“The goal of coaching is the goal of good management: to make the most of an organization’s valuable resources.” HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
You are your most valuable resource.
Most of the time when you are setting out as a coach, unless you are an internal coach (working as a coach in a paid position in an organization) you may be the only member on your team. Even if you do work in an organization, it’s still in the interest of both the organization, and your own development as a professional coach, to focus on what coaching can offer you.
Fitting together why YOU want to be a coach & having your own coach.
You’ll have your own sets of reasons & visions around becoming a professional life coach. So, how does having your own coach fit into one of the biggest things to consider making your training more effective?
Once you know why you want to become a coach, and have made the commitment to the training, it’s important to follow through on that commitment. To be able to walk your talk.
Walking your talk & being able to quantify from experience how coaching is valuable.
It’s much more powerful when you’ve been and are being coached yourself to be able to then understand & work on your own coaching practices. It means you have the benefit of being able to understand both sides of the relationship, being coached & coaching.
Understanding both and the feelings raised on both sides, can help you increase your effectiveness as a coach, as it helps you empathize with the systems you need to put in place for the trust of the coaching relationship.
It’s also powerful to be able to talk about how your coaching influenced your decision to coach, if this is a factor to you. I know I always refer back to my own early coaching as one of the foundation stone decisions about why I knew coaching would be right for me, and how I know it brings real lasting benefits. Because I have seen it in action & can say with certainty where it works, and continues to work for me.
I remember when I was setting out both in my coach training & in the early days of becoming a professional coach, and trying to get my head around why it was such a good idea to invest in a coach when actually I wasn’t really making any money. And I realized that at the heart of it was this key factor of walking my talk & investing in myself as a valuable commodity.
If I am my most valuable resource, and method number one I have chosen to invest my resources in is my coach training, then it stands to be common sense that I want to make the most of that opportunity of training, doesn’t it? And that means recognizing actions that will further support that initial investment you have made in your coach training.
One element of that will be your time. Another more important element in terms of getting the most of your training, is consolidating & strengthening your commitment to the skills set you are in the process of learning.
Case study: Where being coached as a coach can make a difference:
My client, lets call her Anna for the sake of this article, had come to me having just completed a certificate level in coaching. This meant she’d worked on some of the theory & had just committed her time & a small financial investment into becoming a coach with a more practically based Diploma Certificate.
Coaching gave Anna a benefit over and above what she would have gained if she’d been working on her own without support:
It gave the benefit of experiences & resources:
As a coach who works specifically with newer coaches, I was able to share some of the tips & resources I had found useful in the same period. This was information which was not available to other students that Anna was learning with.
It gave the benefit of discussion of assignments & action planning:
Coaching became a space where it was safe to talk about what was going well on the course, about frustrations, and about fears. From bringing in issues all the way through from the amount of time required to complete the course successfully, to getting over feeling stuck towards the end of the course, we were able to keep Anna feeling focused and on track.
It gave the benefit of space:
This isn’t to be over-estimated - time and again I hear one of the benefits to working with a coach when you are in coach training about being able to…pause. Stop. If necessary, to re-evaluate where you re, the progress which is being made and where you should go next for the most benefit. Sometimes this was in the form of a formal review, and sometimes it was as simple as recognizing the words & tone used to identify how busy Anna was feeling, and in raising this to awareness to help her feel more able to choose strategies which would feel valuable & easy.
Co-coach or paid professional coach?
Personally I think that there are benefits to having both of them. I use both a paid professional coach relationship, as well as some supervision on my coaching skills, as well as having a very longstanding co-coaching relationship. The benefit of the long standing co-coach relationship is that it is slightly more informal, is based on working with someone with a similar level of knowledge & experience to myself & we use some of the time to bounce ideas around more informally.
The benefits of working with a professional coach is that you can go in very clear about what you want to get from the coaching relationship & what will be valuable to you to deliver in that short time you have with the coach. I also fully believe that it helps to stretch your own coaching practice to have a coach who is more experienced/ qualified than you are, or a specialist in a particular area, for instance business or marketing coaching, or mentor coaching, that helps you move forwards in a particular part of your business.
So how do you find the right coach for you, in your time as a trainee coach?
One of the first steps is to get clear about what your goals in being coached are.
You can then use this knowledge as your “criteria” for looking for a coach.
For instance, are you looking for mentoring, for some supervision skills, for time management, or a little of all?
What kind of person are you looking for, and what time do you have available to you for being coached?
How much are you able to pay right now?
Are you looking for a paid professional coach or a co-coaching relationship?
Once you have put together your criteria, you can use keywords on the search engines to look for a specific kind of coach, or the different coaching schools & Coaching associations also have engines to seek out coaches on.
Claire Chapman is the coaches coach specializing in working with trainee & newly qualified coaches. Claire focuses on helping coaches to unearth their core strengths, to create space to explore themselves, their coaching & their business, & then to take tangible action to get the right results. Claire works with coaches via telephone for one to one coaching & with the Get Clients Now!(TM) program and other group coaching sessions. Visit the website now to sign up to receive the 30 day e-course “Lessons for Life” what they didn’t teach you at coach training school - and what to do about it. http://www.growasacoach.com
Tags: trainee coaches, coach training
1 response so far ↓
1 Business Management // May 13, 2008 at 11:37 am
The hotel is situated in Manchester city centre, five minutes from the train station and 2 minutes from the coach station. Business Management
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