In this week’s Friday guest post successful coach Richard Nugent, who provided a fantastic guest post last year, returns for a second time. This week he shares his thoughts about congruence in coaching.

Are You Walking It?

by Richard Nugent

Ok my wonderful fellow coaches let us start with a question. Do you have a coach?

I hope the answer is a resounding YES! If not how congruent is it for you to ask your clients to fork out their hard earned cash to pay for one? In my view it is a basic requirement for a coach to have a coach. I certainly won’t employ a coach who doesn’t have one themselves.

Reflecting on this got me thinking about the broader context of congruence in coaching. Authenticity is such a key factor in leadership – actually it is the number one thing that most followers want from their leaders – it should also be considered with the same importance in coaching.

For example, while there are many, many wonderful people in the NLP world, I do struggle at the number of people that I experience at events who seem to be coaching from the world view of their own issues.

There is some similarity in the number of coaches looking to develop a business in coaching other coaches to build coaching businesses! That is great with me if you have a continuing track record of making great money and adding huge value for clients as a coach. It is less congruent if your track record is in marketing or internet business building. This suggests you can build a great coaching practice regardless of coaching skill, ability or experience – let us hope not.

I am sure that few of the readers of this wonderful site fall into either of these categories however it is a great chance for us all to check in with our congruence as a coach or as I like to call it our ‘doing-what-we-say-on-the-tin-ness’.

Here are some useful questions I have been considering.

• To what degree are you aware of who you are creating yourself as (as a coach)?
• To what degree are you congruent with that identity? Consider this from every angle including fees, environment, how you dress, the clients you choose/agree to work with, the results you achieve, and the beliefs and values you operate from.
• Do you set your clients’ standards high enough?*Do you set your standards high enough?
• To what degree do you love what you do as opposed to being in love with how you imagine it could be ‘if only’?
• How much time do you spend in pursuit of ‘should goals’ or ‘recurring goals’? Congruence means knowing when to ‘do’ and when to let go of thinking that you should do.
• How much time do you spend working on your business and how much do you spend working in it. All businesses need time energy and focus.

The reflection as you would expect is that I am hitting the spot in some areas and have work to do in others. What I do know, and I am proud of, is that I hold authenticity as more than an aspiration but as a key success factor for me as a coach and for my coaching business.

Indeed as I reflect on many of those that have had successful practices over a prolonged period they were absolutely congruent with the identity they operated from. Whether you like, agree or appreciate the ‘big names’ in the industry, if they were to reflect on the questions above they would undoubtedly be able to give themselves nine or ten out of ten in every one of these areas.

If you think you can do more, achieve more and earn more as a coach then consider this final question, what simple change can you make to ensure that you are more congruent in your coaching identity than ever before.

About the Author/Further Resources

Richard helps successful business leaders to move from being ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’. He challenges clients to change the way they think about work, to focus on what is most important and to stop firefighting for good.

His work is based on three key beliefs:

• If you can think it, you can do it
• Leaders must be prepared to go first
• To perform at the very highest level you must have a passion for what you do

Clients’ return on investment from his energetic and ground breaking work is well into the millions of pounds, dollars and euros. His reputation as one of the UK’s leading transformational leadership coaches has been cemented by outstanding results with an impressive client list including Tesco Bank, EDF Energy, Merlin Entertainments, ASOS and Lego. He also serves as a consultant to a number of colleges, business schools and professional footballers and cricketers.

www.kaizen-training.com

You can read Richards last guest post “The Evolution of a Coach” here.