10 Best Coaching Tips for Highly Successful Business Coaches
Here are 10 fundamental coaching tips for ultimate success in your coaching business:
Start with Your Habits
Know Your Strengths and Go Deep In Those Areas
Continue to Strengthen Your Knowledge
Be Great at Asking Questions
Empathy for the Whole Person
Create a Structure That Works
Check-in and Often
Use Data in the Analysis
Celebrate Progress, not Perfection
Practice, and then Practice Some More
Start with Your Habits
As a highly successful business coach, it’s probably a good idea to have really good habits yourself. If one of the keys that you are instilling in your clients are good morning or evening routines and you are burning the candle at both ends, how can you show up as your best self to your clients? Knowing what keeps you high-performing - whether that means you are in bed by 9 am or at the gym at 6:30 am, it’s important to have effective habits so you can model that for your clients. Two of my favorite books about habits are Atomic Habits, by James Clear and The Miracle Morning, by Hal Elrod.
Know Your Strengths and Get Deep Expertise in Those Areas
It’s really easy to want to be something for everyone. We all have complex skills we have acquired along the way through our education or throughout our careers. Take out a piece of paper and list all of your skills that you could coach someone on. Then rank them in order of strengths, starting with your highest skilled areas. Notate how much experience you have in those top areas and how you gained that knowledge. It’s better to be a master of a few than a jack of all. Also, know your personal coaching style - are you a drill sergeant or are you more of a cheerleader, or somewhere in between. There is a place for all types and someone looking specifically for you.
Continue to Strengthen Your Knowledge
Albert Einstein said “When you cease to learn, you cease to grow. And when you cease to grow, you cease to improve, get better, move forward, and just sort of begin to - exist.” Along with understanding your strengths, a high-performing business coach is always reading, learning, and sharpening his or her skills. Whether it’s in the specific area of expertise or in personal development, leaders are learners which brings a level of perspective to be shared with your clients. Having a great business library ready allows you to be an invaluable resource for your clients.
Be Great at Asking Questions
Great coaches are great at asking questions. Get good at being curious and asking 2nd and 3rd level questions. You don’t have to know the answers to all of your client’s problems. The best coaches allow the client to get to the answer that’s already inside of them. Asking questions allows the client to think deeply and gives a safe space for them to explore the right answer for themselves. There’s a saying that people will believe only a little of what you say, but a whole lot of what they say. Let them say it.
Empathy for the Whole Person
A great coach cares for the whole client, not just the business success side. Mindset is 80% of the formula. If your mind isn’t right, the business will be challenged to follow. High achievers, business owners, entrepreneurs all share something in common - the potential for burnout. If you, as their coach, don’t look for signals something is wrong, it may be too late. Check-in with their head, their family, their hobbies, etc. Encourage them to find balance, to find joy in everything they do as most get so focused on their business that personal life suffers.
Create a Structure That Works
Create a clear, duplicative structure that takes the guesswork out of your coaching practice. Know how you want to run your coaching sessions, how to collect and structure the data you analyze with your client, and how you follow up after each meeting. Create templates for ease and let your client know what to expect. That way they can also be prepared for each meeting and the follow-up action items afterward.
Check-in and Often
Professional coaches play a critical role in the success of the client by holding them accountable. This accountability is to their goals, action items, and to who they want to be in their business and life. When you and your client create an action plan, check-in on their progress outside of your one-on-one conversations. These "check-ins" show you are paying attention and care about their success. If they tell you they are going to do something by a certain date, then check in to see how it went. If it was a critical conversation, send a little note that you are cheering them on.
Use Data in the Analysis
Coaching is quantitative as it is qualitative. As a professional coach, you are working on both hard skills and soft skills with your client. At the beginning of the coaching agreement, outline the most important data that will move the needle in their business - is it top-line revenue growth, amount of sales calls, visitors to the website, sign-ups, etc? Use data to showcase the growth or decline of the business. Having a scorecard that you review can keep you watching the most important factors and will guide your coaching conversation. Make sure you track both leading and lagging indicators of success. One is an early warning sign while the other is looking in the rearview mirror with no opportunity to adjust.
Celebrate Progress, not Perfection
Celebrate and celebrate often with your client. Dedicate time in your coaching call to go over wins and successes. Success is a habit like anything else. By talking about wins, we are building pathways in the brain that watch for more success signs. And it just feels good to win. Sometimes the coach is the only person your client can high-five with, which is a sad fact among leaders at the top in their field. It can feel pretty lonely at the top.
Practice, and Then Practice Some More
Practice here has two meanings. The first is to practice developing skills with your client. If they are struggling with a critical conversation they need to have with an underperforming employee, then pause to do some role-playing. Help them "script" out the bullet points and tone and have them deliver it as if you were the employee. Provide feedback or ask them "how else" could they say the same thing. This practice helps keep them in the driver's seat versus them looking to you for the answers.
The second meaning of practice is the more clients you coach, the more experiences you will have and the better you will become as a professional coach. While that's not rocket science, it provides hope that a coaching practice is just that - it's a skill that continues to develop client after client, situation by situation. Your experiences will become a source of rich resources which is hard to duplicate.
