500 Words a Week - Lessons from Life Coaching

During the week I had my first day on a life coaching course. The course aims to introduce the necessary skills needed to be a life or executive coach. Many of the skills discussed are something that expands beyond just coaching, below are some highlighted.

Advice Giving

I’ve wrote before about our advice monster. We can be guilty of finding ourselves always drawn into an advice-giving habit. Someone comes to us with a problem, and we think we’ve got it solved, we’ve got the perfect advice. Yet, we really didn’t listen or truly clarify what the person’s true goals were before we bombarded them with advice. We didn’t look to gain any context, we didn’t look to establish what they’ve tried before.

Our Questioning Style

The way we ask questions can determine how a conversation will go. If we ask closed questions, questions that take a short yes or no response, we can’t expect a very detailed conversation. If we ask why questions, people might feel defensive. Rather, if we look to ask open questions (how, when, what), and be patient in waiting for an answer, we allow the conversation to develop. We allow the person to voice their thoughts and explore their train of thought, and their true feelings.

Assuming Resourcefulness

A key concept within coaching is the assumption that the coachee is resourceful. That they have the answers to whatever bothers them, they just need help in getting to the answer. How often do we rob people of the opportunity to figure things out for themselves. How often do jump to conclusions and as above, begin rattling out advice without exploring options or ways forward the person we are talking too might come up with. When we give advice, we rob the person of their sense of agency. We are saying that they can’t figure it out for themselves.

Listening

Too often, rather than listening to the conversation, we find ourselves in our head trying to formulate our next response. When we aren’t thinking about what we are supposed to say next, we allow ourselves space to be present and listen to what the person we are talking to is saying. We are allowing ourselves to be in the moment, enabling us to actually understand what the person we are talking to is saying.

Control

Coaching focuses us to look to aspects of our life we can truly control. As written about before, around the topic of circles of control. By focusing on what we can control, we feel more agency over lives. Coaching also involves challenge, challenge when perhaps we get stuck or bogged down on focusing on elements, we have no control over.

We begin to see that all the above are linked, and centring around showing a form of patience, in holding our advice back, in allowing us to understand the person more and the context in which they are coming from.

Ultimately coaching encourages us to be more in tune with our compassion and empathy.