What Attitudes And Skills Are Desirable In A Coach?
The success of a coaching process not only depends on following a certain methodology, but a large part of success lies in how the coach uses the tools and resources available to him or her.
When we talk about coach tools we refer to the attitudes and skills that the coach has to develop their professional work. Attitudes are related to the personality, way of being and temperament of the coach, while aptitudes are the acquired abilities or skills.
Attitudes have to do with the way a person acts in certain situations (being proactive, being honest, being resilient, etc.). Thus, the most valued attitudes in a coach would be:
1. Empathy
A “real” coach tune in and understand the coachee’s feelings identifying them as those of the other and not their own.
2. Authenticity
This is understood as a combination of honesty and showing yourself as you are while taking your own feelings into account without hiding them, but always taking into account those of the coachee first.
3. Unconditional acceptance of the coachee
A good coach fully trusts the coachee’s abilities, does not judge you, welcomes all your feelings and treats you with the utmost cordiality and human warmth
Desirable skills in a coach
Aptitudes, unlike attitudes, are learned and acquired skills. What the coach must work on to be effective in his or her coaching processes are:
Although all the skills we list here are important, knowing how to listen actively may be the one that most determines whether or not you are a good coach.
Because active listening is not simply listening to what the coachee says. Practicing active listening in a coaching process means going far beyond words to have a complete level of understanding of the other: It is also about paying attention to the tone used, the rhythm, the volume, the timbre and even the pauses And, of course, to pay attention to non-verbal communication and gestural language.
Reformulation
It is the coach’s ability to knowing how to summarize in their own words what the coachee has understood not in each intervention of the other, but after certain comments that he considers important to highlight or to clarify certain aspects that may have been left disordered.
Reformulation provides security to the coachee because, on the one hand, it allows clarity in thoughts or emotions that seem unconnected to him and, on the other, because it demonstrates a good practice of active listening on the part of the coach.
Responsible
The coach must be clear about his role: a companion, a guide for the coachee who is, really, responsible for his or her goals and circumstances. The coach must avoid generalizations and abstractions and understand that his client is the one who has to make the decisions and use their resources to achieve the set objective.
Reframe
A skill that a coach must possess to practice with guarantees is knowing how to make statements that lead the coachee to understand that their difficulty is not strange or serious, but that it is their way of facing certain circumstances as valid as others. An extra within this skill is that the coach knows how to make the coachee see a really distressing difficulty as a challenge to overcome rather than as a problem
This skill consists of the coach being able to make the coachee aware of the disparate relationship that exists between what they think, what they feel and how they act The coach will achieve this by creating a climate of trust, treating his client respectfully, and demonstrating a deep belief in the coachee’s freedom and responsibility.
Ask
This skill is what allows a coaching process to be more or less successful, so its development by the coach is of vital importance to be a good professional. Through the questions that the coach asks during the different sessions The aim is not so much to obtain information, but rather to lead the coachee to reformulate their own questions to open up new options
This aptitude implies knowing that the range of questions that can be asked is very wide (direct, open, closed, evocative, solution questions, etc.) and that one must know how to use them at the right times and with the right balance so that a coaching session does not become an interrogation, but rather a process of inquiry.
Invite to action
The coach must have the skill of making the coachee understand that movement and action are essential to achieve their goal, but not by directly pushing them to do so, but with suggestions such as ‘now what’. We must not forget that the coach accompanies, You should never tell the client what to do because it would take away their power in their journey of self-discovery
Although working on attitudes is more complicated, because they are normally possessed to a greater or lesser extent depending on the character of each person, learning and developing the different skills that a coach must possess is essential to be able to work effectively and with quality.
In our Own Master’s Degree in Professional Coaching we teach and practice in depth each of the skills that a coach must possess to be a great professional; and we even help to outline or highlight the desirable attitudes that, sometimes, our students possess and have not known how to develop them. All this in order to ensure that trained coaches have the best tools at their disposal to act as coaches with total confidence and security.
