The 7 Skills of a SuperCoach That Will Take Your Coaching To The Next Level

Mei Ouw and I talk about the 7 skills of a SuperCoach and why we’re so passionate about helping coaches of all flavours get inspired to continue to improve their coaching skills. 3.5 day intensive coming up end of May. Details to come soon!

Has it been on your radar to learn about the Art of Transformational Coaching Certification or NLP to raise your coaching level?

Have you been waiting patiently to sink your teeth into a delicious SuperCoach immersion training?

From listening to our followers’ requests and feedback we’re finally putting a three and a half day intensive together and it’s coming soon! 

In the SuperCoach space we have different kinds of coaches with all different kinds of methodologies and niches whether it’s energetic coaching, strategic coaching, intuitive coaching or healing. There’s so many different ways to coach and they’re all valid. And that’s what we’re building here with SuperCoach, this kind of inclusivity and inspiration to upskill.  

We are putting the call out into the world to any coach from wherever they’re at in their level of coaching, even if they’re professional coaches, let’s continue to grow and expand our skills.  

We’re also nurturing and building a culture of community because we know that continual growth happens when we constantly attend meetings with other NLP trainers and coaches, and it’s the love of constant growth and constant refinement of skills that SuperCoach Society wants to share back with its people.

What is the specific set of skills for a SuperCoach?

Well, first you need to be clear on the role of a SuperCoach because there’s so many different types of coaching. There’s performance coaching, e.g. tennis players have performance coaches. In sports for example like the AFL football you will have a range of different coaches like the head coach, the senior coach, and the junior coaches. 

Or if you watch something like Ted Lasser it’s the same kind of thing.  It’s about the player’s actual performance and the multi-layered support they are receiving for this performance. 

Now I don’t know if you’ve noticed over the past few years but the football world has been bringing in mindset coaches as their team’s super weapon.  So, the Richmond Football Club here in Melbourne has their own super weapon which is a mindfulness life coach!   

A SuperCoach, if you will. 

This is the kind of coaching that everyone will get to learn from the SuperCoach Collective & Academy!

SuperCoach Collective Academy will be highly committed to developing what we call transformational coaches.

What we’re doing with transformational coaching is second order change which is different from first order change. 

A good example of first order change would be if you were a caterpillar and you wanted to go faster. First order change would be to put the caterpillar on roller skates to roll faster. But you only can get so far with first order change, unlike second order change which is transformation in the inside.

This is brilliant for all of the business and strategic coaches who’ve been telling clients what they need to do to get different results in their business. Yet something is stopping the client from doing the thing. It’s because they’re resistant.

And so this is where the transformational coach helps to facilitate the client undergo a transformation just like the caterpillar undergoes a transformation and becomes the butterfly where after you’ve gone through that transformation and become a butterfly you can never go back to being the caterpillar again. 

How do we change on the inside so that we can hold this new reality and live in a new, more empowering and productive way?

This is really what we do as a SuperCoach, we are creating transformational change. So if you’d like to learn how to do that better with more skill and finesse then the Seven SuperCoach Skills are definitely something to be aware of. These are the skills that we’re continually refining, building your skill competence so that you can actually work those skills with your clients. 

If you were to ask what the role of a SuperCoach or transformational coach is, our answer would be…

A SuperCoach’s role is to help bring out the person’s inner resources that are already within them but they may not be conscious of them, or they may not have thought about using those inner resources they’ve learned from one context of their life and dragging them over to use into another context of their life where they might be experiencing some obstacles or challenges. 

A SuperCoach facilitates in terms of how they are showing up as a coach. 

It’s about your way of being and your ability to facilitate with compassion so that the client’s nervous system feels safe enough to shift to the very boundary and edge of their capacity and comfort zone.

That’s the support part, but as a coach we’ve also got to be able to facilitate challenge. Holding the client’s feet to the fire occasionally.

A part of a coach’s role is to be ruthlessly compassionate so the client feels simultaneously cared for and stretched to be able to do and be all that they can be. Someone to help hold them accountable.

But it’s not just holding them accountable in the sense of “Hey, did you do your homework?” It’s like holding them accountable to be their best self and to show up in a greater capacity with more potential. That’s a different kind of accountability than how a lot of people consider accountability.

