So, you’ve gotten started with coaching and perhaps are starting to leave some of the basic models behind. What’s next? How can you get better at coaching?

Growing your core coaching skills

With practice, you will find that new questions occur to you without you needing to fret about it whilst the other person speaks. If they don’t immediately, that’s where silence comes in again! You will often find that a short pause encourages the person to say more, so don’t worry if there’s a little break between them speaking and you chipping in again.

There’s a few other skills that make up an important part of coaching:

• Noticing. When you are really listening, you will notice things about your coachee’s reactions. Perhaps they say something that links to a point they made five minutes ago, or flat out contradicts it. Perhaps they seem surprisingly frustrated or angry about something. It can be helpful to gently point this out to them. Remember that they are the expert in their experiences, not you, so allow for the possibility that you might be wrong. For example, “I’m noticing x – is that right?”, “Does y resonate? What’s behind that?”.
• Summarising. It can be really clarifying to hear someone reflect back what you’ve just said in a summarised form. This is also a good tool to use when you aren’t sure where to go next in your conversation – summarise what you have heard so far and ask what your coachee would like to explore further.
• Being present. All of this relies on you being as present as possible in the conversation. Consider what you need in your physical set up to make this possible – make sure you’re in a quiet place with your phone on do not disturb. Don’t rush into coaching straight from another meeting. Take a few moments to take some grounded breaths and really settle into the space before you start.

Expanding your questions bank

One way you can improve your coaching is by having a deeper well of questions to draw on. But I’m reluctant to give you a long list of possibilities. Starting your coaching practice using something like the GROW model can be really helpful, but after a while it can become limiting. There are no questions you have to ask, and if you are really listening, you should be asking question based on the conversation, rather than some set list. Having a model or a long list of questions to think about can actually be unhelpful at that stage.

But the right question can unlock something unexpected, and it can be helpful to have more options to draw on. Over time, you’ll find the questions that work for you. You’ll probably find you have some go-tos that are helpful in lots of different settings. Here’s mine:

• ‘What would a good outcome look like?’ It’s surprising how frequently people haven’t really considered this, and having a clear picture of success can really help guide your conversation.
• ‘What are some options you could explore?’ ‘Tell me more.’ ‘What else?’ Very often, we think of one option for how we could approach something, and then we stop. But your first thought it not necessarily the best one! Prompt people to keep thinking until their ideas really do dry up. You’ll also find that if you ask them to tell you more about what’s going on for them, they will dig beneath the surface and see more of what’s really going on.
• ‘What are you learning?’ Again, we often need a little prompting to consider this.
• ‘What do you need?’ This is particularly helpful to ask with line reports – do they need advice, or permission, or an extra resource, or…? It can also help someone unblock whatever has been holding them back.

A note on structure. In an earlier blog, we looked at how you should use divergent and convergent thinking to shape workshops, appreciating that coming up with possibilities and ideas should be distinct from analysing and prioritising. That’s a helpful lens to use for coaching too. In the middle of your conversation, you want to encourage your coachee to think about many different avenues (divergent thinking). Towards the end you should help them narrow down to one or two routes to pursue (convergent thinking). Make sure you capture any actions or things they will do differently before you close.

Taking notes whilst coaching

I always take notes whilst coaching. It helps me concentrate on what I’m hearing and allows me to refer back to things later on in the conversation, or reflect back using the coachee’s own words. I do this on an online whiteboard because it helps me be less linear, and because it’s easier to group similar ideas together.

Once I got more comfortable coaching, I started sharing my screen so the coachee could see what I was writing. This is helpful for a few reasons. Just seeing the notes made the coachee’s thinking more concrete to them. It also made it easier for both of us to make links with things said earlier in the conversation. And it gives the coachee a record of what was said that they can look at later.

This technique probably won’t work for everyone – if you are a slow typist or self-conscious about your spelling mistakes, this might not be for you! But it’s worth experimenting with to help you take your practice further.

This is the third in a series on using coaching as an agile skill. Subscribe to my newsletter to get a regular round-up of posts.