Being a coach is about helping others become their best selves for personal growth. A distinctive coaching style can deliver your point more effectively, build trust with your clients, and create a better coaching relationship.
Your unique style is developed through consistent coaching sessions. It reflects your core values, coaching philosophy, and personality. Let us guide you through the different coaching styles and show you how to develop your own.
Types of Coaching Styles
These common coaching styles can help you in your coaching journey:
- Holistic Coaching Style: This approach covers a broad range of people’s lives and focuses on guiding people to identify and remove obstacles.
- Democratic Coaching Style: This style involves input from people, but the coach still has the final say. It focuses on creativity—people create solutions and foster a healthy culture by helping each other. People are also accountable for their actions and have a sense of ownership of their ideas.
- Authoritarian Coaching Style: This style allows the coach to make decisions for the entire team without any input from the members. Everyone is kept on their toes as they follow directions. This style suits victory-oriented settings where everyone works as one.
- Transactional Coaching Style: This style uses rewards and consequences to improve the team’s performance. It’s effective when your team wants to achieve high productivity and targets.
- Developmental Coaching Style: This coaching nurtures an individual’s development and potential. The developmental coaching style focuses on providing personalized feedback that can help your team members improve.
You can use one or multiple coaching styles to ensure the best for your clients.
Creating Your Coaching Style
The hardest part is the first day of building your coaching style. Here are some tips to help you:
1. Understand Your Beliefs
Your beliefs are the very foundations of your coaching style. They help you align your own coaching philosophy with who you are. Consider what matters to you and how they can influence your coaching process. If honesty and transparency are important, your coaching should involve open and direct communication and feedback.
2. Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Every coach has their strengths and weaknesses, and you’re not an exception. Your strengths are the best things about you as a coach, while your weaknesses are the areas for improvement.
Do a self-assessment to learn what you need to improve and leverage your best skills. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What are the favorable outcomes that my coaching efforts produced?
- What skills or techniques make me a good coach?
- What part of my coaching do I feel confident about?
- How should I handle challenging conversations with my clients?
- Do some of my behaviors hinder my client’s progress?
- What are the specific areas my clients struggle with?
List your answers to learn more about yourself. Acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses and explore room for growth through coaching conversations, practice, mentoring, and training. Being self-aware allows you to develop an effective coaching method.
3. Embrace Your Personality
Having a full grasp of your personality lets you shape your coaching style. Integrate your calm, bubbly, intuitive, analytical, or practical personality into your daily coaching practice. The people you coach will warm up to you when you present yourself naturally.
4. Learn from Other Coaches
One of the best ways to enhance your coaching skills is to learn from your fellow coaches. Of course, you don’t need to copy their styles. You need to analyze the admirable qualities of their approach. Consider incorporating the same coaching elements into your methods while being who you are. Join coaching communities and conferences to gain different insights and perspectives.
5. Be Experimental
Experiment with all of the new techniques that you learned. Incorporate some of the tools and approaches into your sessions and see what works best with you and your clients.
After the session ends, reflect on the techniques you used. Determine what worked well and what you could still improve. This will give you a deeper understanding of your purpose as a coach. Continuing this cycle of experimentation and reflection will help you develop a solid style that you can stick to.
6. Ask for Feedback
Client feedback can greatly improve your coaching style. It could point out areas for improvement you’ve never seen before. Tell your clients to leave honest feedback about their coaching experiences with you.
When reading comments, do not take anything personally. Observe any pattern or common theme to improve your coaching and make other necessary changes. Regularly seek feedback to show your clients you’re committed to growth and satisfaction.
7. Create Your Own Framework
This framework can distinguish you from other coaches by containing specific methods, exercises, and steps you always use in your sessions. A structured and flexible framework lets you demonstrate your expertise in the field.
Final Thoughts
Developing your own coaching style is a process of learning, experimentation, and adjustment. Whether you’re a life coach or coaching a completely different field, your method should stick out so your clients will have a great time with your sessions. You can fine-tune your coaching style as long as you commit to continuous learning.
Your road to coaching begins when you take ICF-accredited coach training programs like what International Coach Academy offers. With their coach training programs, you can unleash the coaching potential you had in you and become a confident coach for future generations.
