A thought-provoking conversation with a goal
Professional coaches engages in thought-provoking conversations.
When we train our students to become professional coaches we always remind them that a ‘coaching conversation’ does not unfold as a friendly conversation.
A coaching conversation is a structured conversation where the coach and the client engage with the awareness that it is a coaching conversation with a goal, which has a specific beginning and an ending and it is supported by a clear agreement around the coachable result that the client want to get at the end of it.
Awareness revealed
The coach hears to what the client is saying and not saying, evokes clarity and awareness through powerful questions with the purpose to reveal the client the themselves. The coach knows that the more aware anyone is, the better choices they can make for themselves. Among the skills that a professional certified coach is equipped with is to partner with clients to help them discover their gifts, talents, needs, values and beliefs. As a result of this we have more aware clients who can choose to move forward on their path towards the life that they desire.
Embracing curiosity
Professional coaches allow themselves to be guided by curiosity to learn more about the clients. Coaching is a ‘discovery business’ and one of the most important benefit of curiosity is that it promotes learning for both the coach and the client. Curiosity is needed when we are learning new things, and professional coaches enter the coaching conversation with the purpose ‘to learn the client’.
Coaches do not offer solution but they are there to allow the highest wisdom of the clients to emerge.
Connect with the client’s greatness
Clients want to work with a client in order to allow their best talents and resources to be seen, heard and developed. Coaches challenges their clients to think and act bigger by stretching their perspective through provocative questions in order to allow them to raise their standards.
Professional coaches enjoy their clients in their entirety, including their upsides and downsides, and this is when high levels of trust fully occur. What is the benefit of that trust and safety in the relationship? Clients are more keen to take risks and more forward, by relying on their capabilities, because they know that the coach is totally there for them, in a collaborative way.
Recognizing every situation perfect as it is
We can look at life from the perspective of what does not work, of what can be adjusted and corrected, or we can believe that everything happens for a perfectly good reason, even when we cannot see it yet. Coaches can embrace this perspective and accept that every event, issue or situation that the client bring is perfect, even when it is clearly not. When we commit to recognize perfection instead of offering tips, suggestions or solutions, then we are Professional Coaches.
Being and coaching in the moment
Everything is movement, everything is in constant change. What is most important to the client will change, too. This is the nature of human beings. Changes occur in the frame of a coaching session, moment by moment, where cycles unfold and when the client and the coach moves in spiral and move to a higher octave of awareness and learning during the coaching conversation. Professional Coaches are flexible enough to move with the client, in the flow of the session, and they adjust their coaching to be effective in the new territories where the client is moving.
Sharing with authenticity
Clients rely on the coach’s observations, intuition and thoughts to move forward in their life. A professional coach offers them with no attachment to them being right and by seeking the client’s input about them. The more often coaches share what they see, hear or notice, the more value that can be created for the clients. It’s often the smallest subtle movements or expressions that can be powerful tools to gain more awareness on something that was not on the surface to be seen.
Honoring the clients’ humanity
We are human beings, both perfect essence and human behaviors, both internal and external, with a potential to maximize, and at the same time very human and we need to be respected for that. Professional coaches develop compassion and respect in looking at life and at their clients, they recognize limits and they appreciate different paths of achieving goals, and they commit to individually and universally respect their clients’ uniqueness.
