Coaching Skills

Coaching requires you to leverage a wide range of skills. Successful coaching requires you to work with what is present and make choices in the moment. This means developing proficiency in many skills: 

• Listening Actively - Recognize that people communicate with more than their words. Their context, identity, environment, experiences, values and beliefs must be taken into account. Pay attention to their body language, mood, emotion and hear what is unsaid through their words and actions.
   
• Asking Powerful Questions - Ask questions that are open-ended (cannot be answered by “yes” or “no”), neutral and short. The key is to choose questions that provide the opportunity for the person you are coaching to gain new insight or reframe their perspective. Powerful questions are best applied when you are also listening actively.
   
• Reframing - Invite the person you are coaching to take an alternate point of view to broaden their range of solutions and consider multiple perspectives.
   
• Reading and Working with the Emotional Field - Coaching requires that you actively monitor the atmosphere, energy, or mood of the coaching space. As it changes during the coaching session, try to bring curiosity and reflection on it into the conversation to deepen an understanding of what's going on. The emotional field is a phrase commonly used by practitioners who have studied Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC)™.
   
• Normalizing - Create a feeling that the person you are coaching is not alone in the challenges they face. When used well, normalizing has the ability to reduce tension or frustration and open people up to new ways of thinking.
   
• Supporting with Silence - Sometimes called “awkward silence,” this is a situation where you and the person you are coaching are both quiet and present, waiting for the wisdom and intelligence of the person being coached to emerge.
   
• Taking a Meta-View - Seek to observe the situation from the highest perspective to see the whole picture, uncover new information and connect what previously seemed to be disparate information.
   
• Holding Things Lightly - When you hold something lightly you acknowledge its presence and avoid allowing the topic or information to consume the conversation or overshadow the topic at hand.
   
• Bottom-lining - Be clear and precise with your words in order to create a “mic-drop” moment. Avoid over-explaining or asking long questions that interweave too much context.
   
• Forwarding the Action - Be intentional about how the person you’re coaching will move forward in action as a result of the coaching conversation.