I get letters …emails, that is. Inquiries from prospective clients. They ask
only questions they know how to ask in seeking a coach, admittedly a hard thing to do when you’ve never had a coach, and their questions reveal as much to me, in this joint-interview process, as my answers reveal to them.While you’re looking for your Ideal Coach, Coach is looking for his or her Ideal Client.
Here are things I’m looking for in my clients, many of them Emotional Intelligence characteristics. However, since I coach EQ and teach these skills, I’m also looking for person with low EQ who is eager to learn, “trainable,” and ready to commit to do work.
1. Good Enough Manners
Being courteous on phone call, or in email, such as, “I was wondering if you have time to talk now,” or “Dear Susan” or some salutation. We are about to enter a relationship, and it needs be one of respect and dignity.
2.The ability to communicate with me in a common language.
At very minimum, a person must be able to realize she and I can’t communicate if she speaks Swahili, and I do not. It’s a bad sign when we both speak “English,” but they speak a dialect, such as Business-eze, or Psychiatry, and they don’t know everyone doesn’t speak it. This sort of blindness to social cues is a bad sign … unless of course they’ve come for Emotional Intelligence coaching, in which case, we have our work cut out for us.
Example 1: When your therapist says to you, “Okay. What part of ‘malignant regression and pathogenic reintrojection as a defense against psychic decompensation’ don’t you understand?” (Source: New Yorker cartoon)
Example 2: The client who thinks before he speaks –“ I want to ask her about minimizing census on QIW Ward. Now how can I put that in plain English?”
3.Empathy … enough
I received an email yesterday with “coaching” for subject line, and body of email contained this: “What do you do? Lillian.”
This is not a good prognosticator—oops, skip jargon—this is not promising. For one thing, it doesn’t pass Manners Muster.
For another, I do 3 large areas of coaching—Emotional Intelligence, Marketing, and what I call “Helping People.” I call it “helping people” because I like to speak vernacular (the language ‘us guys’ speak at water cooler) so I avoid terms like “Personal Life Coach” (does this exclude public life or professional life? There’s no such thing.), or “Ontological Coach” – say what?
Now, prospective client doesn’t have to know I work in 3 areas, or that I train EQ coaches, or that I run a Distance Learning School, and in fact in some cases couldn’t have known, but they need to know that asking me “What do you do?” is highly unlikely to elicit a response they can use, no matter how smart I am.
Call it a basic understanding of field., i.e., in seeking a lawyer to do your divorce, you don’t need to know what a Public Bonds attorney does, you just need to know a Divorce Attorney does divorces and a Public Bonds attorney does not. That’s way field “is”.
Yes, we coaches have our “elevator speeches” ready, but savvy client, one I want to work with, is one who knows how to ask a question. They write, “I want to XYZ. Can you help me? Is this kind of coaching you do?”
4.EQ is better than IQ, but IQ has to be there
I received an email from My Ideal Client-NOT! saying: “What’s difference between a Business Coach and an Emotional Intelligence Coach?” One tells who you serve, other tells what you do. Not being able to grasp that general concept is a clue they aren’t “conceptual” enough to be my Ideal Client-YES!
5.Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear … this is “just right”
I like a client who’s already developed a good set of tools, i.e., on introvert/extravert scale, they test toward middle. On left-brain, right-brain scale, they test toward middle. If an individual is an extreme of anything, there will be more work to do. But of course that “balance,” is what Emotional Intelligence is all about.
EXAMPLE: An extremely left-brained client will continually be saying, “We weren’t talking about that,” or “That’s way off subject.” A coach must gather information that may not appear to client to be relevant to “the subject.” Not trusting process is part of client’s problem!
