There comes a time when our focus shifts toward wanting to raise up and encourage others.
It’s a natural, God-given, in-built desire for us to want to do this. Whatever age we are, we will at some stage invariably find fulfilment in teaching, mentoring, coaching, and nurturing others. God gave us this desire and skill as part of the way we “go forth and multiply” (Genesis 1:28).
Most of us will in our lifetime find a way of raising up others, nurturing and developing them, or imparting something of use to them.
Every Christian is meant to become a kind of mother or father to others spiritually, and in other ways too. It’s in our nature to want to pass on and impart to people what has helped us, what we have worked through, and what we have learned.
Coaching skills offer a natural way of fulfilling this part of your purpose.
Whether it’s coaching your own children, at child stage, or adult stage, or whether you coach those you lead, or whether you coach breakthrough to people in need of help and encouragement, the skills you use in coaching can help you to empower and guide in all these cases.
Here are some ways that learning to coach helps you to develop others:
Listening deeper
Many times, we can be guilty of helping people with a rather heavy-handed approach. As soon as someone expresses a need, we are quick to fix the need by giving advice, praying for them, or offering a scripture, a book, or a song to help. None of this, of course, is bad or wrong, but mostly we haven’t really listened to what the person needs or given them a chance themselves to outwardly process what the problem is or how they are feeling and what they are struggling with. Coaching teaches powerful active listening skills. Not surprisingly, listening more deeply makes people feel more valued and loved and helps them figure out things for themselves many times.
Facilitating God connections
Co-Creative Coaching also offers a powerful framework to help you to facilitate people to ask God powerful questions that go deeper and help a person to hear His answers and gain His wisdom. Connecting a person to God in this way is a great way of growing and maturing them. It helps to grow their dependency on God and not you. Using Co-Creative Coaching to facilitate a person to hear directly and personally from God helps them more than your advice or fixes.
Empowering thinking
Coaching enables people to shift perspectives and think differently in a more empowered way. It points them to positive, solution-based thinking. It points them toward a faith-filled mindset, from limiting beliefs to empowering beliefs. Learning how to apply this skill in one area of their life helps them to also apply this in many other parts of their life, their work, and their faith. It lessens a person’s dependency on you. One day you won’t be around; it is hugely encouraging to know that you have trained someone to think in an empowering way so that they can naturally help themselves.
Renewing the mind
Shifting perspectives can be thought of as renewing the mind. When our thinking is limited, we are, somewhere in our mind, believing lies—because God is not limited, and we are His. All that He has done on the cross makes all authority available to us. Coaching helps with renewing the mind.
Eph. 4:23 (AMP): “And be continually renewed in the spirit of your mind [having a fresh, untarnished mental and spiritual attitude].”
Drawing out more
Prov. 20:5 – “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out.”
This verse is such a great one to explain what coaching is. Like no other method, coaching a person can draw out deep parts of their heart that may have been lost or undiscovered. With Co-Creative Coaching skills, you learn to listen deeply, spiritually, and intuitively and draw out incredible treasures from a person. The impact on them is extraordinary. They will thank you, they will come alive, they will gain wisdom. And you will know that all you did was draw out what was already there. This is working on the right side of the cross because everything we need has already been provided. The Kingdom of God is within us. Helping people to access all of this is true discipleship.
Connecting to God-given purpose
2 Peter 1:10 – “Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble.”
Perhaps one of the lesser-known Bible verses, but a powerful one. If we are sure of our calling, we are less likely to stumble. This is so true. Using Co-Creative Coaching, people get coached into a clarity of their specific purpose—their calling. This is so compelling that it shifts the way you think about your life and the way you plan your life. There is nothing else you’d rather do than that which you were uniquely designed for. This acts as a great deterrent to getting distracted by pursuing other less healthy or fruitful things that don’t align with your calling.
Walking out wholeness
There comes a time when we have experienced God’s incredible healing love in our lives and been healed of trauma, childhood issues, and our ability to receive God’s love and experience Him as a Father. The next part of God’s redemptive healing is to be enabled and empowered to live out the extraordinary calling that He planned for us.
Knowing what this purpose is comes first. This is what the Co-Creative framework can deliver. Once you know your purpose, the next step is being coached to live it out. Strategies, wisdom, understanding timing, knowing where you are ready and where you need re-skilling and training, understanding how to build a vision, then plan and execute are all parts that a well-honed coaching process can deliver. Some need help with all of this; others need help with just parts. Coaching them through to see the calling lived out to the full is fulfilling.
Whatever your area of expertise, raising up others is a part of your purpose—part of what you were born for. This will become your legacy. As you have been trained and nurtured, you in turn can, and I’m sure already do, the same for others.
Gaining coaching skills and a framework that helps you to empower others the most helps you to fulfil your mandate and your legacy.