research paper

Life Coaching Skills and their Importance: Listening, Questioning and Motivating Skills

Student Name

Course Title and Name

Instructor Name

Due Date

Life Coaching Skills and their Importance: Listening, Questioning and Motivating Skills

Introduction

Life coaching is defined as the process of enhancing an individual's well-being and performance in their personal and professional lives with a healthy and non-clinical population. The coaching process is the art of facilitating another person's performance, learning, and development. Life coaches enable individuals who lack a functioning life to set and achieve goals, maximize personal development, and navigate the path toward realizing their ideal vision for the current and emerging chapters of their lives. Three critical skills for the life coaching profession include listening, questioning, and motivating skills. Due to the coach's mastery of listening, questioning, and motivating skills, the professional life coach can comprehend the client's motivations and emotions, reason through their problem, and encourage the client to reach their full potential.

Background and Definition

1. Definition: Life coaching focuses on improving people's personal lives and their working life (Hanson, 2020).

2. History and Trends: The concept is relatively new, but it is here to stay since there has been a huge increase in attention to life coaching. This section will outline the definition of life coaching and trends associated with life coaching.

Life Coaching Skills: Listening skill

1. Reason Skill is needed: Practicing as a life coach requires more than knowledge in any specific domain but requires skill to attend to client needs effectively.

2. Listening skill: Listening skill is crucial for a coach as listening to a client but not offering a solution is needed (Corti & Gelati, 2020). The listening process serves the purpose of ensuring that the coach feels respected, heard, and understood.

3. This section outlines why listening skill is necessary for the client and the coach.

Life Coaching Skills: Questioning Skill

1. Questioning skill: The coach's questioning skill is crucial as it helps a good coach stand out. The coaches put across challenging and yet sensitive questions to the client (Crosse, 2019).

2. Impact of Questioning skill to a client: Integration of questions in the life coaching session enables a client to feel that their presenting issues are heard, acknowledged, and respected by the life coach (Anthony & Sean, 2018).

Life Coaching Skills: Motivating Skills

1. Motivating skills: The motivating skill entails life coaches' actions to elicit the desired outcome, response, or behavior.

2. Life coaching use of life skills: A Life coach applies the motivating skill to a certain point to encourage clients to overcome roadblocks to reach their full potential and help them accomplish sustainable success (Eriksen et al., 2020).

Importance of this skill in professional practice

1. A professional life coach can offer effective services to a client

• Coach actively and warmly receives, understands, and accepts the client thoughts and thought patterns, emotions, reactions, affirmation, and doubts (Gould et al., 2020).

1. The coach understands the client by offering a listening hear, effectively questioning and motivating the client to achieve their full potential (Boyatzis, Smith, & Van, 2019).

• Life coaches lacking this skill cannot offer service that best meets client needs.

Conclusion

Life coaching is a process that assists individuals in identifying preferred outcomes by enabling them to disengage from problem-oriented thinking, allowing them to spend more time thinking about possible solutions and pathways to success rather than focusing exclusively on the problem. The coaching process necessitates acquiring specific skills to provide life coaching services that are responsive to client needs. The skillset includes asking questions to elicit alternative perspectives on a client's problem and listening attentively to understand better and accept the client's patterns, emotions, and doubts. Motivating abilities are required to motivate clients to reach their full potential. A professional life coach who possesses these three skills will be better equipped to manage client issues and assist clients in reaching their full potential.

References

Anthony M. Grant & Sean A. O’Connor (2018): Broadening and building

solution-focused coaching: feeling good is not enough, Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1080/17521882.2018.1489868

Boyatzis, R. E., Smith, M., & Van, O. E. (2019). Helping people change: Coaching with compassion for lifelong learning and growth.

Corti, L., & Gelati, C. (2020). Mindfulness and coaching to improve learning abilities in university students: A pilot study. International journal of environmental research and public health, 17(6), 1935. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17061935

Crosse, E. (2019) 'A Q Methodology Study: How Do Coaches Foster the Coaching Relationship?', International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring, (S13), pp.76-93. DOI: 10.24384/jjag-m372 (Accessed: 12 February 2022).

Eriksen, M., Collins, S., Finocchio, B., & Oakley, J. (2020). Developing Students’ Coaching Ability Through Peer Coaching. Journal of Management Education, 44(1), 9–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562919858645

Gould, D., Nalepa, J., & Mignano, M. (2020). Coaching generation Z athletes. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 32(1), 104-120. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2019.1581856

Hanson, T. (2020). The coaching questions handbook: 150 powerful life coaching and personal growth questions.