Tag Archives: attraction

7 ways to be amazing as a coach

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this-is-only-potential

How do you know you are doing a good job when you are coaching?

This can be a sense or feeling that you get from the responses shown to you by the client.

It could be feedback that you have actively sought from the client in how they have benefited from being coached by you or you may have a variety of ways to ascertain the value you have added to the clients experience and in their life.

I thought today I would share with you 7 ways to be an amazing coach. This is directly from my own experience and I have found these extremely useful in my career

1. Learn your skill

This may sound very obvious but I believe that coaching should be an eloquent, creative expression of who you are through what you do.

This will mean learning the fundaments of coaching in its original form and the subsequent evolution and varied models, applications and theoretical knowledge of coaching. There is also no replacement for practicing what you learn. A life coach-training course will put you in a good position for this first point. Life coaching is not just about setting goals, not giving advice and there are definite cross overs between coaching and counselling.

2. Practice

Again this may sound a little grandma suck eggs! I don’t however mean just in the confines of the coaching session.

I mean to have coaching conversations with people you meet in your daily interactions, this can greatly enhance communication, and people will feel valued and listened to.

Do not have a set outcome from the conversation (unless you desire that) but merely create a shift in how you may have been communicating. This will hone your skill, create an observational quality to how you do what you do and what can stay and what can be changed or adapted.

3. Have a beginners mind

With the massive array of personal development opportunities available in todays society you may come to coaching with a rich plethora of knowledge and experience in moving forward in your own life and helping others.

I would advocate keeping an open mind with anything you learn, adapt what you learn if needs be, take what you want and leave what you don’t and don’t be an expert in the client’s life – they are. You are a facilitator of transformation not the creator and owner of it.

4. Be ok with your own vulnerabilities – be real

You have got to where you are in life through your life experience and knowledge. This does not need to be hidden away in any place that shame can manifest and grow but has uniquely shaped who you are and what you bring to a session.

Through this sense of being real, fallible and authentic you can have a wondrous sense of connection with those that you coach. You don’t need to reveal what you have done or overcome but it will be felt on an intuitive level.

5. Take risks

Through the act of taking risks comes creation, opportunity, growth and movement.

When you embark upon a new venture in your life is the outcome always certain or set in stone?

Do you feel a fear that is present from this dynamic of not knowing? This may be the case but I would say that in order to move forward both with your own life and also client practice you need to jump in and try new things, be open to getting it wrong and being aware of any self depreciating messages that arise in the form of unwanted voices that may tell you that you are not good enough to do this or the job at hand.

6. Be on top of your own learning

How many people do you know that have been on a course where the emotional connection has been real whilst they are in the training room but may be lost in the day to day slug of life afterwards?

A question. How many self-developments books do you own at home that have remained dusty on the shelf?

Learning is an ongoing state whether that be text book learning or through our own life experience.

I strongly advise that you read books (from beginning to end) on coaching, attend inspirational seminars, watch videos and practice. You need to keep on top of developments within the coaching world.  Also prescribe to magazines and coaching journals that will be able to help you in this field.

7. Get support

I do not agree that we need to be a shining example of guru status to be a coach. I believe that we need to be real and this will mean that at times we will also have down days, black clouds and periods of time that we need to get our own support. Whether that be a good talk with a friend over coffee or a more therapeutic intervention that will give us grounding and help us through these periods, I see it is essential to reach out when you need to and in the direction of the right people and places.

Do what you need to do to be amazing.

 

Try and test out in coaching

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When we work with clients regardless of what we are helping them with there will come a time that a lot has been talked about, problems openly shared and a clarity gained on where the client is at in terms of their life goals and what they want from working with you.

First and foremost we need to let the client have the space to discuss what they need to, what is pertinent to them and allow them to talk without needing to change the story or situation.

The nature of this is useful for the client to felt understood, acknowledged and heard.

We then as coaches might need to bring the client back to why they came to coaching in the first place, to keep them on track with what they wanted to change, achieve or create.  Of course as transformational coaches we know that goals shift and more can be revealed during the coaching session.  We also need to be flexible with this happening.

We can then start to help the client move forward towards achievement of what they want for themselves.

This could be in a goal setting approach that brings about actions or a more fluid coaching conversation that creates awareness and more clarity for the client.

Whichever route we take with clients and however we are coaching an important part of the change process is starting to discuss what things would be like or could be like once they have improved or changed.

How will they know things are different? Is it the way they talk to themselves, the impact of this change on others and their relationships and what is the measurement of difference?

The key here is to bring in ownership from the client in how they manage the change, what would be a more resourceful way to be living and the impact in doing things differently.

There can also be an element of testing it out.

