Coaching Mastery

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What’s your next level as a coach?

Do you work with others? Would you like to be able to make more of a consistently positive difference in their lives?After over thirty years as a coach and teacher and more than a decade of offering coach trainings and certifications, I’ve come to see that there is both an art and a science to transformation – waking people up to their deeper nature while helping them get more out of themselves and their lives. The science is in developing an understanding of universal principles as they apply to the human experience – that is, coming to see what is true for every single human being on the planet regardless of nationality, gender, race, religion, or personal history. The art comes from recognizing that while we are all the same, no two people are alike. While “Truth with a capital ‘T’” may be universal, how it appears in your life will inevitably be different to how it appears in the lives of the people you work with and care about most.

What I’ve learned is that people can reliably learn “the science” in around 3 days. That’s not to say you can’t go deeper – I see the potential and possibility in people today in a way that makes me cringe when I think back to how it looked just a few years ago, let alone a few decades. But the basics – who and what we really are, where our experience comes from, and how change actually happens – are surprisingly simple and often easier to get a feel for than we expect.

Transformational Impact

A clip from last year’s Coaching Mastery

Developing your artistry, on the other hand – what could be labeled the craft of coaching and what I often call “coaching mastery” – is a life-long learning process. What we are learning in that process is summed up in the word “elegance” – more impact with less effort; more insight with less input; more grace with just enough grit for things to get traction in our client’s lives and move them forward.

While hierarchies aren’t real in a formal sense, I’ve found that thinking in terms of levels of understanding and experience can be a helpful way of distinguishing where you’re at and what might be some good next steps on your learning curve. So having worked with literally thousands of coaches over the past thirty years, here are some of the more recognizable levels of the learning and development process I’ve seen:

Level Two – Gaining ExperienceI once asked a group of students on Supercoach Academy to ask me every question they had about how to be more effective and impactful as a coach. After writing fifty questions up on the board, I went through them and realized that at least 48 of them could best be answered by coaching more people. So sometimes, the next step in your development as a coach is just to work with more people, do more coaching, and begin to develop a reliable feel for the difference between genuine transformation and “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”.

Level Three – Developing MasteryThere comes a certain point in everyone’s coaching career where the question changes from “is it working?” to “how can I make it work even more impactfully and elegantly with even more different kinds of people?” If you’re at this level, you’ve been in the game long enough to have accumulated numerous happy clients, some killer testimonials, and the awareness that no matter how great people think you are, you’re never more than halfway up the infinite ladder of your potential.

For you, the next step is to raise your game by taking on teachers, mentors, coaches, and clients who will challenge your beliefs about the edge of what’s possible and force you to take an honest inventory of the how you’re doing in yourself and the difference between “really helpful” and “transformative”.