Coaching with confidence

“The confidence of the bird is not in the branch on which it perches but in the wings that allow it to fly”. This is one of my favorite sayings and I have tested its validity many times – and still don’t believe it 😊.

For example, I had just arrived in a foreign country where we had rented a house on the beach for two months. The house did not have a suitable table for me to work. The supermarket was packed with unfriendly Westerners and screaming children. They did not have many of the supplies we were looking for. Traffic was loud and stressful. The first restaurant we found was horrible…. You probably get the picture! While I was jetlagged and awake, I was contemplating taking the first flight back when I remembered the above saying. I said to myself: “We will figure this out! We have figured out many things before, this is part of the adventure, a story for our friends and will be very amusing later. Nothing in the surrounding needed to change, I just needed to trust our proven ability to adapt.

I think this is relevant for coaches – we can trust in our ability to adapt and the ability of our clients to adapt.

When we are working with a client and feeling that it is going nowhere, maybe even thinking that we are not doing a good job, we can ask the client what is working well and what needs to be changed. Trusting our ability to adapt will slowly make us confident that even if things are not optimal, we can figure stuff out together with our clients.

The same could be said for the situations in which our clients are stuck and see no way forward. Many coaches don’t feel comfortable in these situations. They are nice people and would like to help and suffer a bit when clients are suffering (and really, this is NOT a bad thing, it is a human thing). However, the alleviation of this suffering is not in making it go away for the client or making it go away for the coach by offering a fix but in trusting the client’s ability to figure stuff out.

The confidence of the coach is not in fixing things for the client but in the coaches and client’s ability to figure stuff out.

If you would like to figure stuff out together, why not join one of our free meetup and exchanges.

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