What attitudes and skills are desirable in a coach?
These are the key skills and aptitudes when working in the field of coaching.
The success of a coaching process depends not only on following a certain methodology, but a large part of the success lies in how the coach uses the tools and resources at his disposal.
When we talk about the coach's tools, we are referring to the attitudes and aptitudes he/she possesses to carry out his/her professional work. to develop their professional work. The attitudes are related to the personality, way of being and temperament of the coach, while the aptitudes are the acquired abilities or skills.
Desirable attitudes in a coach
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 tunes in and understands the coachee's feelings, identifying them as those of the other.identifying them as those of the other and not their own.
2. Authenticity
Understood as a combination of honesty and showing yourself as you are, taking into account your own feelings, without hiding them.without hiding them, but always taking into account the coachee's feelings first.
3. Unconditional acceptance of the coachee
A good coach has full confidence in the coachee's abilities, does not judge him/her, accepts all his/her feelings and treats him/her with the utmost cordiality and warmth..
Desirable aptitudes in a coach
Aptitudes, unlike attitudes, are learned and acquired skills. The ones that the coach must work on to be effective in his coaching processes are:
Active listening
Although all the skills listed here are important, active listening may be the one that most determines whether or not a coach is 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 understanding of the other person: 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 nonverbal communication and gestural language.
Rephrasing
It is the coach's ability to know how to summarize in your own words what you have understood from the coacheeThe coachee is able to summarize in his own words what he has understood from the coachee, not at 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 out of order.
Rephrasing provides security to the coachee because, on the one hand, it allows to show clarity in thoughts or emotions that seem unconnected and, on the other hand, because it demonstrates a good practice of active listening on the part of the coach.
Accountability
The coach must be clear about his role: a companion, a guide for the coachee who is really responsible for his 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 his resources to reach his goal. and use his resources to achieve the objective set.
Reframing
A skill that a coach must possess to be able to practice with guarantees is to know how to make statements that lead the coachee to understand that his difficulty is not strange or serious, but that it is his way of facing certain circumstances as valid as others. An extra part of this skill is that the coach knows how to make the coachee see a really distressing difficulty as a challenge to be overcome rather than as a problem..
Confronting
This skill consists of the coach being able to make the coachee aware of the disparate relationship between what they think, what they feel and how they act.. The coach will achieve this by creating a climate of trust, treating the client with respect 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 the development of this skill by the coach is of vital importance to be a good professional. Through the questions that the coach asks during the different sessions, the coach does not so much seek to obtain information is not so much to obtain information, but to lead the coachee to reformulate his own questions in order to open up new options..
This skill implies knowing that the range of questions that can be posed is very wide (direct, open, closed, evocative, solution questions, etc.) and that one must know how to use them at the right moments and with the right balance so that a coaching session does not become an interrogation, but a process of inquiry.
Inviting action
The coach must have the skill to make the coachee understand that movement and action are fundamental to achieve his goal, but not pushing him directly to it, but with suggestions of the type 'and now what'. Do not forget that the coach accompanies, never tell the client what to do because it would disempower him in his journey of self-discovery..
Although working on attitudes is more complicated, because they are usually possessed to a greater or lesser extent depending on the character of each individual, learning and developing the different skills that a coach must possess is fundamental to be able to work effectively and with quality.
In our Master's Degree in Professional Coaching we teach and practice in depth each of the skills that a coach must have to be a great professional; and even help to outline or highlight the desirable attitudes that sometimes our students have and have not been able to develop them. All this in order to ensure that trained coaches have the best tools at their disposal to practice as coaches with total confidence and security.
(Updated at Apr 15 / 2024)