The 7 SuperCoach Skills at a snapshot are…

• Supporting
• Listening
• Questioning
• Meta Magic Questions
• Giving Feedback 
• Receiving Feedback
• State Induction

Here’s the thing: many coaches don’t know what they don’t know about the level of depth they can get to with these skills.

We need to first learn the distinctions and the depth of all the Seven SuperCoach Skills. To do that we break them down into two aspects of BEING skills and DOING skills, and each of these seven skills have subskills.

Think about this as an iceberg. Imagine at the top of the iceberg is this concept of supporting. You might think supporting is nodding along, smiling at your client, encouraging them, but what you may not realise is beneath the iceberg are so many other aspects or what we call subskills to all of these seven different SuperCoach skills. 

These are the hub of the internal belief systems and value systems within the coach, the presuppositions that they’re looking through. It’s almost like the invisible secret sauce that makes being a Super Coach look so seamless.

It’s these invisible skills that we want to help make explicit and teach you how to ultimately master.

Supporting, listening and state induction skills form part of who you are BEING as a coach and how you are actually showing up.

A client can experience a moment of realisation that brings up a lot of raw emotion, and it’s not always the right time to ask big questions. Diving deep can crack things open. So part of the skill of a SuperCoach is to be able to realise who do you need to be in that moment that is going to be of greatest and highest service to your client and where they are at now.

You could ask some really gentle questions and then allow them to go through their realisation to allow the transformation. 

You will find people will ask you, “What did you just do? What just happened?” They’ll be curious because something’s actually shifted for them and it’s worked. 

One client was experiencing this really overwhelming and really quite big energy, and she had this gorgeous little puppy with her. As a SuperCoach one of the things that you do is utilise anything or anyone around you to help you work with the client. 

This is an example of listening, supporting, state induction skills. Asking yourself: “Who am I being in the moment?”

Coming back to the example of the lady with the puppy, I took the emotion that she was working with which was overwhelming love. And in my own body I just thought about her puppy and I created the emotion of me of just a really soft, gentle love. Imagine the unfurling of a flower bud in the morning sun – that kind of love.

That’s what I’m holding in me as a coach.

Remember: you and your client create this co-regulation of heart coherence and frequency. 

By holding that state for the client, you can gently, softly start to help shift the state of the client. I’m kind of  just talking through a little example, but this is part of the nuance of distinctions of when you learn the deep supportive skills, the ability to understand what is the state of your client and how to help induce a different state with your own  way of being. This is the BEING skills aspect of the Seven SuperCoach Skills.. 

These are the subskills that you will get to learn to help you in those moments when for example your clients may be experiencing a really intense powerful emotion and they cry, these skills will support you to easily handle and easily work with and utilise their emotion. Whether it’s a really intense positive emotion or a really intense emotion of grief or sadness or frustration, whatever it is, this skill set will help you help them transform in that moment. It’s almost like martial arts or jiu jitsu. 

You are working with the energy a lot like how a punch comes and you’ve gotta either move out of the way or work with it, or take it and then give the energy back. It’s one of the greatest skills that makes a SuperCoach in terms of the nuance and the softness and the smoothness of the coaching session.

When you don’t have these skills of being able to just handle and dance with and utilise whatever comes into the session, whether it’s emotion or an interruption of a puppy or the postman at the door,  you could feel interrupted and it’ll break your flow. Or you didn’t get to do that thing because they got really upset and they cried, you didn’t know what to do with it, they’re just not following the structure or the strategy, so they’re uncoachable.  

9 times out of 10 it is really not about an uncoachable client.

If your client is showing up they are coachable. What it means is that there might be a skill gap in the coach to be able to show up and really handle whatever the client is bringing, and that’s a part of those being state skills that we are sharing. 

These skills really allow you to handle whatever comes into the coaching session, whether that is a one-on-one coaching session or a group coaching session. Because in this example with the lady, there were 30 other people on the line, so it was a group coaching container.

Sometimes people think, “Oh, I don’t need to learn these one-on-one coaching skills because I run a group coaching mastermind, I run a training, so I don’t need to learn these things. That’s beginner’s skills. I’m already past it. “

Learning these skills gives you so much finesse, nuance and mastery to be able to deal with whatever comes your way whether it’s in a one-on-one VIP session or as a group coaching facilitating session. 

With 30 years combined experience between us in coaching and training, these 7 subskills took me to the next level with my facilitation skills and coaching skills and the ability to get results with clients. 

