HOW TO BECOME A COACH

I. Your Inner Voice
To be a professional coach you have to embrace thinking from the inside.

You have to ask yourself: “Do I  really have the self-generated passion to listen to and make sense of another person’s confusion, uncertainty or doubt, even though that may well drag me down in the process, too?”

That is the million-dollar question and it will greatly determine whether coaching is for you.

Being a coach requires a strong commitment as well because you will be asking your clients to carefully listen to their inner voices and then asking them to brainstorm with you to figure out possible solutions which will best enable them to achieve their goals.

However, if you don’t, can't or won't listen to and confirm your inner voice ─ PASSION ─ how can you possibly expect your clients to follow your instructions when you ask them to listen to their inner voice?

II. Mindset and Expertise
Secondly, after you confirm your passion the next question will be “Other than passion and empathy, do I have enough knowledge to coach my clients?”

If you think about it, being a coach is a very sacred responsibility. Someone has entrusted their well-being to you.

Whether you recognize it or not, your words, thoughts and actions will mildly to greatly influence your clients. You must, therefore, ensure that you possess a positive mindset, up-to-date and time-proven knowledge as well as have developed the habit of continuous life-long learning.

This will ensure that your client is taken care of professionally and just as importantly well cared for.

To ensure that you have the most up-to-date knowledge and coaching processes be sure to enroll in a trustworthy, ethical and most of all results-driven coaching organization, such as HICA, to earn your coaching certification. After earning your coaching certification, be sure to regularly participate in industry seminars and networking events.

III. Between You and Your Clients
Lastly, your ability to build mutual trust and commitment with your client is as if not more important than the earlier issues we discussed.

And as discussed before, mutual trust is the foundation of successful coaching.

So you must learn how to connect with your client through your initial interactions whether they are by email, phone, skype or in person.

Once solid and mutual trust has been established, you must know how to motivate and convince him/her to fully commit themselves to the accomplishment of each task as they strive for their ultimate goal.

Although both are not directly related to your coaching knowledge they are equally important as your passion and expertise.

IV. Real Coaching
After your clients have made substantial progress, gains and finally achieved their desired results based on your coaching, then and only then can you truly and honestly say that you’re a qualified and real coach because those actual results along with satisfied, empowered clients, speak the loudest.

We hope to see you in our community soon!

Today’s author is Hank Chin who is an Expert Personal Branding and Career Consultant at IPIB and Director of the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance.

Hank is the No.1 certified job campaigner and personal branding strategist in the Chinese-speaking world, having earned 5 career-related credentials and prides himself on high customer satisfaction.

Change From Inside
As the No.1 certified résumé writer in the Chinese-speaking world, I pride myself on crafting my clients’ résumés and sharing tips on how they can use them more effectively.

The use of a professional résumé has definitely helped them land the interviews of their choice.

However, if they truly want to advance their careers, they will soon find that they need more than just a résumé, because resumes are always just a tool for landing an interview.

Recruiters Hire People, Not Resumes.
So if IPIB really wants to effectively be the clients’ strategic partner and help them land their job of choice and even develop their careers, we should be working with them from the inside out ─ on concepts and mindsets─and then we should be complementing these intangibles with professional marketing documents.

It means we should be reshaping their mindsets, planting the seed of personal branding, and motivating them to achieve their goals.

That is why I decided to be a coach.

What I Do
I learnt my coaching skills and knowledge from mentoring by some global senior coaches as well as through my work experience and formal study.

Before accepting a coaching client, I first try to determine if my clients are coachable and ensure that we have enough mutual trust.

Mutual trust is critical. Since coaching is purely person-to-person work, mutual trust is critical to whether or not we have a strong foundation and it is decisive make sure we have a successful coaching outcome.

If either the client or I don’t have one or both of these, then the coaching process will be less effective, perhaps even breaking the coach’s (my) reputation. So knowing your clients in advance is very important.

What I Like About Coaching
I really enjoy the feeling of hearing clients say they got invited to interviews and especially that they landed a job after receiving coaching training and the creation of a professional résumé.

It’s a BIG sense of accomplishment!

My passion is to help people in Asia fulfill their potential in their daily work.

As Steve Jobs said,“Great work comes from people loving what they do.”So if I can help more people do what they enjoy, their chances of creating great work will increase.

And then their passion and work will benefit their families, communities, countries, eventually all of Asia. Asia will thus grow organically, leading to more opportunities for her people.

My Beliefs
Living a successful and meaningful life that you define for yourself is not that hard, but it’s not that easy either.

A great coach will stand by you, inspire you, and motivate you, but in the end, you still have to ACT for yourself. You can achieve whatever you want as long as you start taking your first step, which will lead you to your future success in the end. 

Learn more about Hank Chin

We'd like to talk a little about our immediate plans for the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance in 2013 and then our plans beyond that.

The first order of business is to reach out to clients in Asia-Pacific and around the world to let them know about our organization and the unique benefits we provide while we build our membership rolls.

Beyond that, we will continue to build and offer original content and offer insights and analysis into coaching techniques and knowledge, client management and best practices.

We hope you'll join us on this journey!

We would like to welcome John Taylor to our Advisory board.

John serves as the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance's online marketing and advertising advisor charged with promoting the organization and website while building web traffic and share of mind. John is a seasoned sales executive and consultant with experience in the US, Japan and Australia. He's an expert in online media and traffic analysis and previously worked as a senior manager at a major online market intelligence and insight software firm where he developed partnerships with some of the most heavily trafficked sites including MegaUpLoad, online gaming sites and well as dozens of other high profile and highly trafficked sites.

He currently works for a major Silicon Valley enterprise software company and is the founder of the Wider Sales Funnel, the premier platform for accelerating your business performance.

John is a native speaker of English as well as a native speaker of Spanish and currently resides in Sydney, Australia and previously resided in the US (California, Boston and Florida) and Tokyo, Japan.