As a coach, you have to always keep learning and improving your skills to stay relevant and consistently deliver high-quality services.
Trends are currently changing faster than ever, and virtually every field of coaching and education is subject to constant innovation. This means that even the most successful coaches have to be aware that knowledge and coaching styles can quickly become outdated.
Without enough investment into your coaching skills, you might notice that:
- You have a hard time connecting with new clients
- Your existing clients are becoming less engaged
- You feel like you’re not progressing your career
So how do you acquire new skills for effective coaching or improve your current coaching style?
In this guide, we go over the most important skills every coach needs and list actionable tips for improving coaching skills.
Skip ahead:
- What skills do you need to be a good coach?
- When is it time to revisit your coaching skills?
- 10 ways to improve your coaching skills
What skills do you need to be a good coach?
Before diving into the specific skills that make a good coach, let’s define coaching itself:
Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance.
— SIR JOHN WHITMORE, COACHING FOR PERFORMANCE (1992)
Coaching is different from mentoring. A good mentor offers their advice and experience; a good coach asks lots of guiding questions to help their client find the answer for themselves.
In this way, coaching is very future-centric, which also sets it apart from therapy and counseling (often focused on analyzing the past).
There are lots of coaching styles that suit different types of clients. Some clients, especially if they are early in their journey, need more direction and hand-holding. For others, simply voicing their ideas is enough.
Good coaches have to meet people where they are.
To become great at coaching conversations, you need to consistently improve a few essential coaching skills.
Coach with empathy
In any coaching course or session, make sure to pay full attention to the other person’s needs, not your own. Don’t think about how you’d do things. Instead, put yourself in your client’s shoes, and ask good questions so that they are able to figure out their own path through self-discovery.
Be a good listener
Active listening is critical to any type of coaching.
Try to be as attentive as possible, without jumping to conclusions. More often than not, your clients are going to find the answer themselves while explaining their thinking to you.
Stay calm under pressure
It’s essential that your clients stay as relaxed and comfortable as possible during your coaching sessions. This means you have to be calm and present, no matter the topic of conversation or any external pressures.
Our body language gives us away. And if you’re anxious, your client will start to mirror that anxiety, which will interfere with the coaching process.
Check your biases and don’t judge
Everyone is different. While it’s easy to look at someone through the lens of your own experience, what worked for you wouldn’t necessarily work for them. Your mission is not to impose solutions but to help your clients find their own. Remove any judgment from your coaching sessions — approaching each clients’ unique circumstances with an open mind will help you help them.
Communicate in an encouraging and respectful way
Being supportive of your clients is critical because it creates a safe space and fosters a good coaching relationship. Showing that you care about and respect them can help them open up with more ease — but it requires strong communication skills.
Focus on people’s talents and potential
Growth is a lifelong process. It’s always possible to improve something.
A good coach can identify the inner critic who limits their own potential and set high-enough expectations to inspire clients to act.
Be confident to inspire confidence
Being confident in your coaching process doesn’t mean doing the work for your clients. Instead, your role is to inspire them to demonstrate commitment and take responsibility for their own success.
The combination of the skills above, without doubt, will ensure more effective coaching. But what are some signs that your coaching might need a little boost?
When is it time to revisit your coaching skills?
Consistently working on your coaching skills, even as a successful coach, is a great idea. The best time to improve your qualifications is when you have plenty of clients and feel on top of your game. You’ll be easily motivated and absorb new ideas faster.
But there are also a few red flags that might suggest you should take a critical look at your coaching and potentially seek ways to get better.
You’re new to coaching
As with any other line of work, getting good at coaching requires lots of practice.
Managers who know how to coach employees and team members often try to jump into a coaching career full-time, without realizing that helping employees develop inside a corporation is not the same as guiding someone to realize their true potential in a non-work-related context.
So developing coaching skills at the very beginning is critical for your later success as a coach.
Your clients are not as engaged as they used to be
Even if you’ve been relying on a tried, well-thought-out coaching program for a long time, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to work forever. At some point, you might see that your clients are not as enthusiastic as they used to be.
