Judy Rees asks a question that many new to coaching asks themselves, in this week’s guest post:
Do You Know Enough To Be A Coach?
By Judy Rees
Are you a coach who actually coaches people? Or are you a perpetual preparer?
I often coach people who are in the process of becoming coaches. I’ve noticed a lot of beginners seem to attend endless workshops and events, learning more and more about how to be a coach, and how to market themselves as coaches, rather than getting on and actually doing it.
Using Clean Language questions and metaphor, I’ll help my clients to understand the pattern – and we’ll frequently discover that on the current plan, they’d never know enough to get started.
As Nicholas Taleb points out in The Black Swan, the more expert someone becomes, the more they realise what they don’t know.
“You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books,” he says.
If you are determined to become a coach, perhaps because you want to help people, it’s important to find a way to manage this. (Just getting a Kindle doesn’t do the trick!)
I like to pride myself on “making change happen, whatever happens” in my coaching work, and I have a pretty solid record of success.
But that success is not just based on knowing a lot of stuff – it’s based on having a coaching methodology that is robust enough to work well, even when I don’t know what’s going on for my client.
At one level, I have to accept, I’ll never know what’s happening. I can’t see the world exactly through my client’s eyes.
And the more clients I have, the more I learn… and the more I realise I don’t know.
If you suspect you might be a perpetual preparer, I’d strongly suggest shifting your attention towards finding a robust coaching methodology that works well for you (Clean Language is my suggestion: others are available) and then getting started.
Practice, get feedback, practice some more, get referrals… and enjoy discovering how much you don’t know.
About the Author/Further Resources
Judy Rees is an author, mentor and information marketer, and an expert in Clean Language and metaphor. Her blog is at www.xraylistening.com
You can learn Clean Language online, free on Judy’s new website http://learncleanlanguage.com