When learning how to effectively coach, you undergo a personal journey.

The journey towards mastery in coaching, moving from mentoring (giving advice) to coaching (non-directive), is a journey of ups and down. In Anne Scoular’s Journey to Mastery, she explains the process of moving from a comfort zone of purely mentoring to purely coaching and how difficult it can be. And so, when learning how to coach effectively, one tends to undergo a life changing personal growth and development journey.

To provide high-quality executive coaching, a good coach will learn, through psychometrics and other tools, where their strengths and weaknesses lie. This allows you to understand how best you can work with your strengths while being aware of your weaknesses in future coaching conversations. As a coach, you will in turn help your clients pull out from themselves their own perceived strengths and weaknesses to find the most effective answers and solutions (that are already within them) to identify and solve their dilemmas.

By the end of your journey to becoming a coach, you will find yourself with an array of tools and skills at your disposal. Active listening, being non-directive, focused attention, questioning – these are some of the skills that one Meyler Campbell Mastered Alumnus said “should stay with you indefinitely”. These skills will not only have a positive impact on your coaching and leadership communication skills, but also on personal relationships. Your ability to truly listen to those you care about will greatly strengthen those relationships, as you provide an empathetic ear to them and make them feel heard. As Stephen R Covey would say “The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply”.

You won’t necessarily be embarking on a coaching journey looking for personal growth and development, but you will find that you most definitely experience it.