The Mindset, Qualities, and Posture of a Coach
For leaders who want to step into a coaching role
The primary aim of a coaching conversation is to develop awareness in others so that they can take effective action, reflect, and learn in service of a desired future. This is the work of transformative change. The challenge for leaders when stepping into a coaching role is that the ordinary way of getting things done — analyzing, problem solving, giving advice — are incongruent with the methods of coaching. For leaders interested in the Coaching Leadership Style it can be helpful to understand the mindset, qualities, and posture required to support others in facilitating growth and change.
The Mindset
According to the International Coaching Federation, the coaching mindset is one that is open, curious, flexible, and client-centered. To cultivate this mindset a coach needs to increase their capacity for self-awareness, self-development, and self-regulation.
Self Awareness
To be self-aware is to be conscious of what is happening in our internal landscape — thoughts, emotions, values, biases, habits — and how that drives our outward behavior. When working with someone in a coaching conversation, it is critical that the person in the coaching role is aware of their current state and what they are bringing into the conversation. Are we feeling tired and pessimistic, creating a world of victims and villains? Are we feeling accomplished and strong, creating a world of heroes? Getting clear on how we are showing up, creating boundaries around what is ours, and being able to observe how we are impacting the person we are working with are critical self-awareness skills that can support leaders making the shift into a coaching role.
Self Development
Self awareness naturally leads to insights regarding the primary areas we have an opportunity to do our own developmental work. What are we learning about our limiting beliefs, conditioned tendencies, and habitual ways of reacting and what can we do about them? Healing old wounds, noticing and naming emotions, creating boundaries, taking care of ourselves, learning about adult development, building a mindfulness practice, understanding and working from our strengths — the more we develop ourselves the more capacity we have to develop others. This is an ongoing stance towards life (and one of the things I love most about coaching).
Self Regulation
When we become aware of our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors — especially the disruptive ones that get in the way of connection and effectiveness — the first impulse might be to suppress them. Stuffing them away can work for a while but eventually what we hide will either leak out or make us sick (or both). Self regulation is about building our capacity to notice, name, hold, and express a wide range of inner experiences. It can be helpful to know what activates our sympathetic nervous system — e.g. what situations and people we find threatening or challenging — in order to intentionally build specific practices in service of self regulation.
The Qualities
In addition to the coaching mindset, there are four qualities leaders can cultivate to increase their ability to engage the coaching mindset: trust, presence, curiosity, and partnership.
Trust
Trust is the foundation of strong relationships, powerful leadership, and impactful coaching. Without trust, teams develop defensive, fear-based behaviors in an attempt to protect themselves from harm. In this environment, leaders will struggle to connect with those they are leading and coaching will be performative rather than generative. Trust requires a leader to be authentic and vulnerable, demonstrate sincere interest in others, ask open questions, be receptive, set clear expectations, and fulfill promises.
Presence
Your presence is the most impactful coaching tool you have. Being present gives us access to everything that is happening in the moment, critical pieces of insight and information that we miss when we are distracted by thoughts, worries, and daydreams. It is rare to be given the gift of someone’s full attention and magical things happen when we are met in this way, when we are seen and heard with acceptance and care. In your next 1:1 give it a shot — allow yourself to be completely present with the other person, without an agenda, and just appreciate who they are and what is happening for them. See what happens, what shifts, what emerges. Elements of presence include being open and receptive, developing self and relational awareness, practicing active listening, and distinguishing between data and interpretations. It should go without saying but I’m going to add it here for posterity: presence and multitasking are mutually exclusive. If you feel the urge to be on Slack, check email, and tend to other work related systems at the same time you are trying to coach someone, you are not practicing presence.
Curiosity
Coaching conversations are about stepping into the unknown and seeing what emerges. Curiosity is the best tool for navigating this space with an open mind and heart. It prevents us from thinking we know everything about a person or a situation and keeps us looking for clues, meaning, and and connections. It is easy for us to reduce complexity into something well defined and known, a natural inclination of humans seeking control in an ultimately unknowable world. Curiosity keeps us connected and open as we look for new ways of understanding ourselves, each other, and the situation we are working with. Elements of curiosity include cultivating wonder, being open to learning, and being genuinely interested in the other person.
Partnership
As a leader, you might be coaching direct reports or skip levels, which means hierarchy and power are always in the background of your work relationship. In a coaching conversation this power dynamic needs to be minimized because the person you are coaching holds the power and leads the conversation — it is your job to follow them, create space for thinking and reflection, and ask open questions to help them generate new meaning. This can feel really uncomfortable! But for a coaching conversation to be effective it is critical to let go of having the all the answers (or any answers for that matter). Partnership is about appropriate boundaries, co-creating the focus of a conversation, believing in the ability of the other person to find appropriate solutions, and holding each other as equals in the relationship.
The Posture
The mindset of a coach is cultivated through self awareness and self regulation and deepened through self development, while the qualities of a coach are capacities that can be practiced day in and day out to build meaningful relationships in service of growth and change. The posture of a coach is about the general orientation towards life that a coach embodies, one that sees and believes in the possibility and capacity of others.
The Optimistic Stance
The optimistic stance is also known as unconditional positive regard, the belief that people are doing the best they can with the awareness and resources available to them. This is why the first step in a coaching conversation is to increase awareness, for it is often a limited perspective that prevents us from taking meaningful action.
To be clear, optimism doesn’t mean naïveté nor is it about bypassing the reality of what is happening in the now. Unconditional positive regard is based on a realistic view of the present and an optimistic view of what is possible. From this stance a coach works to develop the potential within an individual or system rather than correcting what is problematic or “wrong”. The optimistic stance sees individuals and teams as having inherent capabilities that can be noticed and appreciated, even if they are being expressed in unhealthy or challenging ways. Through a process of making them visible, a coach uses a strengths-based approach to meet the uncertainty of the moment with the energy to deal with whatever emerges.
“Optimism is about having the courage to try things. It is about stepping into something because we hope it will be a good thing, without knowing what will happen. And it is about learning not to stay attached to the negative when things do not turn out in ways we had hoped.” — Joseph Melnick and Sonia March Nevis
When things don’t turn out the way we had hoped, it is easy to inhabit the pessimistic stance. The pessimistic stance is tense rather than relaxed, fearful rather than courageous, backwards facing as opposed to forward leaning. Pessimism narrows perspective, where optimism widens it. While pessimism can play an important role in keeping us safe (and biologically we seem wired to go to pessimism first), it is not well matched to the needs of a coaching conversation. If we focus on what is dangerous, wrong, or not going well — what Benjamin Zander calls a downward spiral — we lose the ability to step into worlds of possibility.
If we take a pessimistic stance when coaching the person we are working with may feel judged, shamed, incapable, or any other negative emotion based in fear. Their sympathetic nervous system will get activated releasing stress hormones and reducing their ability to respond to the situation with awareness, presence, and creativity. When we take an optimistic stance we meet the person with openness and a belief in their capacity to find a solution. In this space the parasympathetic nervous system activates generating connection, creativity, and possibility. Combine the optimistic stance with presence and you have an incredibly powerful coaching practice before even asking a single question!
Gaining insight into the mindset, qualities, and posture of a coach is the first step in your coaching journey. But knowing isn’t enough. It is critical to work on developing these capacities and qualities each day so that they become part of how you show up as a leader. If you are looking for practices, exercises, reflection prompts, and other ways to integrate coaching skills into how you lead, check out Words Make Worlds, a newsletter dedicated to the art, science, and craft of the Coaching Leadership Style.
