Developing your coaching presence is a way of being with clients that accelerates growth and change through connection. It the ability to create voluntary relationship with the client. In order to establish a successful coaching presence, a professional coach must display the following traits:
- Present and adaptable.
- understanding, mindful, calm, zestful, friendly and courageous.
- reaches and trusts their insight.
- Sees different ways to work with the client.
- Has a great sense of humor.
- Confidently shifts outlooks and explores new possibilities.
- Shows confidence in working with strong emotions.
In a digital age where human connection has gone into the background, people are longing more than ever for real-life connections. Therefore, it is beneficial for coaches to master the skill of coaching presence to provide that human touch to clients in a decent, unprejudiced and safe way.
How Can You Develop Coaching Presence?
As a coach, you are usually taught skills such as active listening, open investigations and keen reflections. Developing your coaching presence is done through practice of using relational qualities called being skills, which are simply skills coaches use to build growth-promoting relationships and also demonstrate a coach’s way of being when they are most accurate. By forming a relationship with clients, coaches can discover character strengths, or rather the talents or capacities that their clients most value and use most expertly. Similarly, as a coach, it is also important to discover and use your own strengths.
The more coaches develop and rise from their own and their clients’ strengths, the more powerful and effective their coaching will be. As a coach, it is important to not only consider your clients, but also to set-aside judgment and be understanding and softhearted. This way you respect another person’s experience including their feelings, needs and desires. Empathy is also described as a way to understand and connect with someone’s experience in a positive and healthier way.
Let’s now focus on how to develop your coaching presence. Here are some ways to do so:
- Self-awareness – When you are coaching, it’s important to be the actual you. However, you cannot coach by showing up as the unpolished, untamed, involuntary you. Develop your coaching presence by growing your self-awareness through recording, analyzing your needs, wants and values, and acknowledging your personality patterns.
- Coaching Review – After each coaching session, ponder on your coaching presence. Instead of surveying what you did as a coach, study who you were as a coach. This includes the internal conversations you were having, especially at the deep levels- the mental forms that occur without words. Notice the motivations, urges, instincts, needs, and beliefs that affected your coaching presence.
- Competence – Your coaching presence is not identical with your coaching ability, but the two are linked. The more competent you are as a coach, the stronger and more specific your coaching presence will be. A well-developed coaching skill set will also help ensure that you are not pretending as a coach. For developing your coaching presence, work on strengthening your coaching skills.
- Confidence – Nobody wants a coach who is unclear about his abilities. Increased confidence cannot transform an inadequate coach into a skilled coach, but it can ensure that more and more of your coaching ability get signified. As your confidence grows, you’ll appear as someone who trusts yourself, the client, and the coaching process. That’s the kind of person your client wants you to be.
- Credibility – This is about the client’s image of you. If there is anything obstructing your client from trusting you, remove it. It’s very important to develop your coaching presence.
Developing coaching presence allows the client to connect with their inner self. Coaching presence also contributes to trust between the coach and the client and leads to superior and lasting end results. Developing coaching presence helps clients unconsciously develop their own presence, thus moving from quick remedies to permanent solutions.