The disappointed coach: ‘why is it so hard?’

The disappointed coach: ‘why is it so hard?’

This coach has paid good money for her training.  Now it is six months on from that triumphant moment when she learnt that she had got her qualification. She knew it would take time to build a thriving practice but it’s still not happening. Disappointment dominates her thinking. She has just asked me to be her coaching supervisor.  Wanly, she says, ‘What am I doing wrong?’

Coaching isn’t as easy as it looks

Many people reach their forties or fifties with an overwhelming feeling that they need a change. They have often been strikingly successful in their chosen career. Yet it’s not enough. The days of active parenting are over, the mortgage has dwindled, they could coast to retirement. Yet they don’t want to. There can be a sense of having been too focused on themselves, too anxious about money, over-keen for promotion. They will commonly say, ‘I want to give something back’. In the search for what this elusive ‘something’ is, they will very probably have worked with a coach. Their coach is affable, asks a few penetrating questions, challenges politely, listens attentively and gets paid handsomely. To the untutored observer, it doesn’t look difficult. What could go wrong? Good coaching always looks effortless, but it’s the art that conceals art: much harder than it seems.

Build on your initial training with regular supervision

Good coach training will cover the four foundation skills. These are: acquiring the coaching mindset – accepting that the best help is self help and not the advice given to us by others; goal-setting; creating rapport; asking powerful questions. Thoroughly mastering them will mean you are safe to practise, but they are not enough to bring about transformation in your clients.

‘In real life’, clients do not conform to the seemingly predictable scenarios set out by well-meaning tutors like me on our training courses. Clients wriggle, they equivocate, they hesitate to say what‘s really bothering them and sometimes they don’t know themselves what this is. They get upset, they may complain. Or they thank you politely, but the work feels incomplete.

I asked one coach to bring me a recording and to listen to it himself first. By the time he was playing it to me he already knew what had gone wrong. He had filled every pause with a further question. He had offered the client pet solutions from his own experience. He had missed countless hints about the likely underlying issue. Together we looked at how and why this had happened, and what to do to prevent it happening again.

Avoid the mentoring trap

To be a coach you need to be strongly motivated by curiosity and by the wish to help people. When you have had a distinguished career, it is normal to attract clients from your own former field. You may believe that these clients yearn for your advice: they seem to want a little of your stardust. Faced with the apparently intractable nature of the issue as it is unfolded by the client and your own inexperience as a coach, you may feel the intense anxiety of wanting to be helpful yet not knowing how. You solve the problem by offering your own experience in the form of advice. You may justify it by saying that the client begged you for it: ‘Please tell me, what would you do?’

This may be what clients say they want, but do they need it? Probably not. Will they act on it? Unlikely. Were you tackling the core problem? Undoubtedly you were not. Enjoyable though these conversations may be, they are not coaching and rarely lead to further recommendations – the only way to build a coaching business.

Deepen your psychological awareness

Many people who change to coaching careers have been in previous professions where knowledge and intellectual cleverness were what was prized. I’m thinking here of people who were lawyers, accountants, HR experts, clinicians of all sorts, journalists, bankers, teachers, academics. Or they may have been managers in commercial or public sectors where they were paid to give direction and to solve other people’s problems. Few of these professions insist on learning about the byzantine nature of human behaviour. This is the essence of what you need in order to get past the beginner stage as a coach.  Otherwise, it is baffling. Client A says he wants to stop working such long hours and he can even tell you what he should do. But after a short period where he leaves work early, he is now back at his desk for 15 hours a day.  Client B is in an abusive relationship and seemingly can’t leave. How do you explain it? You’ve asked your best questions, now what?

For a briefing on how this might play out, you could read the new chapters in my recently published 5th edition: Coaching Skills: the definitive guide to being a coach, obtainable from my website.

Getting further training

Some coaches fill this gap by training in therapeutic disciplines with close links to coaching such as Transactional Analysis, Gestalt or Psychosynthesis. Others join coaching book clubs and ‘practice groups’ where people coach each other in front of supportive peers. It all helps.

Differentiating yourself

When I began as a coach more than 30 years ago there was little competition. The downside was that you had to explain wearyingly often what coaching was – and even more often, what it was NOT. Now there are tens of thousands of us and it’s a crowded market. Buyers do know what coaching is and they are discerning. They don’t want an all-purpose coach. They want someone who fits their unique need. This means specialising and differentiating. There is more on this in my book Building a Coaching Business which you can buy from my website.

Keep going

However much training and supervision you have, there is no substitute for doing the actual work. When coaches face the kind of frustration I have described here, I will ask them how long it took to get on top of their game in their previous careers. There is a thoughtful silence before they answer, ‘At least five years, possibly longer’.  Why would coaching be any different? Instant competence is impossible. There is a total beginner stage, an apprenticeship stage, an improver stage and then, assuming you have aptitude, a mastery stage. One coach was realistic from the start. She negotiated a part time contract with her then-employer and gave herself a year to reach 500 coaching hours, working exclusively with pro bono or low-bono clients. She invested in supervision every six weeks. That was four years ago. She is now a full-time coach, much in demand and is charging top rates.

Photo by Ennie Horvath