are calm, the next step is to define the situation that triggered your mood (e.g. my boss criticized me) and analyze how you felt (humiliated, angry, insecure). A powerful way to learn about your unique triggers and the emotions and moods they elicit is to write them down in a journal.
Now that you have the basic facts of what happened, you are ready to address the thoughts that accompanied the stressful situation and negative feelings. Try to pinpoint your automatic thoughts or natural reaction to the stressful event. What were you thinking in the exact moment that your boss was criticizing you? Perhaps you thought, “She’s never liked me,” or “That’s not fair!” or “This ruins my chance for a promotion.”
In this stage you are like a detective piecing together evidence and reconstructing the possibilities of an event (e.g. negative call coaching feedback) to understand why you reacted the way you did and what other possible reactions could have occurred. First, try to find objective evidence that supports your automatic thoughts and write down or talk about specific details that led to those thoughts. Think about all the possible proof in support of why you would think negatively. Next, build a case against your automatic thoughts from objective contradictory evidence. For example, “My boss has invited me to lunch twice,” or “Three of my co-workers also received negative feedback or “She is trying to help me improve the quality of my calls.”
Finally, identify a fair and balanced version of what happened based on the evidence for and against your automatic thoughts.
Positive Emotions
Working with your thoughts is not the only way to overcome your fear of call coaching. Another evidenced based solution is to increase your experience of positive emotions. Since 1996, Professor Barbara Fredrickson has researched the evolutionary purpose of positive emotions. Her broaden-and build theory of positive emotions suggests that positive emotions such as gratitude, serenity, happiness and joy boost the body’s immune system and help to decrease the negative effects of stress and the fight-or-flight response. Positive emotions broaden the thought-action repertoire making it easier to be resilient and bounce back from negative experiences. Positive emotions also build character strengths, which make a person better equipped to respond to challenges on the job and generally in life.
By increasing the amount of positive emotions in your day, you can counteract the negative effects of fear and increase your capacity to bounce back from negative feedback. Two of the most well cited ways for increasing positive emotions are the gratitude letter and recalling three best things. To best serve your efforts to overcome a fear of call coaching, think about someone in your life who has helped you overcome a fear in the past. Perhaps it is a relative who helped you not be scared of the dark or a teacher who made all the difference in overcoming test anxiety. Sit down and take a few minutes to write them a letter thanking them for their help. Describe in detail what they did and how it helped you. Whether or not you send the letter, the important part is to project a feeling of gratitude for how this person helped you overcome your fear in the past.
A second way to increase positive emotion is to develop a practice of remembering the three best things about your day. You can use this technique to boost your confidence at work by acknowledging three positive things that happened during the day. This can also help you overcome your fear of call coaching. Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that we remember negative events more vividly and more frequently than positive ones, which can cause us to inaccurately characterize our experience with work and with call coaching as negative. Since we are more likely to forget about the positive and remember the negative, remembering the three best things about a call coaching session can have an immediate impact on the experience.
The Value Proposition of Coaching
Executives pay significant amounts of money for personalized coaching. Professional and amateur sports coaches earn six and seven figure salaries to develop athletes and inspire them to peak performance. The best and the brightest realize that critical feedback is required to learn, grow and perform optimally.
Call coaching is the opportunity to receive feedback about your performance on a call. It is information about what you did and didn’t do in that instance. It is NOT a commentary on character, innate ability or potential. The power to transform your fear comes from developing an ability to notice your thoughts and control your attention so that you perceive the feedback from coaches as information and opportunities rather than absolute truths and failures.
The ability to communicate effectively is an important skill for work and for life. Consider the possibility that coaches are not only helping you to become a better call centre employee, but their feedback is helping you generally improve communication skills such as negotiation and empathy that will benefit you in the long term.
Conclusion
Fear is a physiological response to a perceived threat that prepares the body to fight or to flee. A fear of call coaching can be overcome by restructuring the way coaching is perceived, amplifying counteractive positive emotions, and embracing the value proposition of receiving feedback.
References:
Greenberger, D., & Padesky, C. A. (1995). Mind over mood: A cognitive therapy treatment manual for clients. New York: Guilford Press.
MindTools.com. (2013). Cognitive Restructuring. [Online]. Available from: http://www.mindtools.com/full-URL.
Tugade, M.M, & Fredrickson, B.L. (2004). Resilient individuals use positive emotions to bounce back from negative emotional experiences. Journal or Personality and Social Psychology, 86(2).