Coaching

Strategies For Growing Your Coaching Muscle

Over the last 15 years we have trained thousands of coaches in over a hundred countries. As good as any training is, it is not the end of the learning process. It is only the beginning. Here are three strategies to help you develop your coaching muscle.

 Strategy 1: Work with a coach/mentor

Strategy 2: Receive feedback

Strategy 3: Learn with and from other coaches

Let me unpack the “Why?” before the “How?”

 Why is it important to sharpen my coaching skills?

I am assuming if you are reading this blog that coaching is a muscle you exercise on a regular basis to develop people. Here are three contexts in which ministry leaders flex their coaching muscle:

  • Local Church: Pastors mobilizing disciple makers and developing leaders.
  • Denomination/Network: Leaders equipping local leaders & church planters within a suburb, city, state, region or nation.
  • International: Leaders catalysing multiplication movements across borders.

If you coach in one or more of the three categories above, then you make coaching a priority in your schedule; and developing your coaching skills is a necessity! You understand, to extend your reach that you must empower and coach. This is why coaching is an essential muscle that needs to be exercised. It is not a management tool. Coaching is an empowerment tool!

 How can I sharpen my coaching skills?  

 Strategy 1: Work with a coach/mentor

One of the most helpful experiences in my development as a coach has been to work with coach/mentors. I have tapped into a number of these coach/mentors over the years and each of them has helped to give me fresh insights and new perspectives that have caused me to rethink some of the things I have been doing.

If you want to develop your coaching muscle, find a coach/mentor: someone who is a few steps ahead of you, or has a different approach or a new perspective. Find someone who can challenge you in areas that will help you empower disciple-makers and leaders from the grass-roots to the leader of a multiplication movement.

 Strategy 2: Ask For & Receive Feedback

Most of the feedback I have received from others has been appreciated and usually helpful, but I remember the feedback report I received from my coach/mentor during my initial coach training. I felt it was a bit too harsh and so I side-stepped it and missed the window of opportunity to really engage with the results. Lesson learned! Weeks later when I picked-up the document again, I found the report and its recommendations extremely helpful.

Be prepared to accept what is genuinely helpful and reject feedback that does not accurately represent your experience and reality. Incidentally, this is a skill called “Self-Assessing” that is measured in the Online 360-degree Coach Assessment that I mention above. There are countless ways to receive feedback on your coaching. You can receive informal or formal feedback; it can be in-person, real-time or written. Personally I tend to lean from two types of feedback:

    Real-time observation:

Small group and 1-1 coaching sessions provide an opportunity for real-time feedback. The “fish-bowl” of group coaching gives participants opportunities to practice their coaching with timely feedback from individuals in the group as well as a competent facilitator. In addition, when asked in a 1-1 coaching session, feedback can be requested to give you a sense of how you are helping the other person through listening and asking questions (for instance).

    Qualitative Assessment:

Using an Online 360-degree Coach Assessment, coaches solicit feedback from people they have coached. Multiple people are asked to assess your coaching skills through the Online Coach Assessment, by indicating how you have demonstrated the essential skills of coaching when working with them. The result is a clarifying experience.

The combination of soft + hard data, group + individual, real-time + deferred makes for a robust experience to develop your coaching excellence.

Strategy 3: Learn with and from other coaches

Learning Communities provide a great opportunity for coaches to learn with and from other coaches. In the very early stages of my coaching journey I realised the impact of being around other coaches who were more experienced, more accomplished and more motivated to succeed.  When coaches participate in a “learning community”to develop their coaching skills, mutual learning occurs but only when these three virtues are evident:

  • Humility – leaders who are open to new ideas
  • Hunger- leaders who are motivated to grow in their understanding and practice of coaching
  • Emotional Intelligence – leaders with a high level of self-awareness.

Today, I’m part of a community of coaches who work together to grow their coaching ability and influence.

If you want to continue to develop your coaching muscle, then consider working with a coach/mentor, being open to receive feedback and learning with and from other coaches

If you are interested in the Online 360-degree Coach Assessment you can make contact with us at admin@resourcezone.com.au or for more information Click Here

Colin is the Director of ResourceZone International. He has 30 years of ministry experience as a pastor, college lecturer and consultant/coach to consultants, denominational leaders and local church pastors. He can be reached at info@resourcezone.com.au

 

 
 

Dr. Gary B. Reinecke is the Executive Director of InFocus and trains leaders world-wide in the coaching process and skills.  He has been coaching leaders for disciple-making, leadership development and church multiplication since 1988.  Gary co-authored the Coaching 101 Handbook and Developing Coaching Excellence.  He is a Master Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation. He can be reached at: office@infocusnet.org

 
 
 

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