Being a Coach

What’s it like being a coach? Have you ever considered becoming a professional coach? What attitude would you need to have? Do you need some specific personality traits or maybe a psychology background? What does it mean to be a coach and what does it look or feel like?

Read on to check if coaching profession is the right choice for you.

First of all you do not have to have a degree in psychology to work successfully as a coach. This is one of the most common questions asked about the coaching profession. However, as you’re going to be working with people, it is important to be interested, to be curious, about people; their development, the challenges that they face and how they operate in today’s world. You don’t have to be a psychologist as your role as a coach is NOT about giving advice, proposing solutions and fixing problems. As a coach you follow the process that is at the core of all quality coaching sessions. All answers in this process come from a client. The coach might help elicit them but the source is the client.

To offer coaching at the highest professional standard, coaches want to provide current and up to date services in response to what clients are looking for and the challenges they face. Being aware of the needs of the clients and being familiar with the client’s reality, are imperative to being successful in this profession. A coach that has insights into their client’s expectations can prepare their offer respectively.

There’s something important to understand right from the start

Although it’s called the coaching profession (because it absolutely is) being and becoming a true coach is a life style, it’s a way of life. Why? During the Coaching Diploma course each student learns the necessary techniques, tools and skills. They also develop their own unique style of coaching. They also apply all their new knowledge and understanding to their own life first. So each coach who graduates successfully from the coaching course knows exactly what their clients go through in a coaching process and what they can potentially achieve if they stay engaged and committed. How does the coach know? Because they have been in the same situation. Before a coach offers his services to clients as a qualified professional, they experience coaching, they use it effectively for themself and they are coached by others. As a result change happens.

The client in the coaching process discovers new information, changes ways of thinking, habits, approaches and sometimes even their way of living. They discovers their passion, goals and their wishes, wants and needs. This is exactly the same experience of a student during their coaching education. Can it be therefore considered as a 9 am – 5pm job? Absolutely not.

It doesn’t mean however that the coach never stops coaching. It doesn’t mean that as a coach you treat every conversation, even a friendly chat as a coaching session. Referring to coaching as a life style, I describe attitudes, habits and ways of thinking. If as a coach I encourage clients to believe in themselves, focus on levels of success instead of so called failures (not my usual vocabulary), what will be my image if I don’t follow these principles myself? If I run assertiveness workshops, what will happen to my credibility if I don’t apply the techniques I introduce, in my own relationships?

Your purpose

Every person who is a student on a coaching course is always encouraged to discover their own purpose in life. Not as a practicing coach but as a human being. Mark Twain wrote that “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Every student searches for their own answer to this question during the coaching course. Even if as a result they will not practice coaching professionally, the knowledge they gain during the course is invaluable in their own lives. They learn about human beings and therefore they learn about themselves.

Are you ready?

To be a great professional coach you must be ready to change. This is also what clients have to be prepared for in a coaching process. You want to be aware that not everything will be as you want it to be, because if you are ready for change, you are ready to really get to know yourself. You will possibly discover things that you may not like or truths about yourself that you will immediately want to change. And that’s great because with coaching you CAN.

Do you have any predispositions to learn coaching? What are they? If you have an open mind, accept that you are not always right and that other options and points of view are also respectable, if you can accept the role of a coach as a guide and facilitator rather than an expert, if you are interested in humans and the world around you, coaching might be the right choice for you.

The reasons why students sign up for a Coaching Diploma are not always purely practical. Apart from an obvious opportunity for an additional income and success, people choose this path to first understand what value they have to offer others. As soon as they become aware of it, they start by adding this value to their own lives. All other achievements, benefits and profit can only be a consequence of this realisation.

Are you ready for this “new life” and to practice coaching professionally? The answer is yours.

Author : Joanna Sobczak, PSG