In this week’s guest post, coach Beverley Ireland-Symonds shares some of her thoughts about communication skills and coaching.

How effective are your communication skills?

By Beverley Ireland-Symonds

When you start training as a coach one of the first things you learn is the importance of having effective communication skills to ensure the success of the coach/client relationship.

No one starts training as a coach unless they’re interested in helping people. However, it often comes as a surprise to trainee coaches that their communication skills aren’t quite as good as they thought they were.

There are 4 main reasons for this.

1. Most of us take communication for granted.
2. We often lack knowledge about the different ways people communicate
3. We sometime lack awareness of how individual differences affect successful communication
4. We’re often accustomed to criticising other people’s communication skills but unaccustomed to reviewing our own.

Of course as soon as you start training some of these things start to become very obvious indeed. You’re taught how to build rapport, use active listening skills, mirror client’s body language, vary tone and pace as appropriate and learn the value of silence, as well as many other things.

I remember I had to work hard to change some of my non-verbal communication skills. I’d spent a lot of my working life using BSL (British Sign Language ) and Makaton (signing system) and consequently used my hands a lot when I was talking. Of course this was fine in the context of which I had used those skills, but not good when I was coaching someone.

However, it wasn’t as easy as I thought to just stop using my hands excessively. It took me about three months to stop altogether, though for sometimes afterwards, I suffered an occasional lapse in concentration and would move them unnecessarily. It’s something that I am still very conscious of and regularly review.

Not using my hands was one small area of non-verbal communication skills I had to improve on, but of course there were many others. Even though I came from a communication background and had spent many years teaching and training different aspects of written, verbal and non-verbal communication, training as an NLP Coach certainly helped to hone my skills.

However, one of the things that I was unprepared for when I started to work regularly with clients was the quite different challenges of communicating effectively using Sykpe or the phone rather than face to face.

So many of our interactions in life and our understanding of them depend on what we see, not just what we hear. So just like someone who is blind or partially sighted when you coach over the phone you have to develop stronger skills in our other senses. In this case it is our listening and oral skills that have to become even more finely tuned.

Some of the key issues include:

The use of silence: It can often be more difficult to understand why a client is silent when you can’t see them. It could be they’re distressed, they’re thinking, they didn’t understand, they’re annoyed, they’re distracted. You don’t have any of those visual clues that you have when you’re face to face and it can be even harder to anticipate if and when you should interject.

The client’s voice: Voices always give away a lot of different clues. It’s often easy to pick up by the tone or pitch of the voice and how the client is feeling, including whether or not they’re smiling. What you do miss out on when you can’t see them is whether the rest of their body language is in tandem with what they’re saying. Face to face we’ve all seen a client say they really do want to do something, whilst giving themselves away by shifting their eyes or shaking their heads at the same time.

The coaches voice: The flip side to not being able to see the client and therefore you need to listen even more carefully to what is being said, is that the client can’t see you and therefore you need to be even more aware of your own, tone pitch and pace. Many people are unaware of how differently they sound over the phone. When people can’t see each other, they can struggle to pick up what’s being said, particularly if you speak quickly. Obviously you’re not able to mirror any of the client’s body language but you can mirror their tone and pace to build rapport.

Staying focussed. As a coach our client would expect us to stay in the now. I’m not suggesting that it’s any more difficult on the phone or Skype to stay focussed entirely on the client for 45 minutes or longer, than it is when you’re face to face, but it is a different experience and again with visual clues missing it is the listening skills that take on even greater importance.

Whether coaching face to face or over the phone or Skype, I don’t believe one is easier than the other, they are just different, and whether you choose to exclusively use one or the other or do a combination of them both, the most important thing to remember is that you’re communication needs to be effective for a successful client/coach relationship.

It’s with that in mind that I use 3 specific strategies for checking the ongoing effectiveness of my communication:

1. I always review my coaching sessions, including a specific section where I evaluate specific areas of communication and make notes of what I might do differently or need to improve on.

2. I occasionally run a survey with my clients (using survey monkey) where they answer some questions anonymously about my communication style. This not only keeps me on my toes, but has made me make specific changes to my practice.

3. At set intervals during a group of coaching sessions, I ask the client whether they think the way we’re communicating with each other is effective or if there is anything they’d like me to do differently.(I always remain aware though that some might tell me what they think I want them to say, rather than what they think)

The reason why I adopt this approach is because I always keep in mind this famous quote from George Bernard Shaw

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”

I have this quote above my desk in my office and always thought about it when I was a senior manager is a different working environment. However, it’s just important to me as a coach. Yes, I can assume a lot about how effective I am as a communicator as my clients achieve and/or exceed their goals, but I never want to become complacent about it. Communication is too important for that.

How often to you check the effectiveness of your communication skills?

About the Author/Further Resources

Beverley Ireland-Symonds has worked in different fields including the NHS, travel and tourism, fashion, as well 16 years in adult and further education. As a qualified NLP Coach and Certified Practitioner, she works with clients to improve their confidence and image and has developed an online coaching programme for people returning to work after a break. She also runs a training and consultancy company specialising in communication skills and language development. You can follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn