Learning openness as a life coach
While I can be fairly open in some ways, I can also be fairly secretive. I’m already working on undoing some of those communication patterns in my personal life, but while at life coaching training one dilemma I faced was the fact that some of my cohort will be life coaching me! This is just a bit intimidating for me, because it necessarily involves me opening up to people I don’t know that well, to some degree.
However, I think it’s a good challenge, because while I won’t necessarily be developing relationships with my clients, beyond the professional relationship, I still need to be open enough with them that they feel they can talk with me. So I’m treating this as an excellent opportunity to help myself mindfully continue working on how open I can be.
And this very weekend I did get some opportunities to practice. In three situations I was coached to some degree or another and I had to consider what it was I was going to talk about that could help my cohort gain skills, while also helping me experience what it could be like to be a client. I did pick situations that weren’t too high on my scale of what I could work on, but they were still situations that I could use some help on.
It was a little hard to open up, but I did get comfortable and I realized it was good to talk with some people and get some feedback on those situations. I definitely had a different perspective on each situation I was coached about by the end of each session, which speaks to the effectiveness of what I’m learning.
Categories: Blog
Tags: Life coach, openness, Training
