How to Achieve Coaching Mastery BEFORE You Accumulate 100 Coaching Hours

When I started my coaching journey, I thought coaching was just about asking questions.?I am a sales trainer, and I ask questions to identify customers' needs and pains.?I had also watched how journalists interviewed their guests on TV, and I thought I had a good grasp of how to get answers from people.?

So that was what I did in my initial coaching: asking questions to explore goals, current realities, and options and then map a path forward.?I was focused on what the "problem" was and how my coachee could "solve it".?Later, I learned that I was doing "transactional coaching", which is coaching the "what".?If I can demonstrate transactional coaching, coupled with 100 coaching hours, I could get my ACC (Associate Certified Coach) from ICF.

However, if I were to advance further and be a PCC (Professional Certified Coach), on top of the required 500 coaching hours, I would need to demonstrate transformational coaching, or coaching the "who".

All these sounded like Greek to me.?Not much was discussed about some key differences between transactional and transformational coaching.?While my classmates and I were taught not to focus on trying to solve problems for our coachees, we didn't have a clear idea of what we should focus on instead.?While I was taught that coaches are mirrors of coachees, I wasn't quite sure which parts of the coachee were we supposed to reflect on.?At that time, I did not quite grasp the concept of coaching the "who", and why that is an important element in the coaching process.

Later on, I participated in a coaching practice session supervised by a Certified Mastery Coach (CMC) from IAC.?Many observers were experienced coaches.?I did my usual transactional coaching with the coachee.?At the end of the session, I got a thorough dressing down on how my coaching was way too superficial and how I had missed multiple opportunities to assess my coachee's thought processes, feelings, values, and motivational factors.?As painful as it was during that feedback session, I was enlightened about real transformational coaching.?It began my journey in learning and practicing coaching the "who".?

Later on, when I went for my PCC training with JMC Coach Mastery , I took my transformational coaching skills to a higher level using similar ways.?I had experienced mentor coaches giving direct feedback on key areas I needed to work on.?I felt that each hour of mentoring coaching impacts my coaching standards more than 10 hours of unsupervised coaching.

How to Coach the “Who”?

Looking back, I found nothing mysterious about coaching the "who".?In many coaching sessions, I have found that when coachees state their goals or desired outcomes, they tend to have some underlying assumptions, emotional baggage, or cognitive biases.?Underneath those assumptions could be their values or other motivational factors.?These are components of the coachee's perception of himself or an idealized self that the coachee wants to be.

Hence, the reason why we coach the "who".?When we coach the "what", we are confined by the assumptions, beliefs, and other cognitive constraints that the coachee had.?As Einstein said," we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." By coaching the "who", coaches want to help coachees break that mindset.

Many coaching questions go beyond the superficial and coach at deeper levels.?Here are some common ones I use:

• “How is this important to you?” - This is a question to understand some values or motivational factors compelling the coachee to achieve a specific goal.
• “Tell me more/ And what else?” - these are tools to ask coachees to elaborate more, not just about what they want to do, but also their thought processes and feelings
• Focus on the verb and not the noun.?I had a coachee saying he wanted to “rekindle and restart his morning exercises” The key was not the morning exercise.?Still, the words “rekindle” and “restart”, since they implied that the coachee had enjoyed exercising but somehow stopped
• “How does success look like for you?” - I’d like the coachee to be able to either observe or measure his desired outcome.
• “How is this related to your desired outcome?” -?A question to raise when the coachee seems to veer from the key topic..
• “What gives you the strength to do all these?” - A way of giving affirmation while clarifying some of his underlying values with the coachee.
• ”What drives you to keep on trying?” - Something to ask when the coachee feels frustrated
• “How is this relevant to the person you want to be?”?- Sometimes, I may want to find out what could be the idealized self or identity that the coachee wished to be. .
• "You sounded different/ emotional when you said this.?What is it?" - An essential element of coaching is to observe the coachee's emotional state and give feedback to the coachee.?Then get the coachee to reflect. .
• "You laughed when you were sharing this. What's the reason behind your laughter?" - Another essential aspect of coaching is to observe incongruencies between the coachee's words and the coachee's expressions.
• “Compared to a few moments ago, how do you feel now?” - If I observed the coachee had a state change, I would ask this to find out if he had an “a-ha” moment..?

Now that I have demonstrated my transformational coaching abilities, I have been awarded my PCC from ICF.?However, I wondered what if I practiced transformational coaching from the very beginning and had mentor coaches giving feedback on how I could be more transformational in my approach??Would I then be able to practice transformational coaching before I had clocked my first 100 coaching hours?

In IAC, I noticed that there's no transactional coaching throughout their coaching certification process.?Coaches are trained and measured based upon how they coach the "who" from Day 1, and certification is awarded based on the mastery of transformational coaching.??

So while coaches will still need to clock 100 hours before getting their ACC qualification, they can still achieve coaching mastery before accumulating those hours.

c.j. is a sales performance coach and co-author of Sales Map – the only scenario-based assessment tool to evaluate the sales person’s strengths and weaknesses at every step of the B2B sales cycle.?He is a PCC with ICF, and a Masteries Practitioner with IAC.?c.j. can be reached at?https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/cydj001/ ??

c.j.是一位销售绩效教练，也是“销售地图”（sales Map）的合著者。“销售地图”是唯一一个基于场景的评估工具，用于评估销售人员在B2B销售周期中每一步的优势和不足。他是ICF的PCC，也是IAC的Masteries Practitioner。 你可以通过 https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/cydj001/ ?联系到C.j.。