It took longer than college and grad school. Two hundred hours of classwork. But finally after four years I graduated the Coach U Coach Training Program! There are many shorter programs out there and if I had it to do over again I might have chosen one of them, but as long as I spent the time and effort, I may as well rationalize! It was a genuine gift to spend so much time thinking about and studying coaching within Coach U, which is the largest coaching education organization in the world. Every class included students from across the globe–Australia, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, Qatar, and dozens of other places. Getting that perspective was wonderful. And it was enlightening and gratifying to realize that peoples’ needs and issues–from work-life balance to entrepreneurial struggles to family crises to personal health to spirituality–are not much different in the U.S. than elsewhere in the world.
Many of the Coach U classes involved the blocking-and-tackling of coaching. But the best classes were the many “practice labs” I took in the last year after taking all the preliminaries. In these classes the students coached each other with a virtual roomful of people listening, often covering very intimate subjects. We then wrote thoughtful critiques for the coaches: how effective were their listening skills? Were they able to ask questions that revealed the information needed to maximize the benefit of the coaching for the client? Did they use language for the greatest impact? Did they help the client create actions that can lead to positive results? These were some of the most valuable learning experiences I’ve had, and I had the benefit of dealing with this material at a time in my life when I’m most receptive to it. So thanks, Coach U, it’s been a blast. Now I start the next leg of the journey, toward the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) designation granted by the International Coach Federation. But I think I’ll wait a few weeks. Am I too old for Spring Break in Daytona?
