Next week I am running my first ever training on coaching-type skills. As part of my coaching diploma I have written and I am co-presenting a one day training on questioning and listening skills for coaching.
Even so, I do feel like a fraud.
Sure, I’ve read a lot of books on the subject and I am a practitioner of all of the skills and concepts that I’m presenting, yet at the same time I am no expert. I am still in the “conscious competence” stage for most of the coaching skills I am training.
Sure, I understand that being able to communicate these skills to others, running exercises to help other people’s learning, is going to help me learn, yet I can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s not right for me to be training them.
In many areas I’m becoming very skilled. For example, at the core of coaching is the ability to spot limiting beliefs and be able to help the client step outside of their “map” and see new choices, unconstrained by assumptions that are holding problems in place. In general conversation these jump out at me as if illuminated by neon lights. Which is great, it’s taken me quite a few months to become attentive enough to get to this stage. Unfortunately knowing where to go from that point often leaves me lost for words, wondering which of the many coaching techniques I should apply. That isn’t to say I don’t take the client somewhere, I still get very good feedback about my coaching skills, it’s just for me personally it is affecting my confidence in coaching “awkward” clients and, of course, my ability to demonstrate that which I am going to explain.
Of course this skill will become unconscious in time, I already find this very easy when dealing with “business” problems, it’s translating or generalising that skill in to client situations and being confident to pace and lead the client to a better place that I have to work on.
Some might say I’m being self-critical, I say reflective, and that’s exactly what I created this blog for! If anyone fancies coaching me on this situation, feel free!
