Throughout the coaching process, the coach will use a variety of techniques and skills to help their client to achieve their goals – and enhance their learning, strengths and self-awareness. These techniques often include:
The coach will actively listen to the coachee, providing a safe and non-judgmental space for them to share their thoughts and feelings. Active listening is not how people listen to each other every day. Active listening is an evolved skill that involves the practice of preparing to listen, observing what verbal and non-verbal messages are being sent, a use of silence, and then providing appropriate feedback for, among other things, the sake of showing attentiveness to the message being presented. This unique form of listening helps to convey a mutual understanding between speaker and listener.
The coach will ask questions that help the coachee to explore their thoughts and feelings, identify patterns of behaviour, and gain insight into the underlying issues that may be preventing them from achieving their goals. Good coaches have a wide variety of effective and powerful questions at their disposal: open, leading, probing, clarifying, recall, funnelling, and even rhetorical. Closed questions (which promote only a yes or no answer) are rarely used. Each question is asked for a specific purpose and will move the coaching conversation towards achieving a particular objective.
The coach will help the coachee to reflect on their experiences and gain a deeper understanding of themselves and their behaviour. By reflecting on challenging experiences, the coachee gains a deeper understanding of them, helping to both process and learn from them. And reflecting on more positive experiences allows you to develop a greater sense of appreciation, and perhaps see ways of replicating them.
The coach will work with the coachee to create exciting, visionary, specific and measurable goals that will help them to achieve their desired outcome. Setting goals helps the coachee to maintain focus, develop new, positive habits, increase motivation and build a real sense of momentum in their life.
Coaching works at a deep level because it is helps the coachee to learn more about themselves, enhance their strengths, develop new skills and understand their thinking, feelings, motivation and behaviour. An experienced coach will ensure that the insights and learning gained during, and in between, coaching sessions, are capitalised on so that they become hardwired in the brain. This is how new thinking, beliefs and habits are embedded.
The coach will hold the coachee accountable for their actions and progress, providing support and a lot of encouragement along the way. Being held accountable teaches you to value your time and work, and can keep you from distracting or non-productive activities. Many coachees enjoy having coaching for this benefit alone!
The coach will provide bold feedback to the coachee about their progress, helping them to identify areas where they can improve and build on their strengths. Done properly and in a brain-friendly way, feedback increases self-awareness and confidence.
Coaching can be done in a variety of formats, including one-on-one sessions, group sessions, and virtual sessions. The frequency and duration of the coaching sessions will depend on the coachee’s goals and needs.
Coaching can be beneficial for individuals in a variety of settings, including personal development, professional development, and organisational development. In personal development, coaching can help individuals to improve their relationships, set and achieve personal goals, and overcome obstacles that may be preventing them from achieving their objectives in life. In professional development, coaching can help executives and leaders to improve their performance, develop new skills, and advance their careers. In organisational development, coaching can help teams to improve their performance, develop new skills, and achieve the organisation’s goals.
