What Makes a Coach? - Part 2

What does it take to become an effective coach? Most people’s first instinct would be the basic listening and asking skills coach’s use. The skills are only one facet of what makes a coach-and if your focus never moves beyond skills, you likely won’t get the transformational results coaching promises.   Last month we looked at the “Heart of a Coach”.  Today we will look at more of the qualities of an effective coach.

The Skills of a Coach

This is the familiar part of coaching: listening, asking powerful questions, getting by-in, helping people take responsibility for their lives.  We won’t explore this in-depth here, except to say that it is crucial to ground your understanding of coaching techniques to become an effective coach. However, to really use the skills effectively, you need to know why you were doing them.

Christian Outreach Centres “Introduction to Coaching” and “Developing Coaches” programs explore these skills in depth.

The Lifestyle of a Coach

Here’s another widely overlooked part of being a coach. Your life is the reservoir you draw from when you work with others. Coaching is the art of drawing things out of people; and it’s hard to draw out of others if you haven’t dug your own well and learn to draw deeply from it. "The purpose in a man’s mind is like deep water; the men of understanding will draw it out (Proverbs 20:5)." That understanding comes from your own life experience. For instance, many people come to coaches to get perspective on their circumstances. How will you help them gain a life changing attitude adjustment unless you have paid the price to seek out new perspective in your own difficult places? Great coaching is drawing out of the well of a great life.

We’re not talking here about accumulating knowledge or information to share with others. We are talking about being fully engaged with life. Coaches are people who help others live life at a high level. To do that requires you to live a significant, growing, purposeful, heart engaged life.

One way you do that is to meet God and allow him to shape you through your circumstances. If you constantly find the purposes of God in what is happening to you, and lean into them, the people you coach will as well.  Living in a high level means cultivating deep relationships, giving and receiving genuine feedback, loving and grieving, going out of your way to find personal wholeness. To the degree that you are needy or are still grasping for something you don’t have in life, you’ll work out that neediness on those you coach.

Telling and fixing people are less habits than they are symptoms of neediness: we fix because we need to be fixers, not because people need to be fixed. When you are needy, what you do always seems to end up being about you.  Coaching, on the other hand, is consistently, relentlessly, being all about the other person. Only people who have a high degree of wholeness are truly free to be about others and not all about themselves.

Even though coaching is nondirective, it is as true as ever that the primary thing you have to give to others in Ministry is what Christ has done in you. Great coaching springs out of fully embracing the work of God in your own life. Those who have embraced his work in themselves are best at helping others to embrace it as well.

For more information on seeking a coach or being trained in coaching skills, contact Gary Hourigan on 0412110087 or hipursuits@optusnet.com.au

(adapted from Article by Tony Stoltzfus)