The Transformational Coach

Do you ever doubt your coaching style is achieving the best results for your clients? Have you ever felt there's room for growth, but you're not sure how to achieve it?

To create a more sustainable transformation in the people you coach, you need to start with your own mindset. As a coach, you know you can't change what you do, unless you alter what you believe first.

By shedding the ineffective scripts, trappings and beliefs that a lifetime of personal interactions, professional training and even your parents have taught you, you can reset your thinking to a beginner's mentality and so begin a fulfilling and exciting journey to coaching mastery.

In this fresh and highly effective field guide, Master Mentor Coach, Clare Norman gets into your head to help you pinpoint the attitudes that you need to unlearn and reframe. Through Clare's rich experience, illuminating real-life stories, and practical guidance you can shift towards more useful thinking and powerful skillsets by:

• Spotting and changing your own restrictive coaching mindsets
• Understanding how marginal gains can lead to maximal outcomes
• Embracing replacement paradigms and new thought patterns
• Rediscovering what you love about coaching and its power to resource people

Wow, this is so refreshing, such an original contribution to a somewhat flooded market. Readable and accessible yet evidence based and highly professional. In my view you’ve achieved that beautiful balance between highlighting potential problems and issues in the coaching process but giving several very practical and actionable tips to balance these. So many books are good at describing the problem, or what we’re doing wrong as coaches but are sketchy on the ’solutions’. I would also want to say that I believe your writing is suitable for beginners AND seasoned coaches. Again I believe this is an exceptional quality of the book. Finally, I felt invigorated and liberated reading your book because it’s given me permission to shake off some of the narrow minded doctrines that some coaching ‘experts’ propose. Mary Andrews, Coaching Psychologist.

Becoming truly transformational as a coach requires substantial work to put aside our own selves in the service of helping our clients develop their own thinking and actions. Clare explores these ideas and writes in a very relatable way, with solid practical examples and tips. This book is a must-read for all coaches at whatever stage of their career. Julie Horne, Master Certified Coach.

The Transformational Coach offers great insight, practical and well researched ‘shifts’ taking your coaching to the next level. Each chapter concludes with reflective questions and an invitation to experiment with new habits to strengthen your coaching skills and practice.  Clare Norman brings a huge wealth of experience from her coaching and mentoring individuals and shares her experiences which are both relevant and relatable in accordance with the ICF core competencies. Whether you are new to coaching or a seasoned coach keen to sharpen your coaching skills, The Transformational Coach is an invaluable companion to support your ongoing coaching development and discern the coach you choose to be. Jane Adshead-Grant, MCC, Author of The Listening Coach.

Clare Norman writes that we must unlearn and let go of old scripts to achieve mastery in our coaching. The unhelpful mindsets that we may have ‘absorbed’ are outlined, chapter by chapter, along with recommendations for what might replace them.

Norman highlights some of the learned behaviours, habitual thinking and attitudes in our coaching that we have inherited from various places: our upbringings, our schooling, our peers and our coach training to name a few. The idea that we should regularly examine and challenge our practice is one I would fully support – we should look first to our own paradigms, constraints, conditioning and learned attitudes before asking our clients to do the same.

The perspective shifts described (83 of them) are often full-on turnabouts in thinking and orientation – for example, from more is more to less is more. This shift involves moving away from the urge to do more, and say more, which can get in the way of the client’s thinking process.

While the book is aligned with International Coaching Federation (ICF) core competencies (and by association the mentor coaching process), many of these potential shifts – or at least the topic areas – will show up in supervision of many forms.

Coaches interested in developing themselves in relation to the ICF core competencies will find direct links between topics and competencies (plus, the competency framework is included in full in the first appendix). In general, though, all coaches can benefit from challenging their working assumptions and learned behaviours.

Whether we identify with the ‘old mindset’ that Norman positions for us, or whether we choose to inhabit the new mindset suggested for us, remains a matter of personal choice. Regardless of the choice, the key is that we work on our limiting thoughts and beliefs, with appropriate others and on our continual development as coaches. 

The challenge that has been laid before us is to be enquiring about our way of thinking and beingas coaches, and to be open to changing our minds!  - Dr Rob Kemp,

 Head of Accredited Coach Training at Barefoot Coaching. 

Narrated by Clare Norman and published by the Right Book Company

Click here to get the audio book