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Coaches Need Coaching Too: Growing Yourself & Growing as a Coach

How do you take care of yourself as a coach? What stops you from doing so?

by Ali Schultz and Liz Stewart

Coaching is a calling. How we answer that call affects how we show up for our clients. Beyond the skills of coaching, the emotional and professional development we invest in for ourselves can be pivotal. What steps do you have in place for your growth? If not, what stops you from doing so?

Often, coaches in solo practice can feel isolated. Feelings are a rich part of the work. It’s hard to find a group of professional peers to continue learning and growing from so that you are bolstered as a practitioner in your work in the world. The pressure to earn an income, create a brand, and run a business has similar traps as entrepreneurs: merging their identity with their work and their company. And, most coaches forget that they need a supervisor (and a therapist), too, so that they have a safe emotional outlet and a way to learn from and process all that comes up in their client work.

Let’s start from the beginning. Consider the challenges that surface for you as a coach in all aspects of your work:

• How Do You Begin? How do you find your clients? How do you make agreements and establish contracts? What is the pricing that feels right to you? What are the ways you want to work with clients? What feelings does marketing yourself bring up? What types of people do you want to work with?
• How Do You Uphold Ethical Standards? What are the ethical standards for coaching that present challenges for you? What would it look like to uphold these standards in your practice? What’s at risk if you don’t?
• What is your stance? This is your ground. When you find yourself activated or triggered in the moment, how do you find your ground? How do you return to that place where you know who you are in this work?
• How Do You Work With Closure? How do you end sessions? How do you complete client engagements? How do you prepare or set up for these closures?
• Listening Differently. In what ways is your listening awareness preventing you from hearing what’s being said? What areas of learning would bolster your work? How does listening inform how you need to respond?
• How Does Your Ego Get in the Way of Your Work? How does it serve you? How does it serve your client? When is it present, and what brings it forward? What space does it take up in the room? What impact does it have on sessions?
• Observation. How do you witness yourself while in session? What is the value of paying attention to your thoughts, feelings, and body sensations? Our ability to observe ourselves, according to Rumi, is “beyond judging, doubting and weighing, beyond right and wrong.”
• Transference. Where and when does client work feel uncomfortable? Why does this client make me feel this way? What can you learn from induced feelings and how can you utilize skills to help strengthen and inform your work with the client? What do you take home from your sessions that claws at you? How do you not “take the client home with you” so to speak? What do you do after your sessions to clear client energy? How can you get back into your body and into all of you and what’s yours?
• Boundaries. In what ways are boundaries challenging? How do boundaries or a lack of boundaries present in sessions with clients?
• Attachment styles? In what ways and where do you notice your attachment style, and how do you work with others who have different needs? What is your sense of self-worth, or imposter syndrome and how might that show up in sessions?
• Listening to Your Body. How do you work with your body awareness in client sessions? What is your connection to your heart and gut ways of knowing? How do you trust your intuition and insights from what you’re sensing?
• Client Case Studies. Where could you use more insight into certain client situations? What comes up for you in sessions that you want to work on in a supervisory capacity?
• Burnout & Isolation. Where can you connect with peers or colleagues? What do you need from personal and professional relationships? How do you resource yourself during and after sessions? In what ways have you merged your identity with your work or your business? What anxieties do you carry around income, getting clients, making a living? What would exquisite support look like for you? What are the ways in which you reconnect to yourself and those around you whom you love? Where is work encroaching into your life, and where might you need to more firmly create work-time and non-work time?

All of these facets of being a coach, if left unattended to, is a fast track to burnout and dissatisfaction.

Sorting through any one of those points above can unravel material to work with that overlays with how we show up in the world for ourselves and for our client work. When you look at all of those points together, they create many layers one has to sift through as a professional. It’s easy to see how, for example, if we have poor boundaries in life it will show up in our practice. Or, if we have people-pleasing tendencies, how it may drain us professionally. Or, if our personality is too large, we may miss the point of our work entirely because we are not attuned to our clients or the facilitation room at large.

How can you be comfortable with yourself in your coaching? What keeps you from getting support at this level to enhance your skill set and take the necessary steps to embody your work as a coach?

Enter: Coach Supervision

Getting supervision is one of the primary means of self-care to ensure your professional life and personal development are thriving. (Even dentists need dentists!) Many coaches experience and feel isolated and alone in both solo practice and common consultancy models. The antidote to burnout and isolation is connection and community.

Supervision can be a one-to-one experience or in a group setting. Each offers different types of support. In a group supervision format, you may experience dynamics that may not surface in a 1–1 supervision relationship, allowing you to study and observe yourself and others — learnings that loop back into your work with clients.

Coaching supervision is a mix of learning, exploring, and experiencing oneself. Supervision groups help to pick up emotional trends. In supervision, when a client is presented, group members often pick up thoughts, feelings, and ideas, some of which may not be available to the coach presenting the client. Because 85% of communication is nonverbal, as we talk, we communicate what it may be like to be with the client and the group can assist in identifying areas that the coach is unaware of.

The arc of the content in a group and 1–1 supervision is intended to be supportive for your practice, your professional development and a place for you to uncover what’s showing up for you in your client work. This is work that you cannot do alone. Ultimately, coaching supervision can help you unlock your coaching style, learn how you show up with different people, and provide personal support you need to show up well in your profession.

It’s hard to be on your own as a solo coach. Group supervision is for coaches both new and seasoned who are looking to broaden and deepen their practice in a group with other coaches coming together around the same intent.

Group supervision involves the use of a small group setting to enable members to reflect on their work. By pooling skills, experience, and knowledge, the aim of the sessions are to improve the skills and capability of both individuals and the group. The group supervision experience allows individuals to be in a situation to engage in various professional behaviors and experience contingencies provided from multiple listeners for their behavior. The group is led by a supervisor who models how to create safety, holds boundaries and multiple ideas with curiosity, and focuses on learning and growth.

To be a more effective coach is to know yourself and what you bring to situations, as well as how to be in service to what is larger than you and what is unsaid and emergent in any space, be it 1–1 or in facilitation. In many ways, you are holding the space for transformation for the client or group you are facilitating. This requires you, as a human being, to be attuned to you, your relationships, your environment, and what’s emerging in the interstices of all three of those spaces. Which, at its core, requires you to continue the work of knowing yourself and how you show up in the world.

Curious about how Coach Supervision can help you as a coach? Check out Reboot Supervision — rebootsupervision.io to learn more about ways we can help get you back on your game, centered in your heart, and wholly embodied in your work.

Liz Stewart is a coach supervisor based in Boulder, Colorado, with an international clientele of coaches. Additionally, she has been an active practitioner, educator, and supervisor in the international Rolfing Structural Integration community for over 30 years. Her creative approach to coaching supervision includes working with attachment, trauma, group, and somatically-based approaches to support coaches in working from a fully integrative lens.