You may resonate with the idea that just talking about it isn’t going to change it. Coaching will quite often bring a new clarity into place and sometimes a light bulb moment shows it self within the session. The realization from the client in how they have been living.

When I coach I also want the client to learn from this new awareness and test things out for themselves.

As you may have heard if you always do what you have always done you will always get what you have always got.

In order to get different results you need to do things differently.

The wonder of coaching is that these differences in thinking, actions, and behaviour can then be visited in subsequent sessions with your client to find out what has changed for them? What have they learnt from this and how can this be built upon as a resource to accomplish more of what they want?

The client needs to be at the centre of his or her own development and learning.  Future posts will look at this as key concept to working holistically with clients.

For now don’t be afraid for the client to take responsibility and ownership of their goals and desires.

Parental messages in coaching

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I was thinking today how people live their lives and the way they do this is quite often based upon the messages that they would have received from parenting.

Within coaching sessions these messages come out in the way that people can self-sabotage what they set out to do and achieve.

This is quite often subconscious and automatic and through coaching we can help people understand in what ways they could be doing this, where this comes from and importantly help them to move forward from some of these self defeating patterns.

A very interesting part of transformational coaching is looking at the realms of Transactional Analysis.

Many people will know the book the games people play by Eric Berne, which brought the idea of TA to the modern world.

Within one part of TA it looks at the idea of injunctions.

What are these?

Simply put they are messages that we will pick up on as children, which are also communicated non-verbally from our parents.

They are unconscious and felt rather than verbalised and conscious. These can be very powerful and also the way we live our lives as adults can also be based on these early messages.

There are in total 12 injunctions that create a way of living.

  1. Don’t be or don’t exist
  2. Don’t be you
  3. Don’t be a child
  4. Don’t grow up
  5. Don’t make it
  6. Don’t (Don’t do anything)
  7. Don’t be important
  8. Don’t belong
  9. Don’t be close
  10. Don’t be well or don’t be sane
  11. Don’t think
  12. Don’t feel

You may be able to think about some of your own life situations that the above could apply to. This will be no different for clients who come to you as their coach looking for change.

Through coaching conversations within sessions and with clients you as the coach will pick up many of these themes.

This can provide a great place for exploration with your client. You can also be very open with these concepts with clients and ask them how they could be living their lives based on some of the above injunctions.

This is not to say that the client will not have other areas to work on but using the list above can give a real insight into their world and how they could be limiting their potential and actually living their lives based on old patterns and messages from parenting.

TA provides a fascinating area for exploration with clients and can also bring about a huge awareness for them.

In future posts I will share more in these areas.

The next time you find yourself falling into a pattern is it possible that you are tapping into one of these injunctions?

 

The Law of Action in coaching

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I was thinking today how being a spiritual person can fit into life coaching. I have a number of ideas and I would like to share them with you.

First of all what is “being spiritual”

We all have different versions of this and of course yours may be different to mine.

Some believe it is about having trust in a higher energy, the connection with that energy and being able to utilize this for the better good. For some it could mean being active in their spirituality by meditating, doing yoga, working with other complementary concerns, reiki healing, crystals, gongs and other approaches.

For me when I look at what I see is a spiritual person I see a wholeness that can exude from them, a sense of understanding their place in the world, maybe having a higher purpose and being ok with that.

The danger as I see it with spirituality is that it can also be an avoidance strategy that people turn too that makes them feel better or avoid taking responsibility for their lives.

The law of attraction is in play as I write and as I sit and think about what I want it will come to me. I agree that we need to start from a place of knowing what we want and allowing that to take on board a sense of reality for us, to make this come alive and take shape.

I would then ask

Is this enough?

From experience I see how time and again people wont put action into getting what they want and then become frustrated with the end result or not getting results.

I do agree in putting it out to the universe to say what we want and believing in a universal energy to fuel that want.

I also believe in action, accountability and creating shifts in awareness that the universe doesn’t know about.

In fact we may not know about it either.

Within a transformational coaching session these desires can start to surface, blocks of potential may be removed and accountable actions built in to client interactions that a process of questioning has brought about.

The power here is that people don’t do this by themselves. The end result for the client is one of more clarity, purpose, awareness and direction. If you are coaching someone who believes in the Law of Attraction and all things spiritual it wont be your job to challenge this (unless it is useful!)

You would want to work with them and create goals and shifts based on their model of the world. What they are seeing is true and working with that in creative ways.

There may be times that challenge is entirely appropriate for the coaching session and that through this approach the client can go away with more clarity and also a wow moment that they might say

I can’t believe that’s how I have been living my life!We don’t know what we know until we know it.

This is true of most things and whether you choose to live by the Law of Attraction or the Law of Action I’m ok with that.

I would ask you could you work with both to get what you want?