Self-Awareness: An Essential Ingredient for Coaches?

Self-Awareness: An Essential Ingredient for Coaches?

 To many practicing coaches and coaching supervisors, it appears that there is common agreement that all coaches need to be self-aware to be effective and to develop coaching maturity.  However, this is not uniformly represented by the professional coaching bodies as not all of them include coach self-awareness as a stand-alone core competency.  Alongside this the evidence and academic literature lacks consistency in terms of providing evidence as to the importance of coach self-awareness, and many coach training programmes primarily focus on coaching skills e.g. questioning and listening or other core competencies.  However, if you want to become and operate as a therapist you are expected to undertake therapy on yourself, yet in the coaching profession we have no requirement to undertake coaching to work on self or self-awareness or to receive coaching before becoming a coach, so how important is coach self-awareness and how much effort should we put in to develop it?

From a personal perspective I know that my own development as a coach and my effectiveness has been largely dependent on me deepening my self-awareness and working on self so that I can sit with uncertainty and discomfort, thereby using myself effectively as a ‘tool’ for the coaching whilst ‘getting out of the way of the coachee’. The Pema Chodron philosophy underpins much of my thinking and approach here i.e., “we work on ourselves in order to work with others, and we work with others in order to work on ourselves.”  Whilst this is a personal perspective it is very much underpinned by my own research into self-awareness, it is endorsed, to some extent, when we consider that a core purpose of coaching is to elicit behavioural change through raising self-awareness of the coachee.  If we, as coaches, are responsible for raising self-awareness in our coachees then surely it is imperative that we ourselves work on deepening our own self-awareness. This is further supported by the view that we can only take coachees as far and as deep as we have taken ourselves.  In addition, how can we possibly expect our coachees to do this work if we’ve not done the work ourselves.

Not only does coach self-awareness give us the ‘right’ to work with and on the coachee’s self-awareness, and perhaps enables us to take them to a ‘below surface’ level of work it also has a fundamental role in enabling coaches to have a much deeper human connection in terms of the relationship with the client.  It does this by first providing the coach with deeper self-connection, through self-awareness and acceptance of self.  It is this self-acceptance of our own vulnerabilities, imperfections and failings that gives us the ability to sit with ‘not knowing’ and discomfort.  This enables the coach to ‘regulate and manage self’ throughout coaching interactions, whilst maintaining complete focus on the coachee rather than becoming egocentric and overly concerned with ‘having to prove ‘oneself’ or ‘perform’ as a coach.  It is only when we have done this deep work on ourselves, have connected with, and accepted oneself on all levels can we then truly develop a meaningful client connection for deep work to be done.  In sum, coach self-awareness is essential to developing self-connection and thereby client connection which will then enable coaching conversations with insight and change; it is absolutely a critical ingredient.

By Dr Julia Carden