Coaching Field Guide
Helping people along a path to success isn’t easy. Each person has their own individual challenges and opportunities and, as their coach, you need to help them identify them, work through them, and stay motivated.
At the same time, you need to gain a clear understanding of each client’s situation and track progress during their journey.
This guide will help you understand how to use all the different tools to help your clients along that path to success. You’ll be able to improve your own effectiveness and efficiency while increasing your clients’ achievement of their goals.
Listen to the Course Introduction
Coaching Field Guide Notebook
Use this supplemental notebook to stay focused on what matters most
for both your coaching sessions and your practice itself.
Here’s a quick snapshot of what’s covered and what’s in the course.
Introducing…
The Coaching Field Guide & Notebook
Intaking Your Coaching Clients
Coaching takes a great deal of preparation and outside work, but the most important things will get done during the coaching session itself. In order to make them worth your client’s time and money, your coaching sessions need to be as efficient and focused as possible. A time will come when all of this is second nature, but when you’re just starting out as a coach, it takes some conscious effort to run good coaching sessions.
Preparing for a Coaching Session
Many coaches believe that, to make the most out of their first coaching sessions with clients, it’s important for clients to perform an honest self-assessment before they even have their first session. These coaches feel that new clients can’t just walk in empty-handed or they’ll waste time with basic questions.
Asking the Right Questions
High impact questions are questions that make a person think more deeply about an issue. Closed-ended questions result in a yes or no and often don’t get any deeper than that. Open-ended questions can solve problems, but they may also just generate a list of options or ideas. High impact questions get the client out of their set way of thinking and presents problems to them with an urgency that leads them to take action. They deal in the here and now.
How to Do a SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
A SWOT analysis is a tool used by both corporations and individuals to form the big picture of a situation and assess which direction to take in solving problems or reaching a goal. On an individual level, a SWOT analysis takes a goal and analyzes a person’s skills and external factors to determine which factors are favorable or unfavorable to them or their goal. This is something you should do with your client early in your coaching sessions or possibly as part of the initial self-assessment.
Tips for Taking Action
In the course of your coaching sessions, both you and your client have actions steps to take. Both of you need to be committed and accountable to each other. These are tasks that must be completed between coaching sessions in order for you to move forward.
Creating an Individualized Coaching Plan
The main goal of your first coaching session with a client is to create a plan for all of the sessions that will follow. It establishes a form of contract between coach and client. This first session is also referred to as an ‘intake’ session. It’s a session in which both of you take in information about each other. It’s important for you in learning about your client and the same goes for them.
Anatomy of a Coaching Session
New coaches, especially, will prefer to not enter into the first coaching session with a client cold. Having a base of information about the client in advance makes the first coaching session far more efficient. You won’t be wasting time gathering information that’s just as easily obtained beforehand. The client is paying you not just for the hour you spend with them, but also for this essential preparation time.
Root Cause Analysis - Ask Why?
When we tackle problems in business or personal life, we have a tendency to go after symptoms and not root causes. Root Cause Analysis is a method used to figure out these underlying reasons for a problem. However, it’s not used only when there is a problem or challenge, but also when thing are going well. When your business is strong, it’s good to discover the source of this strength so that you can repeat or reinforce it.
A Root Cause Analysis is based on asking ‘why’ multiple times until you discover the source.
Helping Clients Set Priorities
Your most important job as a coach is to help clients prioritize and start taking action on the things they need to do to improve their lives and their business. You have to help them not only discover what needs to be done, but also get started doing it. This is how they get closer to their goal and when the client succeeds, the coach does as well. When they see benefits, they realize the value of your coaching, stay with you, and tell others about you.