The Importance of Knowing Their Own Values for Coaches
July 7th, 2010
Us, coaches, we understand the importance of values and their identification for our clients. The question is, do we understand their importance for us?
Knowing their own values is extremely important for each and every coach. Our values or “personal rules” by which we choose to live influence our emotions and behaviors and have an enormous impact on what we do and what we say. They embody what we believe is important in every area of our lives. We have values that can be specific for different situations and govern what response we make to external stimulus in these areas.
Dealing with a client is one of those external stimuli. If we have a situation when our personal values clash with those of our clients, we have to be extremely aware of it and proceed with caution. It is our utmost responsibility to NOT show any of our feelings about certain behaviors or opinions of our client.
We have to remember that the values that we hold are true values for us but this does not mean that what is important to us will be equally important to other people, especially our clients. Our clients may hold a different set of values and respecting this is fundamental to coaching.
What do we do in situations like this? it is very possible, that in the instances when the values of our client are fundamentally different from our values, it can make us feel uncomfortable. In very extreme cases I would recommend to refer the client to a different coach, because working together would probably not be very productive. If, however, the differences are smaller, we just have to remember rule number one, which is that the coaching process is about the client and not about the coach. Another possibility is to repeat the value elicitation exercise on a regular basis; sometimes the clients’ values develop and change as a result of the coaching process.
The good news is, from my experience, when there is a good rapport between the client and the coach from the very beginning, these extreme situations do not appear but still, it is helpful to have a set of rules if they do.
Natalie Ekberg is an international personal and executive coach and offers self-improving, motivational and coaching e-courses and e-books as well as face to face or telephone coaching.