My Dog is a Certified Life Coach (And Why It Matters)
13 minute read
This is Ted.
Ted is a great dog. He’s full of love, sticks to his humans like Velcro, and gets obsessive when there’s a ball around. You can’t say the word W-A-L-K out loud because that will send him into an excitable spin, and when you bring a treat out for him he pre-emptively starts rolling over to impress you. It’s very cute.
Oh, and he’s a life coach.
The process of becoming a life coach wasn’t too difficult actually. We paid a little fee, and went through the online course together. Before you knew it, dear Ted had a certificate of his very own.
Why did we do this?
As a trainer and facilitator, I work in an industry that’s largely unregulated. When it comes to coaching, there are different bodies out there, but ultimately it’s not really difficult for anyone – even my dog Ted, to call themselves a coach.
Did we cheat the system a little, Ted and I? Yes. And one hopes that most people would go through even these short courses with a lot more thoroughness than we did together. But the point remains the same. The regulations simply aren’t there.
And that’s how my Foxy Chihuahua suddenly gained a title that seemed quite impressive.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve done short coaching courses myself and gotten accreditations that are quick (and sometimes expensive). Some of these courses are fantastic. But others aren’t. Some coaches you meet will be incredible. I’ve met some who help their clients achieve great things. Unfortunately, though, it’s becoming a market with a lot of smoke and mirrors, so differentiating between those who will really bring you what you’re looking for and those who aren’t right for you can be a long and arduous process.
I want to make clear that I am not bagging coaches or coaching here – I’m in the L&D space myself, I do some one on one coaching here and there, and I firmly believe that coaches can bring immense value when you have the right person and the right situation for it. I am a big advocate for getting external help in the areas you need it. Often, this external help brings people value, clarity, processes, new insights, accountability, and results.
Finding the right fit is where it becomes hard. Ted is very nurturing, but he isn’t going to give much back to you in his coaching session – except for eternal love and affection, of course.
So, I’ve written this article to give some advice around navigating this complex and confusing “coaching” world. If you are looking to hire a “coach”, perhaps it will help you figure out how to do that and end up with one worth your money. Here are some questions to consider before engaging an L&D professional…
Do I need a coach? Or do I need something else?
The word ‘coaching’ in social conversation has become synonymous with a lot of things, including mentoring, training, speaking and facilitating. It’s important to differentiate what some of these words actually mean – because it will impact on what service, exactly, you’re buying.
Coaching:
Pure coaching as a skill is designed to help the coachee gain clarity, direction, accountability and understanding. It’s there to help someone help themselves. In practice, this means a pure coaching relationship is about asking people the right questions so they can come to their own conclusions.
These questions will usually follow a certain formula, and be phrased in specific ways in order to spark the coachee to think differently. A coach is not there to give you advice – but rather to help you unmuddle your mind so you can figure things out and make the decisions that are right for you.
There exists a plethora of ‘types of coaches’ within this niche, and this would turn into a book rather than an article if I went into it too much, so we’ll leave it more surface-level for now. The main thing is – if your brain is full of too much information, you’re feeling overwhelmed, you have some specific decisions to make or issues to solve, and you want someone to sit down and help you nut out what’s happening in your life (life coaching) or work (organisational coaching or executive coaching), this might be a good choice.
If you have an employee who is really struggling and they’re not quite sure what’s going on and you’re not quite sure how you can help them, a coaching session might be great in that situation.
A lot of coaches also incorporate some of the things below into their practice, so it is worth asking them what methodology they use.
Mentoring:
A mentoring relationship is, I think, what a lot of people actually expect when they seek out a coach. A mentor-mentee relationship involves practical advice from the mentor. The mentee will come to the mentor with their situation and their questions, and using the mentors past experiences they will give the mentee their view of the situation.
It’s important to have mentors in your life generally, and when it comes to paid mentorships you’re best to look for someone who is themselves in a position (or has been in a position) you aspire to reach.
