CREATING A COACH

As she starts coaching training in earnest, Psychologies editor-in-chief Sally Saunders discovers how much she has to learn

- Sally Saunders

After much soul searching and seeking to find my A purpose, as well as to equip myself better to be the editor of this wonderful magazine, a few months ago I set out on a journey to become a qualified life coach.

I've always been the kind of person people open up to. It's part of what makes me a good journalist, and so, I admit, I felt I had a bit of a head start. This, paired with my perfectionism (which I try to let go of but quietly persists), meant I had high expectations of myself as I entered those first few sessions. For all you qualified coaches out there wryly shaking your heads, I should probably come clean at this stage (and you probably won't be surprised): I have not yet had life coaching myself. Perhaps this meant I went into the programme with a slightly skewed idea of exactly what we would be looking at. I thought it would be mainly question based, and questions are something I'm good at - ask my interviewees, my colleagues, heck, even my kids. They come non-stop, usually good ones, and allow me to grasp a situation pretty quickly. They stem from my innate, often insatiable, curiosity I really am very nosy!

But with coaching, all that goes out of the window. The aim here is not the headline, the killer quote, or just 'getting the story'. As soon as the course kicked off proper, we learnt that the point is to work in service of the client. It's the foundation of coaching that everything we do is client centred. So as a coach my curiosity is going to have to take a back seat (and it's not the only thing!).