Coaching communication competence is central to the effectiveness of coaching. If you can’t effectively communicate, you aren’t going to be a good coach. If the interaction between coach and client is restrained, reluctant, or repressed in any manner, then the coaching session or sessions will be unlikely to produce the desired outcomes

What is Competent Communication?

Competent communication is interaction that is viewed as effective in fulfilling specific and general objectives in a specified context. In the context of a coaching session, competent communication would be interaction between the coach and the client that results in fulfilling a goal, or creating anything that enhancing the client’s life, work, health, or wealth. Without communication competence, positive outcomes are going to be infrequent, and your coaching career will be rather short!

Coaching Communication Competence and the International Coach Federation

The International Coach Federation (ICF) created a list of core competencies for the coaching industry, and one of the is “Communicating Effectively.” This is broken down into three subgroups – active listening, powerful questioning, and direct communication. Not including an emphasis on all three of these in your coaching practice means you not reaching a level of coaching communication competence.

Active Listening

This is the ability to focus on what the client is saying and what the client is not saying, and it is central to a coach’s communication competence. It also means you understand not only the words they are saying, but also the context in which they are saying them. Here are a few ways to be an excellent active listener:

• Restate – it shows you are listening and also helps you remember.
• Summarize – brings together the facts and also helps you memorize and understand.
• Encourage – helps keep conversation going, but encouragement should be brief.
• Provide feedback – share observation, insights, and experience to help move conversation forward and bring out more in-depth feelings from the client.
• Probing – ask questions whenever necessary to get deeper into the issue and find out more meaningful information.
• Validation – acknowledge the client’s problem, issues, and emotions with empathy and an open mind.

Powerful Questioning

Every coach knows that power inquiry is absolutely essential to obtaining the outcomes their clients seek. These are questions that help reveal information and emotions necessary to the enhancement process. Open-ended questions are best for making progress, finding out new information, and maximizing clarity. Powerful questioning is integral to coaching communication competence, and is a skill that must be learned and then practiced over and over again.

Direct Communication

Direct communication as a core competency involves using clear and concise language, reframing words to allow for the client to see another perspective, and the clear and unambiguous statement of objectives and goals. It also involves the use of metaphor and analogy to provide even deeper understanding and perspective.

Without coaching communication competence, clients will not be getting the outcomes they seek. Your ability to attract and retain clients will be severely limited, and your chances of staying in the coaching game for very long will be about as likely as me winning the NBA slam dunk contest!

Hope you took some great value out of this post today! I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment with your thoughts or questions. And also, you can click on the Twitter button below to retweet this article… Thank you!

Fred Philips
Business Coach
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