This is the time to look for another approach or plan of action for your coaching.
Your work has become less satisfying
It could be that it’s not the clients who are less engaged — but you. You might not find your career as exciting as it used to be when you first started.
Whether it’s the process, results, or the overall purpose of your coaching, pausing and reevaluating your approach is the first step to bring you back on track.
You’ve been doing things the same way for a long time
Today, the world is literally changing before our eyes. Anyone who doesn’t want to be left behind has to change along with it.
So if your coaching style hasn’t evolved over the years, it’s likely that you’ll benefit from revisiting your process and finding where it could be improved.
10 ways to improve your coaching skills
Coaching is a powerful way to help others progress and develop unique strengths. But to maximize your coaching potential, you need to make sure that you continuously reassess your coaching skills.
Here are 6 ideas you can revisit any time you’re thinking about how you could make your coaching practice better.
Never stop learning
Learning is a life-long pursuit. If you’re not constantly getting better, is your coaching business stalling?
Thanks to the Internet, the variety and depth of available learning experiences is pretty much endless. From online conferences, to one-day workshops, to university courses, and more. That’s besides industry newsletters, podcasts, websites, YouTube, and TikTok.
In the coaching process, you should lead by example. Whether it’s management development or leadership skills, you should always have fresh examples and case studies on hand to back up your guidance.
Set a learning budget for yourself and make it a priority to learn something new every few months.
Find a coach for yourself
Being a coach doesn’t automatically make you an all-knowing expert who can resolve any situation.
In fact, coaches need coaches too. You need to be able to ask someone questions and see what’s going on from a different perspective. Being a trainee will, in turn, make you a better coach yourself. It will help you learn how it feels to be guided in different ways, which will give you more empathy when working with your own clients. As well, you’ll be able to see how they use various techniques in practice which may give you inspiration for your own work.
If you can’t find a coach in your own niche or community, try watching another coach online. For example, see 10 ways that Jo Kelly coaches her acting clients.
Set clear expectations for your clients
Coaching is not just having simple conversations. There is a clear goal for every session as well as long-term goals your clients are trying to achieve.
For any coaching methodology to work as expected, you need to set expectations that both you and the client are aligned on. Only then can you build out a plan that will help them improve.
At the same time, your client should be able to revisit their goals and vision as their priorities change.
Develop a template for your coaching sessions
The best coaches have several repeatable models that they rely on to keep their sessions structured and effective.
Models are situational and give you time-tested tools to improve performance. They are created and deployed depending on the context and environment. For example, models for leadership coaching can be different from the ones you’d use when you coach employees.
One of the most famous coaching models is GROW, first explained by Sir John Whitmore in his book Coaching for Performance. GROW stands for:
- Goal: Both short- and long-term goals have to be set clearly
- Reality: Explore the current situation the client is in
- Obstacles and options: Identify what prevents the client from achieving their goals and what are the opportunities for moving forward
- Way forward: Transform the best opportunity into an action-based plan
GROW has been used a lot in corporate and executive coaching for over 20 years to improve learner engagement and retention. But there are dozens of other models out there for any area of coaching. SMART, for example, can help you create effective goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Knowing a few models and switching between them will have an immediate effect on your coaching versatility.
Continuously experiment with new strategies
Even if you have a tried-and-true template that you’ve used for years, it’s a good idea to keep experimenting with new strategies. Not only does this help your clients practice different skill sets and approaches, but it also lets you see if new tactics can actually drive higher performance than your existing set.
Understanding a client’s learning style is a good first step to help you interpret how to adjust their sessions. Verbal and auditory learners may prefer talking out ideas with you, whereas a kinesthetic (hands-on) learner might prefer working through templates and worksheets together.
As a best practice, try to mix in one new element into each of your templates every time you use it. Slight tweaks over time will help you find what works best for you and your clients. More than likely, you’ll also see that some adjustments to the template work better for some clients and different adjustments work better for the rest. Each client is different so continuous experimentation helps you meet them where they’re at.
