The Three Things You MUST Do In Order To Be A GREAT Coach!

Hi!

Whether you are thinking about moving into a career as a coach, or you already are a coach, it is always good to come back to and touch base with the basics. I have put together a list of what I consider to be the three things you MUST continue to do, day-in and day-out in your coaching work, in order to ensure your continuing success as an incredibly insightful and transformational coach.

 1)     You HAVE to ensure that your clients feel safe and supported at all times. I cannot stress this enough - this is such an important component of your role as a coach. You have to remember that it can often take a lot of courage and willpower for your clients to admit that they need some help in the first place and they can often be feeling quite scared and confronted when they first come to work with you. If you are successful in ensuring that your clients feel safe and supported in your coaching sessions with them, they will MUCH more readily open up to you and speak the truth of what is really going on for them. You will find that you are then able to take your clients much more deeply within themselves to explore (and ultimately understand) quite confronting and challenging aspects of their personality that have been holding them back from achieving their goals. This not only serves your clients (because they get results), but it also ensures that your reputation as a coach who gets results for their clients continues to grow!

So how do you go about making your clients feel safe and supported? Well, you can consciously use things like the tone and the pitch of your voice, your body language, the way you use your posture (warm and open instead of cold and closed down) and the way you give them space at the start of the coaching session to 'download' to you etc. etc. All of these things come into play to really help make your clients feel safe. However, the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do make your clients feel safe is to be PRESENT and 'in the moment' with them - which brings me to point #2.

 2)     You MUST develop and hone your Observing Awareness - which is your own internal compass of how you are acting/operating/reacting/feeling in each and every moment. Why is this so important? In order to make your clients feel safe and for them to be able to trust you and open up to you, they need to know (and more importantly feel) that you are really present with them and ready and able to support them as they are exploring potentially deeply confronting and emotionally charged patterns. What can happen in coaching sessions (if you are not aware of what is going on internally for you) is that you can be triggered by what your client is exploring and this can cause you to 'drop out' of the present moment and go inwards as you are automatically processing what you have been triggered by. By being aware of this and staying in your observer, you are able to see and acknowledge that you have been triggered - but you can consciously choose to remain present for your client and come back to processing what you have been triggered by a later (and more appropriate) time.

 3)     You MUST continue to do your own good quality inner work. As a coach, if you want to be hugely successful at what you do and if you want to be giving your clients maximum impact in terms of your ability to help them see and understand what is going on for them, you have to (and I cannot stress it enough), you have to always be doing your own inner work. If you haven't observed, owned and worked with a pattern within yourself and come to that place of acceptance and understanding around this pattern, you will much more likely be triggered if this patterns turns up in a coaching session within your client. If you are triggered and you drop out of the present moment and move away from being present with your client - then this is not serving them. The more inner work you do on yourself, the more your client will really see and feel that you are the best person to be supporting them on their transformational journey. Coming back to my first point, they will feel much safer working with you because they can really tell that you have worked on this particular pattern within yourself and that you understand first hand what they are going through.

To your legacy,

Josh Stone