Overview

Here s a chance to assess your coaching skills and qualities and design a program to improve them. Also, you ll find a series of questions that can direct you in capturing your learning and continuously improving as a coach.

In the first chapter we spoke about the importance of continuing to develop ourselves while simultaneously coaching our clients. By doing this, we stay out of the temptation to become experts, dispensers of advice and opinion who have no experience about what it really takes to change. We also stay grounded in the fact that when our coaching efforts fail, it can be because of our own lack of competence, as well as limitations with the client. Also, clients will continue to present new questions, breakdowns, and challenges to us as coaches, and if we are going to be of use to them it is important that we continue to become more skillful. Besides all that, staying involved in Track Two will keep our coaching alive, vibrant, and nurturing for us instead of becoming a rote, mechanical, deadening repetition of what we ve done dozens of times before.

I haven t found this aspect of coaching in any other text on the topic, but self-development seems to be a self-evident component of coaching. Besides working with yourselves, I recommend you find colleagues, friends, and yes, a coach, who can support you as you coach. Psychiatrists, physicians, teachers, and lawyers all confer with peers and mentors in difficult cases. Coaches are, it seems...