Coaching tools are a crucial element of any coach’s repository. From life coaches working with individuals to executive, business, and leadership coaches working with large organisations, coaching tools and techniques are a vital part of the coach-client journey.
And no two coaching tools are the same – each coaching tool is designed with a specific intention to provide the coach with answers that will assist in the client’s transformation journey.
Among the numerous coaching tools out there, we think that these 5 coaching tools can assist a variety of coaches during their coaching engagements:
1. Coaching Intent
The Coaching Intent tool is designed to ask quick yet thought-provoking questions that help a coach capture a client’s situation and expectations from coaching, providing them the right number of clues on how to create the first step of an enriching journey.
This is because the sheer number of possibilities in sparking off a coaching engagement can be difficult to navigate. “How exactly should I begin working with my client?”, “Where are we really headed?”, “What exactly am I supposed to do?”. The short answer: let the client tell you.
From better understanding the client’s dreams and aspirations to where they find themselves in their lives, and what their expectations of the coaching engagement are, this digital tool can do it all in a crisp and clear fashion. When you then look back at their responses at the end of the coaching engagement, the tool also serves as a lovely snapshot of how far they’ve come and how successful the journey has been!
When to use it: Preferably well before your first session, because the information attainted from this Coaching Intent tool can inform the questions you ask your client in your very first coaching call.
Take Simply.Coach’s Coaching Intent tool for a spin here.
2. Reflective Goal Setting
The Reflective Goal Setting tool is a must-have in your coaching tool kit to help clients discover & formulate meaningful goals and thus, make the right behavioral changes to improve the quality of their life.
This life coaching tool helps clients get inner clarity on what they need to be working on and formulate their goals with conviction. Further, even if a client has some idea of what their goal should be, this reflective tool can enable greater clarity and buy-in for the goals they’ve chosen.
Not only can this tool lay the foundation for the rest of the coaching journey, but it can also provide you with insights into what needs to be worked on in the immediate sessions.
When to use it: The tool is best administered after the chemistry session or the initial phase of discovery. This is so that the coach gets the time to help the client prepare for the survey, as it demands a certain reflective state to answer effectively.
Having a one-to-one before administering this tool allows you to decide whether this extensive goal-setting form might be too detailed, especially if the client already has a good degree of clarity on what they want to work towards in the coming time. That way, you can tweak the tool before sending it to the client.
Try out Simply.Coach’s Reflective Goal Setting Tool here.
3. Self-Reflections
Self-Reflections are a great way for clients to take a look back at their week/month/year and reflect on what they learned, how they were successful, what challenges they faced, and what goals they would like to set moving forward.
The structure has been developed and popularized by Dr Marshall Goldsmith and follows the GDD (Good, Difficult, Different) model, accompanied with open-ended questions. It is not only a great tool for helping clients build a reflecting habit, but also helps them troubleshoot their own problems and encourages them to plan for improvement.
Given that reflecting is one of the simplest yet most effective tools available to a coach, Self-Reflections is built with essential reflective prompts that serve the methodologies of all types of coaches.
In addition to helping clients develop a reflecting habit, Self-Reflections – over the course of a few months of the engagement – help demonstrate clear shifts and improvements in your client’s life, in their own words! Helping clients reflect regularly makes them more conscious of their objectives and progress, leading to greater application and outcomes.
When to use it: The Self-Reflections life coaching tool can be used through the course of the entire coaching engagement – either weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly, for most clients. It is recommended that it be done at the start or end of every week.
This tool is extremely useful for clients who need to build a habit of self-reflection and need a single space to capture and track their difficulties and progress.
Take Simply.Coach’s Self-Reflections tool for a spin here.
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4. Feedforward
Marshall Goldsmith says, “Feedback is limited and static, as opposed to expansive and dynamic.”
The Feedforward tool, developed by Marshall Goldsmith, is designed to prompt a client’s stakeholders to provide exactly the latter – expansive and dynamic inputs on how the client can better achieve their goals! It also serves as a quick monthly progress touch-point between the client and client’s stakeholders: how was the client’s progress in the last month, and how can it be improved in the next month?
The triple advantage of the Feedforward digital coaching tool is helping everyone productively focus on the future, conveying inputs to the client in a more palatable way, and doing it far more efficiently and effectively.
When to use it: While the advantages of the tool are undeniable, it is crucial to understand when it should be administered, and if the situation warrants you to stop using the tool.
Typically, the Feedforward is succinct enough to be sent out to stakeholders every month. But this must only be done if the stakeholders are invested enough in your client’s growth that they are willing to spend around 20 minutes of their time every month in providing constructive suggestions.
Curious to see how the Feedforward coaching tool works? Click here.
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5. 360º Feedback
One of the most beloved digital coaching tools, the 360º Feedback tool covers planning, decision-making, leadership, and values. It’s perfect for leadership, business, as well as executive coaching, where there is an involvement of a large number of the client’s stakeholders.
The idea behind the tool is to get comprehensive inputs from the client’s stakeholders – peers, subordinates, and managers, as well as friends/family – so as to create an all-round picture of the client.
Getting a comprehensive assessment from stakeholders in your client’s growth is an extremely powerful way of giving them a tangible picture of how their actions and behaviours are affecting those closest to them.
It often reveals the appreciation that stakeholders have for the positives they are seeing in your client, thus giving them fresh motivation to keep putting in great efforts. On the other hand, this tool can also reveal blind spots for the client, providing them a hard reckoning of where they need to get better.
When to use it: You could administer the tool at the start of the engagement, to serve as a baseline for comparison, and at the end of the engagement, to help measure and report on the progress made by the client.
Try out Simply.Coach’s 360º Feedback tool here.
These are some of the most popular and effective coaching tools, but there are so many other equally effective and powerful coaching tools out there – each unique and apt for different times and situations in the coaching journey. So, explore and experiment with as many as you wish until you find a curated set of tools that works best for you and your unique style of coaching.
About Simply.Coach
Simply.Coach is an enterprise-grade coaching software designed to be used by individual coaches and coaching businesses. Trusted by ICF-accredited and EMCC-credentialed coaches worldwide, Simply.Coach is on a mission to elevate the experience and process of coaching with technology-led tools and solutions.
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Content Marketing Manager @ Simply.Coach
Ipsita Nayak is a full-time writer-editor-content strategist and a part-time NLP coach & yoga teacher. She believes conventions are overrated, has a disproportionate need for solo time over social time, and loves a good mix of sci-fi and trashy TV in her free time!