Additionally, think about how you can adjust the sessions themselves to give your clients more flexibility. For example, a spontaneous five-minute phone call can often do as much as a scheduled two-hour session. Or, you might consider replacing a virtual component with an in-person component, or vice versa.
Practice active listening
If there’s any single skill that can be foundational to good coaching, it’s active listening.
Active listening means not being distracted and not using the time your clients are talking to think about what you’re going to say next.
To improve active listening:
- Focus on everything your client is saying
- Maintain eye contact
- Ask clarification questions
- Stay on topic for as long as your client has something new to say
- Paraphrase and summarize what your client has said
- Give body language like nodding your head that shows you are following along
Really listening to your clients helps build trust and lets them open up. It can even show you what your clients are not saying (by watching their body language).
Related: Use this free coaching session template to have more consistent, productive coaching calls.
Revisit goals regularly
Setting a schedule for your goals helps ensure that you’re hitting important milestones on time. This is important for your own professional development as well as the development of the clients that you’re working with.
For your own goals, create a plan to check in on short-term goals at least once a week and measure progress on long-term goals once a month. For your clients, make a practice out of asking them about their goals at the start of each session.
Remember that it’s definitely okay to move goals if needed. Sometimes, as you move closer to a goal, you realize if it is actually attainable or if the situation has changed and affected your ability to meet the original objective. Reviewing and adjusting your goals often will make sure that you’re setting up a sustainable and realistic path to success.
Connect with industry peers
Even if you have your own mentor and have a strong feedback and experimentation cycle with your own clients, you can still benefit from connecting with your peers. It is another way to learn about new best practices that can help clients achieve their goals faster. As well, building industry relationships is important for building more brand awareness that could later help you earn new coaching clients.
One of the biggest benefits to having a network of like-minded coaching peers is that they are a wonderful resource to bounce ideas and challenging questions off of. Use them as a sounding board for big business decisions or for getting ideas on how to manage a tricky situation with a client.
The best places to meet peers are through certification programs, industry events, and online learning communities.
Focus on accountability
Your coaching clients are paying you to help them meet their goals. And as a coach, you’re preparing to continuously improve your own skill sets to stand out in your field. Neither can happen if you’re not prioritizing accountability.
Ways to improve accountability as a coach include:
- Fact-checking materials and resources before sharing them with clients
- Showing up to sessions on time or communicating far in advance if you believe you won’t be able to make it one week
- Responding to feedback and questions in a timely manner
- Staying aligned to your goals and key objectives that you’ve set for yourself and your clients
- Being true to who you are and not taking on clients that don’t align with your niche offering
- Tracking data that relates to your service offerings and using it to fuel your business growth
Communication, trust, and honesty are at the core of improving accountability. Prioritizing this will help you build strong relationships with your clients that can lead to potential upsells, referrals, and positive reviews down the line – all things that will help you earn more revenue or industry reputation!
Ask your clients for feedback
One of the fastest ways to improve your coaching skills is to ensure you’re always getting timely feedback from your clients.
The feedback process can be as simple as asking a few questions after every session or sending out an anonymous survey to all your clients every quarter or so. Make sure to include open-ended questions so that you get the deepest insights, rather than short “yes” and “no” answers that don’t provide a ton of context.
Discuss the feedback you get with your own coach and create actionable steps to make your coaching conversations even more effective. If you’ve received your feedback directly from a client, also make sure to thank you for their time and effort to deliver the insights as it’s not always easy to provide constructive criticism. This helps build trust and make it more likely that they’ll give you more feedback in the future, too.
Where to go from here
With all the coaching skills you can improve on using the tips above, why not share what you know and scale your coaching business?
Try out Thinkific’s Coaching & Webinars feature to host your coaching sessions, consulting calls, and workshops all in the same platform with your coaching community! Coaching & Webinars even makes it easy to get started by using AI to create your coaching session landing pages, so you get your precious time back.
Use Thinkific to make a bigger impact on your clients and earn more revenue — without trading your time for money.
This blog was originally published in May 2022, it’s since been updated in June 2024.
