The ability to listen well is an absolutely essential skill for masterful life coaching. By honing this ability, you can achieve greater momentum and flow in your coaching sessions, and serve the client by enabling them to go deeper and further in your sessions together. You can hear your client’s agenda clearly, or know when and how you need to ask for further clarity on the agenda. You can hear your client’s wisdom and coachable moments, and as a result know what the most powerful questions are that you can pose to your client. You can then hear your client’s shifts in energy and perspective, and tune in to when and how your client is ready to make new commitments, and take action. In short, listening well can provide the foundation for a strong and successful life coaching session.

To facilitate this, you can hone your listening skills by spending time reflecting on what you’re listening for. In the Coach Training Accelerator, there are a number of excellent tools and resources that can help any life coach reflect on what they’re listening for in a session, and further develop active listening skills that hone in on key moments throughout a coaching session.

In the Certified Coach Program, one of the assignments is to record yourself coaching a client (with the client’s permission, of course!). While this can be daunting at first, you will soon discover a wealth of information to be found in listening to and reflecting on your own coaching. By doing so, you can clearly hear how your questions and engagements resonate with your client, how changes of energy and perspective sound for your client, and perhaps even pick up on nuances of tone, energy or meaning that you may not have heard during the initial session.

By deliberately training yourself to recognize and fully engage the many opportunities that arise for clients in coaching sessions, you not only learn how to listen better, but you also continue to learn how to be a masterful life coach.