Qualities of a Great Life Coach

Loyal readers of Life Coaching Insights may have read the many previous blog posts dealing with different aspects of life coaching and been left wondering exactly what qualities are required to be a really good life coach?

When asked what the prerequisite qualities are for becoming a life coach, my answer is always the same.

You need to be a thoroughly ethical person, you need to love working with and helping people and you need to have an open, inquiring mind, ready to learn a lot about yourself and others.

That’s it. It’s as simple as that.

But whereas those attributes are more than sufficient for anyone who wishes to embark upon training, many qualities of a great life will only develop during training and become honed with coaching experience.

[box type=\”shadow\”]\”You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within.\”

– Bob Nelson[/box]

 

Qualities of a Great Life Coach (continued)

 

There may be a few others that readers would like to suggest but to my mind to be a great life coach you should be:

Honest, Ethical and Sincere

This should come as no surprise.

Life coaching is about empowering others to reach their full potential and thereby achieve their goals, ambitions and dreams.

While coaching your full focus has to be on doing what’s best for your client, ensuring that no harm is caused in the process.

New Insights has a simple yet important code of ethics that its trainee coaches have to sign before they start engaging in practice and/or paid for coaching using our system.

Passionate about helping and inspiring others

If the idea of having a career that involves focusing your attention on helping others doesn’t appeal to you, you should look elsewhere.

On the other hand, it’s hard to explain how immensely fulfilling and rewarding it is to see others spread their wings and fly with your help!

Life coaching is a career in which you can truly make a difference to the world, one – or many – clients at a time.

Self Aware

To be able to coach someone else it is necessary that you have a good degree of self awareness, in other words the ability to be introspective and understand what makes you unique as well as your own aspirations, strengths, abilities and limitations.

New Insights coaching gives you access to an online journaling tool, called Journal@New Insights, that is specifically designed to help grow your self awareness.

Adept at building rapport

Rapport between two people is a feeling of being on the same wavelength; of understanding, trusting and respecting one another.

In order to build rapport you need to understand and appreciate what makes others tick. Ideally, you need to be able to stand in the shoes of others – and this requires tolerance of the views, beliefs and values that others may hold, even if they differ from your own.

Adept at asking the right questions at the right time

You can only help someone if you have sufficient information about them, their situation and what it is they want to achieve.

By employing a good mix of questions designed to open up the client, probing further, clarifying where necessary and then confirming certain facts, you will get to the information you need.

Able to listen generously

Listening generously means listening authentically, because you really want to hear what your client has to say, not because you feel it is the polite thing to do.

Life coaches need to understand where their clients are coming from, what drives them and why they hold the beliefs and values that they do. Only by asking the right questions and listening attentively can they gain this information.

Flexible in your approach

A great coach is prepared to do what it takes to help their clients succeed.

Because every client is unique, and each time you coach them their situation may be different, you will need to maintain a thoroughly flexible approach.

Having a professional coaching system – such as the one provided by New Insights – will provide a great structure for your coaching programme but within that structure you will need to be prepared to be flexible.

Suitably knowledgeable within your chosen niche

Here it is necessary to make the distinction between coaching and mentoring.

Mentoring is about sharing your knowledge and wisdom with someone who is less experienced than you and who wants to learn from you to get further in life.

Life coaching is very different. You have to appreciate that your client is the one who knows the most about their life and where they want to take it. You are there more as a facilitator with access to a set of tools and techniques that will help.

Nonetheless, if you have chosen a specific market niche within which to practice (e.g. relationship coaching, coaching young adults, coaching retirees, coaching executives on life balance, health and wellness coaching and so on) you will need to have a degree of expertise within that niche.

Self esteem or knowledge of your own self worth

A common failing of many coaches is their reluctance to charge fees that are commensurate with the service that they are providing. This is often due to doubts about their own self worth.

New Insights training goes to great lengths to help trainees know and understand the true value of the services they will provide along with an appreciation of the importance of the concept of fair exchange – giving and receiving similar perceived value in any transaction.

A blend of toughness and compassion

At New Insights we like to call this having ‘The Edge’. This means, very simply, that you are able to challenge your client to be do and have more – but in a compassionate, caring way.

Clients pay coaches because they want results but sometimes they get distracted and diverted from their goals. The job of the coach is not to molly coddle the client but to get the client back on track to achieve his or her goals.

This requires a ‘streetwise’ yet sensitive, respectful and caring approach from the coach.

 

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