Coaching: The 7 Skills You Really Need

Coaches need to take the time and to use the opportunity to identify what is truly important to our clients. This segment provides a process with supporting material that helps you to generate clarity about their core values. This can be adapted to use with a team, or to focus on a business as if it were a person. 

If you can, it would be great if you can find a buddy to work with on this segment. I describe a listening activity that you can try for yourself. It shows exactly what happens when we fail to really engage with what another person is trying to communicate to us. Listening is also related to the way we handle feedback: typically we are closed to both praise and criticism. I will explain more in the video, and you can use the principles to learn how to remain open minded and engaged. 

There are two handouts to support this lecture - one is a self assessment on active listening, and the other covers the principles of openness to feedback. 

Great coaching conversations don't just go in circles. They move to a conclusion, and along the way they might successfully open up new understanding and insights into whatever the issue might be. In this video I share a number of examples of how we might use frameworks to achieve these outcomes, and provide handouts that you can refer to for three of these. 

Learn how to use a guiding framework for the conversation itself, so that you move things through a logical process. Think about using a 360 degree feedback exercise to decide what to develop. And/or use my guiding framework on Comfort Zones v. Authentic Growth. I share common needs like prioritising, and communication styles. 

There are many others - don't worry, I intend to make an entire course where I share as many of the frameworks that I've found useful in coaching as I can. Watch this space! 

Asking great questions is at the heart of effective coaching. So what do we need to establish before any client will trust us enough to regard those questions as helpful and positive? What kind of questions are then useful in opening up new exploration and ideas? How did the GROW framework emerge?  Wouldn't all this be great to learn? :) 

I also share some surprising tips for asking great questions in ways that produce insightful outcomes, including the most powerful, two word question in the coach's playbook. Finally, I share the most effective question to ask at the end of a coaching conversation. 

We coaches love to help. And our clients want someone to solve their problems for them. And here's our challenge: when we step in to "help" we disempower our client. Is there a way to resist the pressure to tell them what to do, or to do it for them? Absolutely. Learn how in this video. 

Without nailing down decisions and without genuine commitment to action, nothing will come out of our conversations, no matter how great they seemed at the time. How can coaches help our clients to turn their new insights and ideas into valuable outcomes that actually make a difference?