If you prefer to listen to this blog, click below for the audio. Or, just read on…
The Hidden Qualities of a Great Coach
It is now estimated that there are over 100,000 professional coaches Worldwide (ICF 2023), the market is saturated, and coaching continues to develop and mature.
We started The Working Parent Company in 1998 and what a great coach looked like then, is very different to the expectations of coaching today. As the market has shifted and grown, so too has coaching.
You cannot fail to have noticed the continuing technological development within coaching, both digital communication tools and generative AI of course. Group and team coaching have increased significantly, and many niches now exist within coaching, targeting specific sectors or specific desired outcomes.
Every ten years at TWPC we have undergone a research project and asked: ‘What helps most?’ We have asked our clients, our team, trusted peers and academics, and we kept on getting the same answer: ‘We feel seen and understood by you’.
I’d argue that this is only the start. It’s not just about having someone who understands, it’s about what happens to you, the client, when you feel understood. Who are you then able to become? Perhaps braver, more boundaried, more confident, or clearer?
Since the pandemic so much of our work went online and another big change occurred, we all started talking more openly about our emotional health. Though in fairness I think most working parents are pretty good at this.
In todays article we are asking:
What does a great coach actually look like?
Firstly because it’s a question that we have been asking ourselves (and you’ll see below some exciting news about our changing brand identity that will launch soon).
But also, how do we get clearer on what a great coach looks like, so that you can get clearer about what you’re looking for, and have some sort of measurement in order to assess any coach you might be working with, or meeting, for the first time.
At The Working Parent Company we are depth coaches. We focus on both high performance, and the inner work of the leader and parent. We coach the whole person. What other qualities does a great coach bring to the table?
1. Creates greater awareness
We are nothing without awareness. In fact, we are merely projection without awareness. Whilst many of us may like to think we are self-aware, a great coach will expand this awareness for you in ways that deeply resonate and are incredibly helpful. A great coach helps you to make new meaning from experience.
For humans, so much of our behaviour is unconscious. We simply ‘can’t see’ our emotionally formed ways of adapting.
The road to awareness might be uncomfortable at times. Why? Because to expand awareness we have to face our own adaptations and survival strategies. A great coach understands adaptations as essential scaffolding and does not merely deconstruct them, but helps to reconstruct them into something more positive, meaningful and fit for high performance. A great coach has the skills that will guide you into relationship with all of your adapted selves.
We lock ourselves into emotional straight jackets, tangled up with the limiting beliefs we have formed. A great coach will skilfully help to untangle, but it is the client who chooses to take off the jacket, or not.
2. Adjusts our Self conception
A great coach will help you to adjust to who you think you are, how well or how badly you esteem yourself; and helps to build a new self-concept. The unconfident leader finds confidence, the pleasing leader learns to please themselves, the conflict avoidant leader learns they can tolerate and skilfully participate in robust conversation, and so on.
3. Broadens your vision
A great coach does all of the above whilst holding your potential in view. A great coach offers a kind, robust, compassionate external eye to a client’s sense of self and opens up a possibility of being that was often obscured at the start of the relationship. A great coach is skilled at the psychology of visioning, of what is possible, knows how to leverage your strengths and mitigate for weaknesses.
4. Reduces isolation
A great coach is a thinking partner, sounding board and essential witness to a leader’s process. A great coach is skilled at ‘being with’ someone’s process, knows when to offer new ways of being and doing, and when to not intuit or interrupt process; a great coach is trustworthy and curious, engaged and feels safe, even in challenge.
When we are witnessed skilfully it lends us a courage to explore more of ourselves, our choices and our ways of being.
5. First class advocate
A great coach holds the whisper ‘go on’. A great coach is a skilled, compassionate and robust hand at your back. A great coach isn’t passive but active in the work with you, able to challenge and confront and champion and support you.
A great coach shares insights, information, and experience with you. They are intellectually vigorous and certainly aren’t there to just collude with you as a way of appearing like an advocate. They advocate by deep understanding; they have to be able to fit your ways of being into intellectual frameworks. To observe how a joins with b, x fits with y, how prior discussions relate to the current situation, and maintain these connections while supporting effective and lasting change.
6. Is not “an expert”
This may sound odd after all that has been said before. A great coach has expertise and skill and experience and is professionally trained, but that same coach holds their expertise lightly. If they get something wrong, they admit it. If they cause a rupture, they are skilled in role modelling repair. They are open and human and fallible. They are able to say sorry.
A great coach knows that only you are the expert on you, and they want you to experience and understand that, more and more. They need to be free of urges to be right, or clever, or better, or moralise. And even when all of this might arise in their own awareness during a session, they need to be able to hold it wisely.
7. Is Present
A great coach is present. In order to be present, the great coach has worked on themselves so that more of themselves can be available to the work.
At TWPC, coaches engage in contemplative practices to enhance their own sense of presence. We practice what we preach, and we are human, flawed, humble in our knowing. A great coach is committed to their own continuing education and professional supervision.
8. Has superb timing
A great coach has a superb sense of timing. A coach doesn’t have long, commonly 6 months, possibly 12 or more. Yet they don’t allow the clock to force an urgency upon them or the client. They can be grounded enough to wait for the right moment.
I was once told never to utter an answer, “until it is on the lips of the client and let the client speak it for themselves”. No matter how ‘right’ I might feel, it is essential for the client to come to their own realisations, to embody them for them to truly be felt. Change happens in the body first. A great coach knows when to hang back, when to dive in, when to let it go. And they know that through having hours and hours of experience.
9. Works with all of you
A great coach is able to work with the transpersonal. Not just with your brain in the here and now, but with you as a whole system; able to explore your inner world of mind, body, emotion, spirit, plus all of the systems and roles that you exist within; family, ancestral, organisational, political, communities, and so on. A great coach is skilled at holding a systemic view and to raising your awareness so that you can hold that view for yourself.
10. Trusts that you are inherently well
In spite of the inevitable challenges that life throws us, a great coach holds an unshakeable belief that the client is inherently well and resourceful. This doesn’t mean that the coach denies difficulty, crisis or complexity. A great coach has to be skilled at working in all of those circumstances; rather the coach recognises that beneath disturbance there lies a grounded capacity for wisdom, resilience and growth, whether you the client, have that in awareness or not. In that way you are never a problem to be fixed, but a human being, who just like the coach, has inherent health and strengths to be uncovered and mobilised. This quiet conviction, in and of itself, can be transformative.
11. Leaves you with a felt sense of possibility
A great coach leaves you with a felt sense of change. You will be left feeling clearer, challenged but respected, unburdened and lighter, more self-aware, accountable with a renewed conviction about your next steps, energised through learning, trusted and seen and more spacious in your thinking, doing and being.
I am sure I have missed things. Even in writing this I can feel another ten ‘good coach’ traits come to mind; joint practice for example, to name but one, and a sense of humour, because life can be hard and humour helps us see its predictability. But I am also aware that a great coach knows when to shut up.
As clients this is what to look for, to enquire about, to aim for. We hope it helps you to become clear in your search to find the right kind of coach for you.
If you enjoyed this article and would like to receive the next one direct to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter here.