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What makes a good coach a good coach?
There are countless articles about the coaching skills that are necessary to deliver great coaching. However this article will give you a new point of view on the coaching process.
We’ll find out what we can take away from the proven life cycle of a business management process.
It will show you how a more process-oriented approach has much more impact than just thinking from session to session. You’ll also learn how to easily integrate it in your current coaching to help your clients achieve outstanding results.
It’s the (R)Evolution of Coaching
Let’s dig in with a common example. A client feels stressed, easily overwhelmed and very exhausted every evening. The coaching session points out that the client needs to work on her work-life balance to reduce stress.
She gets the homework to prioritize her daily tasks and to integrate exercises to relax as a daily practice. Now she’s usually left alone with this task until the next session, where she reports that she could not do the homework because there was not enough time or unavoidable distractions.
Or she could tell you she was not successful because of unexpected feedback from the environment. Another possibility is that she is not really aware of all these things and she only reports about excuses why she didn’t follow through.
The next coaching session starts with working out what did not work and to start from the beginning to get the client into moving forward again.
But what did really happen here?
Let’s have a closer look and you may see that the idea/concept you worked out together in your session was only considering the mental part of a much more complex process.
Every idea and plan has to be lived and experienced when it should become a part of the life of our clients.
This means the idea/concept needs real action to become reality (for example starting with finishing the assigned homework). Therefore the habit or routine of our client has to be modified.
A good coach takes in account that sustainable change is a process that takes time
Once this is done, the experience and especially the associated emotions have to be positive and stimulating in the desired way. But to accomplish that the client has to overcome some roadblocks (deflections, many other inspirations, daily routines, getting conscious about missing skills, wrong imaginations or illusions and many more). This requires usually a sequence of adjustments to reach the desired goal sustainably.
And this principle permeates our entire life.
Life is in a constant state of flux, so life in general and even the personal life of all
individuals are a continuum of processes.
Process of Coaching – Life is all about processes
That in mind helps us to recognize that every development/change is initiated by an idea/concept, which then has to be realized (brought into reality). It has to be lived and experienced to bring real results.
In that way, we personally are the result of our prior experiences made in our life (positive or negative). This produces our way to live, including our habits, our filters we use to perceive our world and also the information we absorb.
What makes a good coach?
A good coach knows that every process needs refining and adjusting
Forming the idea is the first step and the second step is taking action, that means living and experiencing it in real life. But there is a very important third process running, that we aren’t aware of most of the time. This part supports the two first steps with analyzing, adjusting and refining to eventually get the desired outcome.
The first part of the process is the mental part, which is the process of forming the desired concept
which is normally the main part of the sessions of your coaching or counseling. In business, this part is called the management process.
After that, it is necessary to live this idea in daily life (in business that is called the operational process or execution). It’s the practical part where we take action and experiences are made. But these actions and experiences may not be as we expected them to be. This means our plan needs to be refined or adjusted.
Now the third part joins the game. It’s the process which is observing, analyzing and providing us insights for important adjustments. It helps us to rethink and refine our strategy. Therefore it is important to train the awareness and to record the whole process step by step.
This allows us to find out which things did not work as expected and which things worked out very well. This part is important to keep up the momentum of the setting, to keep our clients in the coaching state of mind and to provide motivation to keep on track. In business, this part is called controlling.
Coaching for success – The process consists of three elements
All three described processes work together as they provide interrelated feedback to each other to
make sure the desired goal will be accomplished in a sustainable and reliable way.
You may say this sounds good but it is too complicated to realize in normal coaching/counseling because you cannot provide this kind of service in the daily life of your clients and you even don’t want to babysit them. And you may be right on first sight.
But luckily we live in the digital age, and that allows us to easily build a bridge from our setting
to the real life of our coaching clients.
What if there is a tool which is available wherever and whenever needed, to record and track every step of the three processes in the way of painting a detailed picture of them.
This picture is updated just in time whenever something interesting happens. By providing an overview and insights just in time for you as the coach, it allows you to easily adjust and individualize the process to the needs of your client (and every client has its own point of view, their own ability to put into practice as well as his own experiences with them).
You get a big picture of the collection of all the interrelated tasks (called the process), to see how they work together and what is the exact outcome (expected or not). You easily get the important data, which shows you and your client, how the ideas and plans from the sessions were executed. This allows optimization to be very effective, it reduces errors and increases the quality of your coaching settings at the same time.
Sustainable success in Coaching – A bridge between session and daily life
We created CleverMemo to support this process and to build a bridge between sessions and daily life.
It’s a tool, which creates a secluded room for the individual process of each client, where all the shared information is stored and accessible at all time. The awareness for the experience and the process will be trained by providing corresponding tools and questionnaires to do so.
This data will be added to the stream to provide you as a coach or counselor the necessary
feedback just in time. It allows you to easily optimize the interventions as you can see at a glance how all the elements work together.
Provide good coaching by honing the process
Your service expands from a session orientation to a process orientation just by offering the bridge into daily life, which at the same time builds the bridge between the three processes running for better integration and optimization.
You centralize all communication, shared and provided documents, analyses, and feedback.
At the same time for you as a side-benefit, you get more insights into your work as a coach by getting detailed feedback of what works well and what could be optimized in the future. You’re not only providing good coaching but also an outstanding experience to each of your clients.
You now can easily demonstrate your workflow to new clients as they get a clear picture of how
change and development will come into their life. This more integral way of viewing your service makes it easy for you to beat your competitors when it comes to promoting your coaching/counseling to new clients.
We launched CleverMemo in 2015 with on clear mission: We wanted to make coaching better and provide a bridge between sessions and daily life.
And even if you offer packages or programs you now get the chance to optimize them by providing
each client individual support for a more sustainable outcome.
When looking at the radical change the digitalization brings to the companies globally, our clients are also demanding a more personalized treatment in respect of feeling valued. We call this (R)Evolution of coaching as it brings your services to the next level.
Start your free CleverMemo trial here and find out how easy it is to make YOUR coaching better
