What Makes a Good Coach?
Want to know how to improve your coaching skills? Discover the nine essential characteristics, approaches, and qualities of a good coach.
Coaching is a proven career path, seeing a healthy return on investment and high satisfaction results. IPEC reported 99% of individuals and companies who hired a coach were “satisfied” while 96% would repeat the process.
But reaching this level of satisfaction takes time and a particular set of skills. So, before you embark on a career in coaching, let’s explore the key qualities of a good coach.
Knowledge and Understanding
Personality goes a long way and makes up many qualities of a good coach. However, the most important thing is gaining a thorough understanding of the specialism in question. Whatever industry, discipline, or environment, you better have a solid understanding of strategy, theory, and best practices.
For example, if you’re a football coach and your team are two goals down at half-time in a cup final, a rousing speech isn’t always going to cut it. What about the method that’ll get you back into the game? Where are the areas identified as the reason for your failures so far? And what tactics can you implement to change the fortunes of the team?
Before hiring or becoming a coach, be sure they’re/you’re an expert of the discipline, field, or industry. Motivation is essential, but it’s not going to achieve any goals without the correct strategy in place.
Self-Analysis
Another crucial attribute of being a good coach is the willingness to analyse your own knowledge, credibility, and skills. How can you expect clients to see themselves as others see them – when as a coach, you don’t adopt this self-awareness?
Self-awareness is a central issue to personal development and is often the stumbling block between people realising their true capabilities, unleashing their potential, and achieving their goals.
An article in Forbes reports how 95% believe they’re self-aware, but in reality, it’s only 10-15%.
This is one of the first rules when training to become a life coach or personal development mentor. Being a teacher of self-awareness is only achieved when you become a master of analysing yourself.
Focused on Goals
Identifying goals and setting about to accomplish them is common coaching practice. This requires a coach to correctly assess their client, before planning short-term and long-term goals. The coach and client can then deal in specifics without ambiguities.
Goals require a ‘what’, a ‘how’ and a ‘why’. Knowing just what the goal is and how to achieve it is only two-thirds of the coach’s job done. The individual must have a clear sense of why they are setting out to achieve this goal. This gives them a much more powerful incentive.
Emotionally Intelligent
Emotional intelligence is a vital attribute to top coaching. Understanding someone’s desires, goals, and failures comes through recognising how they perceive these motivators emotionally. The foundations of coaching are built on relationships. Building close-knit, healthy, and trustworthy relationships are dependent on emotional connections.
Depending on the individual, emotions drive our behaviour. Emotions can decide how we make up in the morning and how we perceive the world. The qualities of a good coach now include ‘soft skills’ in emotional intelligence like empathy, as much as theory, tactics, and expert knowledge.
Positivity and Enthusiasm
Having a thorough knowledge of industry-specific coaching, alongside emotional intelligence, is critical. But a good coach also needs to have the correct fuel in the tank to deliver these attributes. This fuel is positive energy.
A coach should avoid negativity whenever possible. The energy should remain positive and enthusiastic to rightfully direct clients on the right paths for achieving their goals. Positivity helps with confidence and can create a ‘law of attraction’ perception of life. Positivity is also a powerful tool and is the correct tone to use when communicating.
Supportive and Trusting
Supportive coaching is not just a pat on the back and an uplifting word to keep spirits up. The coach’s job is to deliver results through support across the board. Things like resources, information, training, and protection from outside interference.
Building trust comes through this all-encompassing support. Clients must trust their coach to lead them to success. Achieving quick results through short-term goals is a way of finding trust early, in that the client trusts the process is working.
As with any relationship, trust is the key to its longevity and credibility. Any good coach will begin by building trust with their client.
Clear Communication
Remembering communication is the connection link. An effective coach will communicate clearly and always listen. Conveying your thoughts isn’t easy. It may sound great in your head, but in reality, it makes zero sense to the person standing in front of you.
Being a great communicator comes with self-awareness and making sure the listener understands. A good coach will communicate with ease, simplicity, logic, and when necessary, passion.
Respect
The underlying personality of a coach should always be respectful. There can be no influence or judgement based on any background, culture, race, religion or gender identification. A good coach respects everyone and sees no differences that may cause stereotypes or judgement.
Respecting clients through skills in self-awareness, goal setting and emotional intelligence will return the clients’ respect straight back to their coach.
Patience and Assertiveness
Achieving goals doesn’t happen overnight. It can take a long time for someone to accomplish aspirations. After all, you’re expecting someone to try and change their life. This can be a gruelling process of trying to rewire the brain. Patience is crucial.
However, there is a fine line between trying and pretending. Assertiveness can provide a difficult decision in a coach’s career. For example, when a client isn’t trying as hard as they can to achieve their goals.
Ultimately, you want them to achieve what they set out to, so that may require the right type of motivation. When positive enthusiasm isn’t working, the time for assertive honesty is necessary. At the risk of upsetting the client, truth and honesty might be the thing that helps them get over that challenging stage and onto better things.
Professionalism
Having a recognised coaching qualification and being a member of a professional body such as the Association For Coaching and have a solid CPD programme for ongoing development in both knowledge and skills.
Continue Improving Your Coaching Skills
If you’re interested in improving your coaching skills, then you should look at our award-winning accredited coaching courses, training, and packages.
At UKCPD, we offer a broad range of specialist coaching courses across personal development, ILM qualifications, AC coaching qualifications, NLP qualifications, and beyond. All our courses are fully accredited by various governing bodies for complete peace of mind.
For more information, get in touch with us today.
