Coaching Skills

Coaching Skills Base
Attending our courses will give you a very wide coaching skills base to work from. These skills will be both theoretical and practical. You will understand the different approaches to coaching and when it is best to apply each to help you client move forwards quickly.

However, other skills need to be mastered as well. These are your unswerving self-belief and self-confidence in your ability to be a brilliant coach and to question your clients to get the results they require.

The main qualities of a great coach;
• You want to make a significant and positive difference to other people’s lives
• You are able to practice active amd puposeful listening
• You are good at empathising with the situations of others
• You understand that you don’t always need to know the answer to someone’s problems
• You are able to not judge people
• You are interested in the variety of humanity and curious about ‘what makes people tick’
• You able to give 'tough love' and challenge someone when they need a ‘push’ to motivate them
• You are observant of body language, voice and words spoken
• You are positive about yourself and others to help them reach their potential
• You are willing to learn how to communicate clearly and effectively
• You are an honest and ethically mined person who will stay within professional guidelines

After this course you will be able to;

• Ask not tell
• Empower others through self-learning not leading by instruction
• Give people the opportunity to learn decision making skills and the self-belief to use initiative and challenge themselves further
• Be able to find what motivates the individual coachee or a whole team
• Allow others to feel they are being listened to and respected for what they have to say
• You will be the catalyst that allows a coachee to reach personal goals by identifying and destroying obstacles to success
• Give people the chance to develop skills that will allow them to defuse both inner and external conflicts.

These lists are by no means exhaustive and coaching demands that a person is determined to learn, develop and grow. Which is why coaching provides the perfect setting for you to draw from your inner well of knowledge you have engendered during your lifetime.

Coaching has an incredibly positive effect on people hence coaches are often drawn by their innate desire to help people reach their goals. All forms of coaching requires intent listening to all the words said by a client/coachee as they provide lots of subtle signs and ‘hidden’ messages that allows the coach to understand fully what is happening for the coachee. A coach needs to be able to 'see' the world from the client’s point of view, in effect using the client’s map of the world, not the coaches own. Therefore coaching demands that you ignore any of your own beliefs allowing the client/coachee to explore their world and values to obtain their own answer. Thankfully this means coaches do not need have to be ‘right’ solution to their problems.

Self-belief and confidence
One of the initial slides for the first presentation of the course is titled ‘You are being coached’. It is our firm belief that for you to be able to ‘walk your talk’, you need to experience personal coaching yourself. During the course you will be coached throughout as a group but will also undergo several 1-2-1 sessions with a faculty member and a ‘peer buddy’. This process allows you develop your self-belief and confidence as a coach. Many students actually employ an external coach to help them through the course! What better experience can there be?

Coaching is not about giving advice or solutions to your client. It is about helping them discovering their own answers. Many coaching students find this a difficult challenge to master – we all like to give advice and ‘nurture’ people along. To counteract this; the CILC courses are very experiential and involve significant practice time to test out you growing techniques in pair or group of 3 people.

One thing that helps students overcome the ‘I must give advice’ instinct is the asking of the right type of questions. Questions are very powerful and if you want people to think, then ask them a question. Not just any question but well thought out probing and insight provoking ones. This allows your client to discover their answers, become motivated to take action.

Coaching is all about asking the right questions so it obvious that you need to have an enquiring mind. Through questions a coach is able to challenge the coachee in various ways to develop clarity of objectives, be honest to themselves and create a focus on the present and the tasks ahead. With practice a good coach will detect the any signs of ambiguity, inconsistency or flagging commitment. However; they can see the flash of discovery, the moment the ‘light bulb goes on’ that turns on the client’s motivation.
Once you become a confident questioner of people you will be able to coach just about any one regardless of their occupation or situation. You do not need to be an expert in what they do or how they feel but one in how to get them from where they are to the goal they desire.

Coaching is about personal empowerment, this means the coachee has to be inspired by your unswerving belief in their ability to reach their full potential.

Being able to communication at many levels, (voice, expression, body language, etc.), is utterly vital for good coaching, so your ability to do this is essential. All coaches must study, learn and understand the power of open communication, (with no hidden agendas), being built on honesty and integrity.