How to Coach Successfully

To coach successfully, a Professional Coach must build a trusting relationship with the client and assist them on their journey of personal discovery.

Listening: In coaching, listening is more important than talking. By listening, people can be helped to overcome their fears, offered complete objectivity, given undivided attention and unparalleled support. This leads to the intuitive questioning that allows the client to explore what is going on for them.

Communication skills: Coaching is a two-way process. While listening is crucial, so is being able to interpret and reflect back in ways that remove barriers, pre-conceptions, bias and negativity. Communicating well enables trust and meaningful understanding on both sides. Good coaching uses communication not to give the client the answers but to help clients find their own answers – the ones that are right for them!

Rapport-building: A coach’s ability to build rapport is vital. This ability stems from a desire to help people, which all coaches tend to possess. Rapport-building is made far easier in coaching compared with other services because the coach’s only focus is on the client. When a Coach supports a person in this way it quite naturally accelerates the rapport-building process.

Curiosity, flexibility and courage: Coaching patterns vary; people’s needs are different; circumstances and timings are unpredictable. Therefore coaching relationships do not follow a single-set formula. Remembering that everyone is different and has different needs is an essential part of being a coach. Ultimately everyone is human so coaches take human emotions and feelings into account. The coach’s curiosity enables the client’s journey to be full and far- reaching. Both Coach and client are often surprised at how expectations are exceeded and how much people grow.

All of this does take courage! Coaches generally have a strong belief in themselves, a strong determination to do the best they can for their clients and a belief or faith that inherently people are capable of reaching goals themselves, given the right level of assistance and support.