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 theyâre interested in helping people. However, it often comes as a surprise to trainee coaches that their communication skills arenât quite as good as they thought they were.
There are 4 main reasons for this.
- Most of us take communication for granted.
- We often lack knowledge about the different ways people communicate
- We sometime lack awareness of how individual differences affect successful communication
- Weâre often accustomed to criticising other peopleâs 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. Youâre taught how to build rapport, use active listening skills, mirror clientâs 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. Iâd 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 wasnât 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. Itâs 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 canât see them. It could be theyâre distressed, theyâre thinking, they didnât understand, theyâre annoyed, theyâre distracted. You donât have any of those visual clues that you have when youâre face to face and it can be even harder to anticipate if and when you should interject.
The clientâs voice: Voices always give away a lot of different clues. Itâs often easy to pick up by the tone or pitch of the voice and how the client is feeling, including whether or not theyâre smiling. What you do miss out on when you canât see them is whether the rest of their body language is in tandem with what theyâre saying. Face to face weâve 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 canât 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 canât see each other, they can struggle to pick up whatâs being said, particularly if you speak quickly. Obviously youâre not able to mirror any of the clientâs 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. Iâm not suggesting that itâs any more difficult on the phone or Skype to stay focussed entirely on the client for 45 minutes or longer, than it is when youâre 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 donât 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 youâre communication needs to be effective for a successful client/coach relationship.
Itâs 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 weâre communicating with each other is effective or if there is anything theyâd 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
âThe single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken placeâ
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, itâs 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
Combining her business expertise, having been a business consultant for over 10 years, working on multi-millions programmes around the world and running a successful 6-figure business (she hit that figure within 9-months in business and then doubled it within the following 6 months!) and her mind expertise, being an international licensed NLP Master Practitioner & NLP Mind Coach, Frederique has developed the “Mountain Moving Mindset” programme, where she empowers business owners, entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs to master their mindset, so that they can move mountains and bring their businesses to the next level!