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Being Non-Judgmental: The kiss of death for your coaching practice

Written by: Hannah McNamara

Article Overview: Too many life coaches, business coaches and executive coaches try to be 'coach-like' the whole time. Rather than show-casing their services, this almost always counter-productive and turns prospective clients off. Being non-judgmental when building your coaching practice and trying to get more coaching clients is the WORST thing you can do. This will sabotage all your marketing efforts.

Being Non-Judgmental: The kiss of death for your coaching practice

Whether we trained to be a life coach, executive coach, small business coach or another niche coach, we were taught to keep an open mind. To clear our own thoughts and be completely present with our clients. To listen. To observe. To facilitate. But never to judge.

While this is almost always exactly the right thing to do within the context of a coaching session, it can be the absolute worst thing you do when building your coaching business. If you are trying to be non-judgmental and ‘coach-like’ in every aspect of your practice, you are on the road to ruin.

Let me explain.

We’ll look at the idea of being ‘coach-like’ first.

What does it mean to be ‘coach-like’? From my own observations it means actively listening to people, being empathetic, mirroring and matching body language, nodding along and smiling serenely as someone is talking, very rarely talking about yourself and generally taking the attitude that whatever the person you’re talking to is saying is right in their map of the world.

The down-side to being ‘coach-like’ when you’re not in a coaching session is that people outside of the personal development world can find it very hard to engage with you. They just don’t ‘get’ you.

I often hear business people at networking events talking about coaches saying things like, “It’s really hard to get a conversation going – they just want to listen” and “Don’t they have an opinion?”.

Some even go as far as making comments like, “I find them patronising; they think they’re so perfect” or “I hate it when they start asking really personal questions or putting me on the spot. Sometimes I just want to let off steam and they think that gives them permission to ask me probing questions or ask me why I feel that way!”

When you’re outside of coaching sessions, you don’t need to try and ‘stealth-coach’ people to showcase what you can do. You can do this much better by being yourself, being authentic and expressing your opinions. You’ll also have a lot more fun! Be prepared to talk about things other than coaching when you’re networking. Keep an eye on current events and sports so you have things to say. Read around your subject so you can talk with authority. When you’re asked what you do, be specific. Tell stories and give examples. Remember interesting facts and figures that are related to the market you work in. Don’t just talk about coaching sessions or techniques; mention talks you’re running or articles or e-books you’ve written on the topic. It’s much easier to offer to email information about these to people than it is to try and sell them on a coaching session there and then.

If you’re really being yourself, very quickly you’ll find that the kind of clients you wouldn’t get along with anyway will drift away and the ones who are right for you will be drawn closer to you. It’s a process of natural selection.
You’ll also find that people start to see you as a real, unique individual rather than ‘just another life coach’.

Now let’s move on to being non-judgmental.

This idea that you should be non-judgmental in everything you do has the potential to be very damaging to you. Not just in your coaching practice, but in your life generally.

You need to make judgements on a daily basis, if not a minute-by-minute basis. You need to judge how fast a car is coming towards you before you step into the road, you need to judge whether the food in your fridge has gone off before you eat it and you need to judge whether you’re coaching the right people on the right things.

When coaching our clients to be more successful we tell them to set goals, make decisions and to take action. This requires judgment on the part of our clients. They need to judge whether the goal they are setting for themselves is achievable, whether it’s actually what they want and whether it is really SMART enough (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Bound).

To make a decision requires them to weigh up all the options, select the best option and discard the others. To take action they must decide what they are going to do and also what they are NOT going to do. Every action comes with an opportunity cost. In other words, if you take one course of action, it means that you are unable to take another.

When our clients avoid setting goals, making a decision or taking action, we might question whether they know what they want. And if they say that they know what they want but still resist doing something about it, we’d ask ourselves whether they really want it badly enough.

As coaches, if we truly want success we have to be decisive. We have to make judgments. We have to decide to take a course of action, even if it means that we can’t take another. Anything less than that and we are abdicating all responsibility for our future success to ‘the Universe’, fate or luck. That’s also called being passive or if we’re being extreme, “wishful thinking”.

But fate, luck and ‘the Universe’ are funny old things.

When you tell them what you want, things start to happen. You might have heard that phrase, “Leap and the net will appear”. When you leap you do it as a whole person - you have to choose which direction to leap in! The other option is you chop yourself up into tiny pieces and scatter them in the wind hoping that they all come back together when they hit the right net!

The leap that I’m suggesting you take is to decide who you most want to work with in your practice. Which coaching clients would you most like to have? And what do those people most want to get from working with you?

Make judgments about the sort of people you like and the people you would prefer not to coach. A good coaching relationship hinges on whether the match between coach and coachee is right. Yes, you can adapt your style to suit the client, but it’s an awful lot easier to concentrate your full attention on the coachee when you can relax and be yourself rather than concentrating on whether you’re building rapport effectively or matching their words exactly.

You’ll be a better coach when you relax.

And when you’re more present in coaching sessions, your clients will get better results and you’ll earn yourself the reputation as the ‘go-to’ person for people like them.

So, while being non-judgmental can be the kiss of death to your coaching practice, making the right kinds of judgments can give an ailing coaching practice the kiss of life.

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Article Tags: attitude, body language, business coach, executive coach, life coach, map of the world, networking events, niche, personal development, personal questions, probing questions, saying things, sessions, showcase, small business, stealth, steam



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