5 Keys to a Successful Coaching Conversation

There are some fundamental things with any successful coaching session such as asking questions and certainly listening and I want to take a different perspective to broaden leaders minds of what it truly takes to have a successful coaching session. Here are the five strategies:

1) Be Prepared-as simple as this sounds don't just show up mentally or rushed to get to the session, rather be prepared with absolute relentless intention of helping someone discover their strengths and opportunities to improve.

2) PLEASE PRACTICE - we cannot improve what we do not practice and coaching conversations are about asking questions and listening and demonstrating active listening paraphrasing back to somebody what they've understood. These things simply take practice and cannot arbitrarily be performed. It's much like telling an athlete don't show up for this week's practice but go out and make sure you have a great game… If this only worked!

3) Realize a successful coaching conversation is not one session rather a series of sessions woven together so don't try to solve or fix or address things in just one sitting.

4) Wait… Wait… Wait… Before you assume you know what the issue is and you try to fix it too soon when in fact coaching conversations are about people who self discover and utilize their strengths and become aware of their opportunities to improve. One of the toughest things even though sometimes were right is getting there before the people were coaching get there.

5) Remember it's a conversation not a fix-it session. Often at workshops or public speaking engagements people will bring up comments such as "my employees issue" or "my team's problem is" or "the person I'm coaching situation is" ... All of these indicate an approach to fix the person when in fact coaching is nothing more than a conversation. Sometimes we don't fix anything but the conversation itself has tremendous value because it can build trust and create commonality between the coach and the person being coached.

If you are interested in becoming a master coaching conversation practitioner please attend this Friday, August 30 at 11 AM webinar on the Coaching Conversation Training Series where were announcing a fixed price unlimited training specific to mastering the coaching conversation: Join Here