Helping Coaching Clients Succeed Through Effective Skills Assessment

April 20, 2010 - PRLog -- Many professional coaches have encountered that tricky client, the one who seems to be immune to their arsenal of proven coaching strategies. According to behavioral consultant Lynda-Ross Vega, the reasons why coaching doesn’t work are many but the #1 reason is not clearly understanding why their client has sought a coach in the first place. “Many times even the client doesn’t truly know,” she says. “A person’s explanation of why they have come to coaching often obscures what they really need to work on. The cause of this is at the heart of one of the main reasons why coaching often does not achieve all that it can.”  A recorded discussion with Lynda-Ross Vega on coaching pitfalls is available at http://AttendThisEvent.com/?eventid=11027235.

“I recently held my first teleclass at ACI for Coaches, it was all about the top 3 reasons coaching doesn’t work,” says Lynda-Ross. “And the #1 reason I talked about was this prominence of confusion with the client and the coach.  You see, if you don’t know what’s really wrong you can’t fix it.”

Lynda-Ross teaches strength-based coaching, a method designed to help people achieve their goals by helping them to develop and apply their strengths. She believes many coaching problems lie in the fact that people are often confused about what their strengths really are, and coaches don’t have a quick and reliable way to assess these strengths.

“Without a reliable assessment that focuses on measuring a person’s natural strengths, coaches are left to rely on their own informal assessment skills and their client’s self-report,” says Lynda-Ross. “All too often this approach misses the mark.”

“More often than not, I see clients achieving average results because they come to coaching with issues that reflect an attempt to achieve success in life using acquired skills rather than seeking to discover their innate natural skills.”

According to Lynda-Ross, the alternative is for a client to come to coaching with a clear understanding of the skills they do naturally well, which can be achieved through a comprehensive skills assessment.

“Instead of focusing coaching sessions on their inability to use their acquired skills to create meaningful success, coaches can gain more ground by helping them to understand, acknowledge, claim, and begin to use their natural skills more regularly.”
“As coaches, we have the responsibility to help clients discover what they do naturally well and give them the choice to let go of old approaches to life’s challenges. While we accept our client’s assessment that their life is not what they want it to be, we must challenge their assessment of why and offer alternatives that honor their innate core strengths.”

A free download of Lynda-Ross Vega’s teleclass and information on using effective skills assessments is available at www.ACIforCoaches.com.

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A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build dynamite teams and
systems that WORK. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, visit www.ACIforCoaches.com