With a coach, you’re paying for the skill of coaching itself, but with a mentor you’re paying for their experience or personal advice – so make sure it’s relevant to you. If you’re in a position where you have very specific questions related to your current path, and you can’t find the industry knowledge or experienced advice you need, a mentor would be your go-to.
Training:
Training in its purest form is about upskilling. This is imparting specific information and knowledge about processes, products or ideas that will help someone improve in a specific area. With a trainer, I would advise asking about education and knowledge bases, and also training style. For something like product knowledge training, you probably want someone who has the expertise in that technical area who can answer tricky questions.
Training is what you want when you have a specific skill that needs developing, or ongoing processes that you or your team need consistent refreshing on. (Training, like all the things in this list, should really be an engrained part of your organisational culture, and an ongoing external trainer can help to ensure consistency with this).
Facilitating:
In common practice, facilitation is about development through a mix of training and coaching. A good facilitator will have the education and knowledge bases needed to upskill effectively (aka. They know what they’re talking about), and the ability to ask good questions and get people actively involved in their learning process.
Some facilitators will be facilitators in a more ‘pure facilitation’ sense, which in reality often looks like group coaching towards specific goals. Pure facilitation is more like mediation and support, someone who comes in as an external party to help a group of leaders in a business collaborate on new projects, for example. They’ll work to ensure everyone gets involved, ask questions to help people brainstorm, mediate discussion, prompt people to think more deeply about their responses, and ask people for their contributions to create a space of honesty and openness.
Other facilitators will really be trainers who like to keep people engaged with their training style through facilitative questions and practical activities. This kind of training/facilitation is good for soft-skill development and areas like leadership, which requires a good mix of theory and self-awareness. Anything where you partly want to come away with solid content-based value, and partly with discoveries you’ve made yourself, is likely a good slot for this service.
Importantly, my definitions could be different to the person you’re speaking to as a prospective coach. It is absolutely imperative to decide what you’re actually looking for, and find out if that ‘coach’ (who may secretly be more of a mentor or a facilitator) is on the same page as you. Ask: What methods do you use? What is an example of what a session would look like?
What experience should I be looking for?
Of course, this question is not particularly easy to answer. It’s going to vary based on what you’re looking to achieve. I’m a particularly young trainer myself, so I can’t boast 30 years in training or sales or anything like that. This also means I am probably (thanks to my consciously-unconscious biases) going to steer you away from looking only for the person who has the most years’ experience. But years of experience won’t necessarily be the right question anyway.
Some of the points I would personally look for here are as follows:
What knowledge or experience is the person using as their basis for credibility?
If it’s a course, what was the course? What did it involve?
(If it was the same as Ted’s course, it was a couple of hours of content and a multiple choice quiz. Most people will have done something more meaty than that).
What kind of knowledge and skill base do they have?
For coaching, my understanding is that something approved or endorsed by the International Coaching Federation is considered more legit, because the ICF is a pretty large body and they have high standards, requiring a certain number of hours of practice etc. I have a coaching certification, for example, that was approved by the ICF, but I am not an ICF accredited coach (that would require a lot more courses and hours, I think). Small things.
For a trainer, in Australia a big chunk of trainers will have completed their Cert 4 in Training and Assessment from TAFE. (I haven’t, because I did something similar at uni). You generally want a trainer, if you are paying for them to design and deliver a course, to have some tertiary knowledge around adult learning. That’s because you want them to not only have the expertise in the subject matter, but also be able to deliver it in a way that is more likely to be retained and executed by the people being trained. There are some pretty formulaic elements to this that one would gain from education.
If you’re looking for someone to do pure coaching, you definitely would want them to have completed education on coaching methods – because that’s the skill you’re paying for.
If you’re looking for someone to, say, train on behavioural profiling (DISC, MBTI, 5 Factor, Insights, McQuaig, etc. etc.) most people will tell you that you need certain accreditation to be able to do that properly. I don’t necessarily agree with that, because most of the accreditations around different kinds of profiling, to the best of my knowledge, aren’t particularly regulated either – so I don’t know how much meaning we can attach to some of them. (As another aside, that means if you’re looking to do a course yourself on one of these things you should ask for referrals from people to find the good courses).
