What attitudes and skills are desirable in a coach?

The success of a coaching process not only depends on following a certain methodology, but that a large part of success lies in how the coach uses the tools and resources from which they has.

When we talk about coach tools we refer to the attitudes and aptitudes that he possesses to develop his professional work. Attitudes are related to the personality, way of being and temperament of the coach, while aptitudes are the skills or abilities acquired.

• Related article: "Why can we resort to a coaching process?"

Desirable attitudes in a coach

Attitudes have to do with the way a person acts in certain situations (be proactive, be honest, be resilient, etc.) Thus, the best valued attitudes in a coach would:

1. Empathy

A "real" coach tune in and understand the feelings of the coachee, identifying them as the other's and not his own.

2. Authenticity

Understood as a combination of honesty and showing yourself as you are with your own feelings in mind, without hiding them, but always taking into account the coachee's first.

3. Unconditional acceptance of the coachee

A good coach fully trusts the abilities of the coachee, does not judge him, accepts all his feelings and treats him with the utmost cordiality and human warmth.

• You may be interested in: "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): principles and characteristics"

Desirable skills in a coach

Skills, unlike attitudes, are learned and acquired skills. The ones that the coach must work on in order to be effective in their coaching processes are:

Active listening

Although all the skills that 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 is saying. To practice active listening in a coaching process is to go far beyond words to have a complete level of understanding of the other: it is also about attending 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 sign language.

• Related article: "Active listening: the key to communicating with others"

Reformulation

It is the coach's ability to know how to summarize in his own words what he has understood from the coachee, 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 disordered.

The reformulation provides security to the coachee because, on the one hand, it allows to show clarity in thoughts or emotions that seem disconnected to him and, on the other hand, because it demonstrates a good practice of active listening on the part of the coach.

• You may be interested in: "The 28 types of communication and their characteristics"

Hold accountable

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 achieve the goal set.

Reframe

A skill that a coach must have to exercise with guarantees is knowing how to make affirmations that lead the coachee to understand that his difficulty is not strange or serious, but is his way of facing certain circumstances as valid as other An extra within this ability 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.

• Related article: "Cognitive schemas: how is our thinking organized?"

To confront

This skill consists of the coach being able to make the coachee aware of the disparate relationship between what he thinks, what he feels, and how he acts. The coach will achieve this thanks to the creation of a climate of trust, respectful treatment with his client and demonstrating a deep belief in the freedom and responsibility of the coachee.

To ask

This ability 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 to lead the coachee to end up reformulating their own questions to open new options.

This ability implies knowing that the range of questions that can be asked is very wide (direct, open, closed, evocative, solution questions, etc.) and that You have to 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 a process of inquiry.

Invite to action

The coach must have the ability to make the coachee understand that movement and action are fundamental to achieve his objective, but not by pushing him directly, but with suggestions of the type 'and now that'. Do not forget that the coach accompanies, you should never tell the client what to do because it would take away his power on 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 one, learning and developing the different skills that a coach must possess is essential to be able to work effectively and quality.

In our Own Master in Professional Coaching we teach and practice in depth each of the aptitudes that a coach must have to be a great professional; and even, we 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.