Pretty much anyone can hang a shingle and call themselves a life coach or a business coach – or any type of coach. Many coaches are perfectly adequate at what they’re doing, but they haven’t taken the necessary steps yet to become great.
If you are happy with your coaching practice but you feel like you’ve not broken through the ranks yet so that you can call yourself great, or feel as if you’re absolutely top-notch and excellent at your profession, there are steps you can take to become a great coach.
There are some personality traits and attributes that many coaches have depending upon their focus and niche. You can probably identify some of your own attributes that are necessary to hold for the type of coaching you do or want to do. What’s great is that if you know some attributes and skills that you’d like to have to make yourself and your business better you can always work on them.
Attributes and Traits Many Coaches Share:
* Self-aware to the point of brutal honesty
* Intuitive about others’ feelings
* Ability to focus on what’s important
* Excellent communicator with a great command of words
* Respectful of clients
* Able to develop creative solutions to problems
* Perceptive about the world at large
* Curious about everything but able to focus
* Loves to learn and is always looking for new tools, tactics, and techniques
* Really wants to help clients and cares about them
* Open and thankful personality
* Walks the talk
Attributes and Traits Business Owners Share:
* Organizational ability
* Strong leadership skills
* Intrinsically motivated
* Risk taker
* Seeks to learn
* Competitive
* Knows how to work hard
Pick one the one you need the most work on and spend some time each day developing that skill. To be a really great coach you need to walk the talk and be a good example of what you want for your clients. If you can’t do that, it’s kind of like the old “do as I say, not as I do” approach to parenting, and it simply does not work. It doesn’t work in parenting and it won’t work in coaching. You won’t be believable if you can’t keep your own stuff together. You need to be the model.
If you want to be a great coach, become a client to a business coach that you look up to. As you’re going through the coaching program that they’ve developed, it’s likely you’ll identify areas where you can improve yourself. A great coach is always looking for ways to improve themselves so that they can use the newfound insight with their clients to become more than a good coach – a great coach. But even more than that, to become the best person they can be.