The only exception there is the person should be very well trained in the interpretation of any reports that they will be generating. Personally, my test for this person would be to ask them to profile someone for you, or to ask them to give you some examples around the profiling they’ve conducted before. You want them to be able to demonstrate the practical skill of profiling itself, and what it’s all about – because that’s likely what you’re hoping to gain from their service.
If it’s their own personal experience they’re using to back themselves, there are a couple of things you want to be wary of. The first is, is the experience relevant to what you want? The second is, we all know that the best salespeople, for example, don’t necessarily align with being the best coaches, trainers or facilitators. They’re very different skillsets. Try to establish, beyond their own experience in the field, what their style of facilitation, training or coaching actually looks like. Is that going to resonate?
Finally, you want to ensure, especially if their knowledge base is entirely on personal experience, that their philosophy aligns with yours. There are a thousand different belief systems around how to sell, how to manage, and how to lead – and if this person is delivering based on what worked for them, you want to ensure that style fits in with your values and belief systems (or your organisation’s).
How do I know if they’re the right fit for me?
Coaches work very closely with you. In the coaching and mentoring space, certainly, you want to make sure you actually click with the person. You don’t have to be best buds, but you do have to build enough rapport and trust to be able to get vulnerable and be authentic with them. Otherwise you’ll cut yourself short. This is especially true for more long-term arrangements.
On that one, I encourage you to trust your gut, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. It’s also in the coach’s best interest to ensure you’re a fit before moving forward, so don’t hesitate to suss it out properly. You definitely want to have at least one decent length conversation over the phone or in person before proceeding with any kind of coach or mentor.
Does their coaching methodology suit me?
Some coaches operate entirely online. They’ll conduct their sessions using Skype or Zoom, or even via messenger. Others will only do face to face sessions, and others will use phone check ins as their main port of call.
Most of us know what communication methods we work best with. If you’re looking for group coaching or training for your team, consider their routines, communication styles, and motivation. For example, a less motivated group needs the lowest effort communication method (e.g. coach comes to you in work hours). More motivated groups are more inclined to execute self-learning (e.g. online training modules that are not live or interactive). Most groups will benefit from a blended assortment of communication methods, time investments and styles.
Summary Questions
Putting this all together, the key points I would advise on your quest for a coach/external L&D professional or company are:
Before looking for someone
Identify what you need. Is it:
Someone who can help you to help yourself? Who will assist you with self-awareness, introspection, and internal thought processes? (Coach);
Someone who can give you practical advice and guidance based on their own experiences, which are superior to yours? (Mentor);
Someone who can upskill you or your team in a specific product, process, knowledge base or idea? (Trainer);
Someone who can give you a mix of information and self-learning, where you come away with both practical knowledge and new insights you have come to about yourself? (Facilitator)
Then, when you’re assessing candidates
What is this person basing their service on?
Do they cover what I need them to cover?
Does their philosophy about the topic align with mine?
The most important criteria
The main considerations have to be:
What do I want them to do? (overarching goal or problem)
Are they going to do that? (method and material)
Are they going to do that well? (authority and credibility)
Ted’s coaching services
I would tell you about Ted’s services, but I’m almost certain you couldn’t afford him. From what I can gather, a lot of his life philosophy centres around keeping your eye on the ball.
In Conclusion...
My primary goal here is to help people understand the difference between different kinds of L&D services, and avoid making the wrong decision. Even though there are lots of great coaches and trainers out there, there are also some who squeeze into the space with meaningless certifications and big promises, without the skills that will actually serve their clients.
As a consumer, my advice is to be wary but open-minded. Do your research, really get to know the person or company you're dealing with, and make sure they'll deliver on the specific goals that you have for the process. That way, you're more than likely to find a perfect fit who gives you value well beyond your dollars spent.
I'd love to know -
Have you ever had a situation where you signed up for a ‘coach’, and got something different to what you were expecting?
What’s the best coaching experience you’ve ever had?
Sonia
Don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter for updates and exclusive weekly content!