Leveling up as a coach grows your impact. To grow your impact as a coach, you must continuously grow your craft. That’s why Bright Morning President, Elena Aguilar and Senior Associate Lori Cohen shared strategies – and role play! – on how to Level Up As A Coach as our March webinar.
Check out the recording here and read on for top takeaways!
Link here – https://vimeo.com/400027631
Five Tips for Leveling Up As A Coach
As Lori and Elena deeply engaged in some of the best tips and strategies, a few core tenets emerged. There are so many ways to improve your coaching – and just like teaching and leading – the more we can hone our practice, the more skilled we’ll be. Below are the Top Five Ways to Improve Your Coaching.
- Pick a couple of tools and become masterful with them – Lori named the Ladder of Inference as a frequently used tool in her toolkit.
- Plan your coaching conversations and reflect on them afterward – Lori then shared how valuable conversation planning is (what you’re going to say/do and what you hope that leads to), especially in combination with post-conversation reflection (what did I actually say/do? How did that go?).
- Practice, practice, practice… and get feedback – Elena highlighted the value in practicing and noted that you never get to a point where you don’t need to practice.
- Record yourself (on video or on audio) and reflect on your coaching – Elena also noted how it can be awkward but essential to understand how you sound and what you look like. There are tools available for this, or just use your phone! |
- Watch people coach – Elena noted that her experience of watching other coaches really helped refine her own practice and see what people don’t always notice about themselves.
Feedback and Final Thoughts
After sharing these five tips, Elena and Lori conducted a role-play, with Elena as the coach and Lori as a new and overwhelmed teacher.
After the roleplay ended, the two debriefed how it went and highlighted and shared key reflections. For example, Lori shared how valuable validation was from Elena on her feelings – and how that can provide an opportunity for so much growth and learning.
Elena ended her feedback on the roleplay session by sharing her three goals in every coaching conversation (these are quick tips on leveling up as a coach):
- Boost the resilience of client – offer the client an opportunity to connect to their own power and agency in this conversation
- Hold space for someone to reflect – provide an opportunity for the client to practice insight and reflection
- Provide ways for the client to be able to change their behavior – provide tangible and visible ways to get the client to do better
There’s no right way to do this – there’s just the way you do it and the way it happens!
Ready to level up your practice? Here are your next steps:
Coach’s Toolkit Virtual Summit
Taking place over two months from April 7 – May 28, the Coach’s Toolkit Virtual Summit provides 16 sessions focused on coaching tools, practice, opportunities for modeling, and more. It is relevant to anyone seeking to level up, as a coach, mentor, leader or educator.
Virtual Workshops: Coaching Catapult
If you’re looking for intensive practice, on May 18 Elena is leading a virtual workshop – the Virtual Coaching Catapult. It is one day with lots of roleplays and feedback, demonstrations, and little bites of practice to help you level up as a coach.
Art of Coaching Certification Program
Our most extensive offering and one that is further down the road is the Art of Coaching Certification Program. This revamped program will be mostly virtual and provide a comprehensive learning experience to ensure you are working from a strong foundation and making every conversation count. Registration isn’t yet open but you can click here to tell us you’re interested in learning more – and you’ll be the first to know!
Free Offerings
We usually have at least one free webinar a month.
Due to the extraordinary circumstances, we find ourselves in, we’ll be offering two free webinars this week to support our community in thriving, not just surviving this challenging moment in time. On Wednesday you can join Resilience Reminders with Lori and Janet, and on Thursday we have a special Cultivating Resilience for Parents we hope is helpful both for some of you, as well as your extended school communities – please feel free to share broadly.
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