Showing Up – Five Tips To Becoming The Best Coach For Your Clients

Showing Up – Five Tips To Becoming The Best Coach For Your Clients 3 Year Ago · 5 min read

Talyaa Vardar

Talyaa Vardar, MA, FCPC, MCC
Executive Coach, Psychologist & Art Therapist

With over a decade of experience coaching, the founders of Flow Coaching Institute have coached businesses, CEOs, athletes, students, and almost everyone in between. Being a coach is not an easy job, but it is an extremely fulfilling one. Over the years, our founders have learned a lot along their coaching journey and we are going to share some of their tips on showing up and being the best coach for your clients. 

What Does Being A Good Coach Mean? 

Coaching in itself is a long and rewarding journey that is deeply rooted in a lot of self-reflection and personal growth from the perspective of the coach themselves. To become the best coach for your clients, you will need to be the best version of yourselves or at least be working on becoming the best version of yourself. 

Tip 1: Be Open & Honest 

Your clients will be coming to you with a lot of problems and things that they want to improve and fix in their lives. If you are not open and honest with them, they will be able to sense that and this will significantly affect the session that you are having. 

Being open and honest means that you are showing them that you are not judging them and that you are able to be honest with them to show your vulnerable side as well. Most times, people will wait for you to open up first before they do so. So as a coach, it’s best for you to open up first and set the example beforehand so that your clients can lead from your example. 

The ability to create a safe environment is extremely important as studies show that when you create a comfortable and safe environment the people around you will feel a lot more at ease when opening up.

Tip 2: Learn To Coach Everyone 

You might be called in to coach a CEO of a multi-million dollar company but deep down they are still someone’s son or daughter, a husband or a wife or a friend. We are all humans and there are a few things that we all have in common. If you want to be a better coach with better coaching methods, you will need to learn to be everyone’s coach. 

Find that thread that links everyone together. This way, you will be able to easily understand the crux of problems and be able to give them the best advice by finding the root of the problem rather than surface-level issues. 

Tip 3: Curate Tangible Results 

When you start working with your clients, always sit down with them and verbalize and when possible write down tangible results that they want to see. Have a healthy discussion on what they need and want to get out of these coaching sessions with you. 

This is extremely important as this will become the blueprint of your journey with this coaching client of yours. It will also help them visualize their progress and where they would like to be in the near future. 

Plus, when things are written down, people are more likely to follow it rather than just speaking it into existence.

Tip 4: Owning Conversations & Maintaining Them 

Sometimes people can mistake therapy for coaching sessions. If you want to be a highly effective coach, become a better coach, and show up for your clients, you need to be able to own conversations and maintain them. 

Not in the way of overstepping your clients, but being able to reel them back in when needed. Asking questions like “what is the goal you want to achieve here?” or reel them back in by saying that “that’s not where we are supposed to go”, and be able to steer the conversation back to the matter at hand. 

This becomes a lot easier as well when you have those tangible results that you and your client have agreed upon beforehand. 

Don’t be afraid to own conversations, you are there as a coach to help them become a better person and improve their journey and life experience. This is your job and if you feel that the trajectory of the conversation is not doing your client any good anymore then gently steer the conversation back. 

Tip 5: Focusing on Follow-Ups 

We get it, sometimes life gets in the way. Especially with everything going remote lately, it might be easier to push meetings or to do shorter meetings. But, being a great coach means that you are very diligent with your follow-ups and checking in on your clients. 

Things get hard and time passes by, but this should not deter you from maintaining your coaching schedules with them. Once you become a coach, you become an accountability partner. 

There you have it! Our 5 main tips to becoming the best coach for your clients. Always remember that you need to have your client's best interest in mind at all times. 

What are some tips that you think we should add? We would love to hear from you! 

If you are interested in becoming a coach yourself, visit this link or send us an email at info@flowcoachinginstitute.com to learn more about our programs!