We can all appreciate the difference between a good conversation and a really great one. Coaching conversations are no different.
As coaches, we are continually striving to have life-changing or world-class conversations with our clients. However, applying even well developed understandings of the foundational coaching competencies can oftentimes be more challenging than expected.
Our Redemptive Communication course was developed to help coaches improve the quality and overall consistency of their coaching.
Once the coach and client have determined the ultimate outcomes the client will strive toward, the actual coaching sessions will occur in an environment where four crucial practices are at work along with the ICF Core Competencies:
- Clarifiers
- Contextualizers
- Deliverables
- Ultimate Outcomes
Establishing awareness and intentionality around these characteristics is vital to improving session quality and consistency.
Great coaching conversations occur in a context that is client-centric. Therefore, coaches must be committed to adapt to the client’s perspective and needs.
When doing so, coaches should identify when a client is avoiding challenges, gives up easily when facing obstacles, sees efforts as fruitless or worse, ignores critical feedback, or feels threatened by the success of others.
These are all indications of a fixed mindset. In contrast, a growth mindset embraces challenges, persists in the face of obstacles, sees effort as the path to mastery, learns from criticism, and finds lessons and inspiration in the success of others. As a result, clients with a growth mindset reach ever-higher levels of achievement.(1)
The Redemptive Communication process begins with a coach assessing the client’s initial perspective and ensuring that the client is prepared to move forward with a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset.
In the context of a growth mindset, the four practices of Redemptive Communication, Clarifiers, Contextualizers, Deliverables, and Ultimate Outcomes, will improve communication and progress.
Clarifiers assist the coach in better understanding the client’s needs and identifying the most important element of what the client is communicating.
Contextualizers bring value to the coach because they provide a frame of reference for what the client shares and give the coach dynamic awareness of how to apply ICF Core Competencies.
Deliverables are the benefits that the coach delivers to the client.
Ultimate Outcomes are what the client wants to accomplish through the coaching.
Redemptive Communication is a system of four practices that function around the basic core competencies in order to improve communication between the coach and client while significantly increasing the overall quality of the coaching, which results in greater client progress.
(1) Research from Stanford Professor of Psychology, Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of
Success, (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 2006).
