When it comes to coaching, there are a whole bunch of skills one should have. The most important things to do are:
Listen and support, listen and support, listen and support.
Without these skills, there is no coaching, because they are the skills that give you the key elements you will need to ask the right questions during a coaching session.
Why Being A Good Listener Isn’t Always Easy
You might think you’re a good listener, or that you know how to support people. However, just like a lot of people who come to us to be trained, you will find out that there are a lot of ways in each skill that you might not know about.
When it comes to listening, how much silence do you leave for the person speaking? How much clarity are you getting from the other person’s words? Are you tracking the conversation? Are you mirroring your client’s body language? While all the time maintaining eye contact and giving enough room for the client to talk?
There are a dozen or more behaviors within listening and supporting. Effective coaching is all about allowing the client to talk; the coach only does 30 to 40% of the talking.
There’s a benchmark sheet we use with scores on it, from 0 to 3.5. When a coach is benchmarking someone, he’s listening and watching the behaviors that the person does to be able to score the person. If the person is leaving silences, maintaining eye contact and talking 30% of the time, they get a score around 3.5. This score is actually extremely high and pretty rare for newcomers. Most people in their first benchmarking end up scoring between 1 and 2.
About Listening
Listening is the ability to receive what a person is saying to you and then be able to feedback to them accurately. It’s the client saying something, and you, as the coach, creating a model of what they said, understanding what they said, and feeding it back to them.
One way that could help with listening is tracking the conversation. This demonstrates a high level of listening and helps the person to know where they started and where they’re going.
Listening is very important, because if you’re not doing it right, it’s going to have a big impact on your ability to support the person you’re having the conversation with.
One of the mistakes some people might make is trying to figure out what they’re going to say next. If you’re spending your time thinking about that, it will be like having 2 conversations at once.
Coaching Is About Changing The World
For a lot of people, coaching is all about making a difference and helping free their fellow human beings from suffering. It’s a way for them to change the world one person at a time.
Generally speaking, when it comes to life coaching and executive coaching, the core skills are the same but the target market is different.
It just comes down to when you want to help people, which people do you want to help the most?
The 7 Skills You Need To Be A Good Coach
When it comes to coaching, the key word is to relax. Don’t try to focus on what you do not understand. Don’t focus on anything other than the client. If you make the other person the most valuable thing in the interaction, you’re going to be effectively listening to them.
There are seven core skills you need to develop: Supporting, listening, questioning, meta-questioning (exploring the depths of a person’s psychology), inducing states (if a client is coming to you it’s because they’re in one state now and want to change it), giving feedback, and finally, receiving feedback.
Coaching And NLP
What we’re talking about here is a coach training system, while NLP is a methodology that teaches people how to develop some of those skills that a coach needs. NLP is one of the most effective methodologies teaching you how to use those skills in a powerful way.
For those who want to be coaches, think about this: when it comes to effective relationships and communication, the first two skills are the most important. If you’ve been supporting someone, they will feel comfortable with you, and if you want to figure out the most powerful questions you’re going to ask the other person, listen.
Ask yourself: does this person feel supported by me? And do I make this person important enough to listen to everything they have to say before responding?
Click Here To Get Your Free 8 Video Course Preview
