[This User’s Guide to Coaching series explains everything you need to know to successfully engage and work with a coach—a life coach, a creativity coach, an executive coach, any sort of coach. It accompanies Dr. Maisel’s latest book, The Coach’s Way, described as “the finest resource available for anyone who wants to develop or enrich their coaching abilities.” Grab your copy now!]
Therapy has been around for a long time now, for more than a hundred years. That has allowed for countless client satisfaction studies and outcome studies to be conducted. The results of these studies have been remarkably uniform and consistent. What best predicts a good outcome and high client satisfaction are the therapist’s warmth, genuineness and empathy. It doesn’t matter how young or how old the therapist is, whether he or she is male or female, or what theoretical orientation the therapist adopts. What matters is that the therapist is warm, genuine, and empathetic.
It also matters that the therapist is experienced as competent. Clients find it hard to form a relationship with a therapist who is anxious and disorganized, who doesn’t seem to have much of a clue as to what might help, or who provides only platitudes, homilies, and rote responses. Therapy clients are looking for someone who appears to know what he or she is doing. We don’t want our surgeon to fumble—and we don’t want our therapist or coach to fumble, either.
Coaching, being a relatively new helping specialty, has produced far fewer outcome studies and satisfaction studies than has therapy. The ones so far conducted relate more to success than to satisfaction: did the client meet his or her announced goals? But it’s reasonable to suppose that the same qualities and characteristics that mark a therapist as effective mark a coach. As you look for your coach, have it in mind that you are looking for someone competent, genuine, and warm.
When you begin the search for your coach, you might begin with word-of-mouth recommendations from the people in your circle whom you trust and respect. That’s always a reasonable place to start. But if you can’t land on a coach that way, you’ll probably end up hunting on the Internet—and what a sea of choices you’ll encounter there! All those bright, charming websites with smiling faces, success stories, and glowing endorsements. How will you choose?
As you try to distinguish among the coaches you read about on the Internet, try to look for those key qualities that make for successful helpers: warmth, genuineness, empathy, and competence. It is rather less important that a coach have a long list of credentials, make a lot of promises, provide many endorsements, or announce a signature method. What is important is that he or she feel genuine and competent. This is rather the same task as dealing with those endless profiles on a dating site: and, hopefully, someone will stand out!
Of course, coaches can present themselves one way on their website—as warm, human, open, empathetic, competent, and all the rest—and not actually be that way in person. Ultimately, there is no substitute for having a session. It makes good sense to opt for a single session, whether free or paid, rather than commit to a package of sessions or a long-term commitment. You can’t know from the coach’s website what exactly you are getting. Indeed, the website may be rather better than the coach! Have a first session and find out.
In the end, just as with dating, finding an apartment, or searching for a job, you will have to get out there, put yourself out there, and see the real thing. You may land immediately on a coach who is a great fit … or it may take some time. Don’t feel committed to a coach just because you met with him or her once. By all means go in with some optimism and openness, but also be careful. You may have made a match right off the bat—or not. The only way to know is to see.
**
“The Coach’s Way is possibly the finest resource available for anyone who wants to develop or enrich their coaching abilities. This new book is designed to give coaches the confidence and structure in their practice that will generate real results for their clients. Any- one who makes a living in the coaching arena will benefit from Dr. Maisel’s tremendous experience and training as a therapist, coach, and human. I’m so glad to have this book as a guide for my own coaching work and will recommend it to many others in the helping professions.”— Jacob Nordby, author of The Creative Cure: How Finding and Freeing Your Inner Artist Can Heal Your Life
**
Read Part One Here: The Coach’s Way: User’s Guide to Coaching
Read Part Two Here: Can You Tolerate the Truth?
Read Part Three Here: Can I Collaborate?
Read Part Four Here: Picking a Kind of Helper
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock