It gives me great joy when students from our online coach training programs tell me that learning our coaching has improved their relationship with their spouses, their fiancé and even with their adult children.
I can attest to experiencing a big shift in me when I also learned coaching many years ago.
So, how does coaching grow your relational skills?
Here’s four basic coaching skills which bring massive improvements in relational intelligence:
SKILL 1 – Active listening which builds connection
Very few of us know how to really listen until we have learned professional level ‘active listening’. Active listening is one of the first, basic skills you learn in coaching. Active listening in coaching means being 100% present with a person and being able to understand their agenda and stay present with that agenda.
The word ‘active’ is key as you learn to pick up on the nuances of the person’s agenda and delve deeper by actively asking questions on what shines out as important. You reflect key points back to the person to check you have understood and are aligned with the person’s train of thought.
Being listened to in this way enables people to feel valued, seen, understood, and heard. It builds solid relationship collateral quickly and bonds you together! You end up getting to know someone in a much deeper way.
SKILL 2 – Beyond ‘Normal’ Curiosity
Learning to coach switches on and switches up healthy curiosity. Mostly we don’t exercise a lot of curiosity in our conversations with people. We don’t become very curious with what really matters to them.
We may think we do, but a cursory couple of questions doesn’t really count. It doesn’t exercise beyond normal curiosity. To really get to the roots of what really matters to a person, we must learn persistent curiosity.
To do this, we must switch off our own agenda, refrain from trying to fix or bring a solution. We must stop listening to prove our point, or to find a way of bringing in our own beliefs.
There is process we need to go through of shifting ourselves to believe in the person first and foremost. By this I mean, we need to believe that they have incredible resource within themselves, that they are in fact a masterpiece created by God and that they have hidden treasure within themselves.
Our curiosity then becomes healthy, and all about finding the gold within them. That kind of curiosity feels empowering to the person. They will feel loved, valued, and precious. They will begin to believe in themselves. The relationship between you and them changes. More trust is built, more understanding and more belief in each other. It becomes a relationship that brings life.
SKILL 3 – Holding the focus on what really matters
In all relationships, those at home and at work, the skill of holding the focus within conversation is a valuable one. This applies especially to conversations about serious and important things, as well as emotive subjects that matter to the person talking.
Too many times, we can tend to get distracted and the conversation changes immediately. The person’s important subject gets side-lined. Distractions can include phones/devices, but also our own agendas, to talk about something similar or to step in to try and shift towards a fix or solution to the topic, rather than taking to time to fully hear a person out.
If we do get distracted, people end up feeling less valued and it damages relationships when this happens. Alternatively, a person may want to navigate away from a conversation that feels difficult or confrontative. If we don’t hold the focus and see it through, we miss the opportunity to go deeper and grow a better connection.
SKILL 4 – Self-managing to empower others
Everything I’ve already mentioned above covers something around self-management, but it is such an important relationship skill it merits its own mention. Coach training teaches this skill at the beginning of the training journey.
Self-management is partially about the art of holding back from giving advice. Advice can be a powerful gift, but equally it can drive a wedge between people in a relationship. People can feel patronised, or not really heard. They can feel angry and upset when someone jumps in and gives advice, when they haven’t asked for it.
Sometimes advice can feel totally inappropriate to a situation because the person giving the advice hasn’t really taken the time to understand the situation or because the person giving the advice just doesn’t understand who they are giving the advice to.
Learning to self-manage involves learning how to listen first and listen deeply, whilst holding back your urge to give someone a solution. Many times when you self-manage and listen, you find the advice you are holding back would have not been very helpful anyway, and you would not have known that if you hadn’t fully listened and got to know the person first.
Holding yourself back from jumping in with opinions, advice or solutions, will improve your relationships tenfold!
If you are the kind of person that doesn’t self-manage at all and is constantly jumping in with opinions and advice, you may find that the relationships around you are with people who seek this and want this. Those people may not wish to be empowered to think for themselves. You have a choice whether you want people to depend on your input or if you would prefer them to learn how to live their own lives in a more empowered way.
When we self-manage, we take ourselves to the next level of leadership. A place where we are secure and have nothing to prove. We no longer care that we have the ‘right answer’ or the ‘best solution’. We care more that the person in front of us is encouraged and empowered to find their own right answer and best solution. What this means is that when they don’t have us in front of them, they have built confidence in their own ability to think and make decisions for themselves.
These four skills, will help you build deeper connection, trust and intimacy in all of the relationships around you.
Interested in taking your relational intelligence to the next level? Check out our Level 1 Executive Certificate in Transformational Coaching