I was having a conversation recently revolving around an underlying desire for this person to learn to be a great coach. Rather than write a post about one of the specific skills I think a great coach demonstrates I am going to focus more on how you can learn to be a great coach.

How do you currently define a “great coach”?

This is a step that I find is often missed out. In conversations with people who tell me they want to be a coach but don’t feel that they are there yet it’s not at all uncommon that they haven’t actually defined for themselves what that means.

Once you know that benchmark it’s so much easier to then learn to be a great coach.

I invite you to take a moment to see what your current definition is, and share with you the following questions to aid you with that:

What is an example of a testimonial that a client would write for a great coach?

If you were following a great coach around, what would you see/hear them do?

What skills does a great coach possess?

What qualities does a great coach demonstrate?

Where are you now?

Once you have your benchmark of what a great coach currently means to you then you can take steps so that you are a great coach too. So my next question is where are you now?

I know as a coach/trainee coach you will probably have seen clients give an answer to a question that is outdated yet they still believe to be true. It’s a human trait to get caught up in that from time to time – you may be a coach but as I’m presuming that you are also human I invite you to consider the possibility that you may be wrong with your initial answer and check out the current reality.

So my first questions in this section are:

How do you know? What proof have you got?

My guess is that if you have got this far through a post about learning to be a great coach you are likely to think that there are skills that you could develop further. So my next question is:

How would you know if you too had those skills of a great coach?

Sometimes it’s a lack of information that can keep someone stuck – if you do find that any of your answers are “I don’t know”, find out!

Take action

Don’t just wish for these skills to appear overnight, the chances of your skills developing and you becoming a stronger coach increase dramatically if you actually do something to create that.

The action you take will depend upon the answers you have to the first two sections. My question to you under this heading is

How can you strengthen a particular area of your coaching?

Just some potential actions that may be relevant are:

Practice, study, observation, training, drills/exercises, establishing a strategy. working with a mentor, get your own coach, seeking feedback

What is it for you?

Evaluate the difference a particular approach made

Once you have taken action, check to see how it’s worked. One word of warning here – Don’t beat yourself up if the action you have taken hasn’t immediately resulted in you perfecting a skill. Learning can be “clunky” at times and things can be strengthened using many different ways. However, I find that beating yourself up isn’t one of the most effective ways 😉

Repeat

I was very conscious while writing this that I did not want to give a list of skills/qualities etc that I believe a great coach demonstrates. However, I also know that my definition has influenced what I’ve included and this stage is a prime example. For me, one thing great coaches demonstrate is continuing to develop their own skills etc.

You may have noticed that in the first stage I asked you how you currently define a great coach. I know that over the time I’ve been coaching some of my answers to the questions have remained relatively constant. However, there are aspects that I am aware of now that I was oblivious to when I first started coaching. Your perspective of what makes a great coach can change over time, so it can be worth checking what it is for you now.

Additional questions you may like to add in when you repeat this process –

How can you strengthen your coaching?

How can you make a bigger difference for your clients?

Feel free to share your views below, including your current definition of a great coach 🙂