This is the first of 3 blogs that may help you with improving your business, focusing on a better future and giving you an optimistic outlook. If you like these you may want to subscribe by visiting our website.
 
Are you ready for change as change is inevitable? 
 
We are living in uncertain times. Having just climbed out of one recession, have you put any strategies in place to protect yourself if and when we fall back into another? We know that the economy continually goes round in circles, it goes up and it goes down. Currently, I have never read so many stories of ADIs doing well with full diaries and working too hard. When it's good we suffer from work / life balance and when it's bad we just struggle.
 
A way of protecting yourself is to develop a unique selling point (USP) that helps you stand out from the crowd. This can be difficult to find in an industry where we are all equal by just holding the green badge. The DVSA have thoughts about creating a hierarchy of ADIs through 'earned recognition' and this very thought may send you running to social media to protest and voice your opinion shouting loudly 'how dare they?' The DVSA  are responsible for the standards of ADIs that are held on the Register and the DVSA believe the general public should be informed of those standards. You can see this already happening on the www.gov.uk website when you look for the 'find your nearest driving instructor'. 

A starting place to find your own personal USP is to look at what sets you apart from your fellow ADIs. Below is a list of points that you may want to look at with regard to your competition:
 
Price (remember this is not about being the cheapest - it's about giving value for money - you could even be the most expensive)
Quality
Range of Products and Services
Website
Ease of booking
Speed of delivery
Reliability
Qualifications
Grade
Availability
 
 
You may want to add more to this list. 
 
So start comparing yourself to the competition and find out what sets you apart. Create your own unique selling points because at the end of the day we are in business.

We like to keep you up to date at Tri Coaching Partnership and want to share with you some findings from a recent report on the Road User Education (RUE) project, the main aims of which are: 
 
1. To motivate and support drivers to reflect and learn throughout their life.
 
2. To improve the effectiveness of the way drivers learn.
 
If we look at ourselves, the system of driver training has a heavy focus on driver testing, whereas the RUE project has its emphasis on Education and Training as the number 1 objective.
 
The current DVSA National Standards have been influenced by the Goals for Driver Education model which has 4 main levels (there is a 5th) covering these factors:
 
Level 1 - Basic Vehicle Control
Level 2 - Mastery of Traffic situations
 
These 2 levels are generally all that is needed to pass our current driving test but are not sufficient to prepare a new driver for a life long journey of learning. The next 2 levels have far more influence on post-test driving and they are:
 
Level 3 - Journey Planning
Level 4 - Personal Characteristics
 
Although, we know our driving test is evolving, it is difficult to measure these final 2 levels.
 
All 4 levels of the GDE consider these factors :
 
Knowledge and Skills
Risk Increasing factors
Self Evaluation
 
Our flagship course - the BTEC Level 4 in Coaching for Driver Development - helps you develop self-evaluation skills in new drivers. Coaching and Client-Centred Learning is the way forward for our industry.
 
Some of the essential ingredients of coaching - that you must be able to know and understand - are listed below and have been taken from the the Road User Education project:
 
 

1. Work with the learner to understand and clarify how their learning goals change and develop over time
2. Listen to what the learner is telling you about their preferred way of learning and the things that are getting in the way of effective learning
3. Work with the learner to develop strategies for overcoming obstacles to learning. Watch and listen for attitudes or behaviour, about which the learner may be unconscious, which are dysfunctional in relation to safe and responsible driving. 
4. Work with the learner to develop appropriate strategies for mitigating the impact of those attitudes or behaviour 
5. Support the learner to take active responsibility for their learning process from the earliest opportunity 
6. Encourage and support the learner to develop a reflective approach to their learning and their driving 
7. Actively transfer the balance of responsibility for the learning process to the learner as soon as they are ready to take it, without forgetting that they have an ultimate duty of care in the learning process 
8. Work with the learner to agree when they are ready to undertake formal assessment of their driving competence
9. Help the learner to reflect on the experience of formal assessment and, if they have failed, identify strategies for overcoming any problems or weaknesses that were identified 

You must be able to know and understand:

1. that being client-centred does not mean letting the learner make all the decisions
2. that the teacher still brings essential expertise and experience to the learning process 
3. how to listen effectively
4. how to use a range of client-centred techniques to help the learner identify and overcome barriers to the achievement of their learning goals
5. how to use a range of client-centred techniques to support the transfer of ownership of the learning process to the learner
6. the impact of their own willingness to transfer ownership of the learning
7. how to use verbal and non-verbal clues to identify when the learner is switching off or not fully engaged in the learning process
8. that the decisions that we all make are constrained and shaped by a variety of influences, including our skill and knowledge, our personal confidence to act, the opinions and attitudes of our friends, colleagues, peers, learners and the values and norms which operate in the wider society (our life space) 
9. that any of these factors can have a direct impact on the decisions we make when we are learning to drive and when we drive unaccompanied
10. that adolescents are going through a key formative stage in the development of their personal identity and their cognitive functioning and the habits they establish in learning to drive may be significant in the rest of their lives
11. that adolescents are generally just as aware of risk, just as rational in their information processing and just as risk-averse as adults, but are also subject to a number of psychological, interpersonal/contextual and biological factors which mean that they are more likely to behave in risky ways despite their understanding of that risk 
12. that, for adolescents, being told that they have ‘failed’ can prompt them to regress into a defensive or reactive mode of behaviour - that there is little evidence that educational interventions moderate risky behaviour in young people
13. that a person’s attitudes are the product of a mix of emotional, cognitive and behavioural factors and can vary in polarity, salience, moderation and in the degree to which they are implicit or accessible
14. that the mix of those factors can change from moment to moment and over time
15. that if we are to bring about sustained and robust changes in the attitudes of individuals, we need to encourage them to engage actively with the issues 
16. that learners will disengage if we attempt to teach them one thing and demonstrate something else in our own behaviour.

 
This is just a small section of the report on the RUE project. If you feel like you are going to be left behind we will help you discover new skills and develop your existing skills.
 
 
So many of our clients find that our Tri Coaching Partnership BTEC Level 4 Professional Award in Coaching for Driver development has helped them unlock their potential.
Below are some recent comments from ADIs attending the course.




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Linda Western'Many thanks to Graham Hooper, Sue McCormack, Di, and Sara for all ur help and support. Many thanks also to Lisa Vincent, Brian Munn, and Claire Fry for all their valuable input and knowledge,it's great to see and hear other people's opinions and working methods as we can always learn from them. It's so interesting seeing things that you struggle with, dealt with so easily by others. It gets you to think about things in a different way which allows, the seemingly impossible to be easy.
We had a lot of laughs along the way as Sue and Graham make the classroom session relaxed and fun, and as we all know that is when u learn best.
Both are always at the end of the phone or email to give u every support and advice to guide you, when you get to that. I wish I had done the assignment earlier stage.
Many Thanks to all.
Now I must get on with the assignment'

 Brian Munn 

'Likewise, thanks to you all for being so supportive and, well, nice! It was lovely to be in the company of such like-minded people. I've found it very challenging but incredibly rewarding. It has reinvigorated me and I now enjoy my job so much more.'
 
 
Due to logistical difficulties we are sad to say that our BTEC 4 course starting in July will probably be our last in Glasgow, so if you live in the North of England or Scotland we will help you spread the cost of your payments.
For more information on all of our courses head to our website.
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