If you’ve had one of those difficult clients where you almost think they’re uncoachable or they’re a little bit of hard work, if you drop into a certain state of being and really hold the space, it’s like the client leads themselves through their own transformation and insight. It can reframe your perspective of these clients and your experience as a coach.

Through showing up in a different space and changing ourselves on the inside it can create a set of conditions that allows the client to drop into themselves and come up with these insights that they hadn’t had before. 

We’ve covered the being skills. Now let’s cover the questioning skills.

We’ve got our secret special meta magic questions, getting and receiving feedback – these SuperCoach skills are what we call the DOING skills.

These are the things that are seen. It’s the questions that a coach is asking the client to help their client uncover their transformation. These are the things that you’re doing as the coach and showing up through this way of being.

Asking questions like:

• What do you want?
• Where are you going?
• What specifically is happening here?
• What specifically do you want?

By asking these kinds of questions then you’re able to elicit and uncover from your client what is in their unconscious.

That’s a true sign and skill of a SuperCoach.

It’s not about what your client says they want to change, e.g. I want to grow my business, I want to lose weight, I want to get a new relationship or I want to leave the relationship I’m in, whatever the change is that they’re after. A level 1.0 coach might go, “Okay, here’s five things you can do to get that result. Quick, here, you can do this. Do A, B, C.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Sometimes that’s exactly what the person needs and they’ll go, “Yes, great! I’m going to take this and run with it.”

But we know that you could look it up on the internet. You could google how to lose weight or how to get a boyfriend, or leave your husband or how to have better sex! Whatever it is, there is not a lack of information. However, there is a vast gap between what we know as human beings and what we actually follow through on.

These doing level skills of the coach allows us to probe into and uncover what those things are that’s blocking the client from following through on the things they already know they should be doing.

Most times you could ask a client all the questions to open them up, but it’s not that they don’t know what they need to do. It’s that they’re not doing the things that they know they consciously need to do and do they actually want to do it?

Is the change they are wanting really what they want?

It’s almost like opening up Pandora’s box and it can feel like it might be a bit dangerous to uncover because we don’t know what the client’s going to come up with. It’s like travelling into the underworld or the unknown and into the darkness, and it’s easy to feel like that if you just don’t have the skills. 

That’s why what we’re teaching you as a SuperCoach is how to navigate this terrain. 

Do you know how to navigate the unconscious? 

Do you like to navigate the places where it feels like it’s darkness or is it uncomfortable?

Sometimes coaches can have a little resistance around getting into those conversations with their clients thinking they’re not a therapist, they’ll just refer them out. It becomes a lost opportunity for the coach’s personal growth, to be able to become familiar with their own self, and also a lost opportunity for the client to really go a bit deeper and have that kind of transformational butterfly experience where it’s really creating a lasting change. 

It’s okay to go slow to go fast.

That’s really what we’re standing for in educating this way. We are making a stand for going in deeper and that it’s okay to go slow to go fast.

It’s okay to slow down with some of these questions and these metamagic questions and it’s okay to hold the divine mirror up sometimes to be vulnerable to give and receive feedback about patterns that we notice in conversation with each other and ourselves.

We can shed light on these patterns by just giving some honest, open-hearted feedback from a place of ruthless compassion. When we find the similar and/or different aspects about these situations, that’s the moment of insight where a new neural pathway forms.

It’s our internal selves now seeing something new and we now can’t unsee that. Once we know, we’ll never not be able to see that pattern when it shows up in our life and in our clients’ lives because it’s like our eyes are wide open and we see it at a deeper level of change. And that’s the power of asking questions, of asking metamagic questions and being able to have the insight to give powerful feedback, and also be able to receive feedback yourself, and then teach your clients how to receive feedback as well.

Meta Magic questions are about how the coach is asking the question. It’s the space that they’re holding inside their body as they ask the question. 

The 7 Super Coach Skills is really about who the coach is being, what the coach is doing, and both of those helping the client to go deep inside, shining a torch in the darkness. 

Shining a torch in the darkness and realising that the torch illuminates the hidden treasure. The hidden treasure of a new insight or resource. This is then the catalyst for transformational change. Because when you shine a torch and illuminate the hidden treasure, that’s what sparks the instantaneous change within that then creates the transformation.

Transformation comes from the inside out, not from the outside in.

The power of that is that inside out change is sustainable; it is inherently holistic because it’s coming from within. It’s coming from the deepest yearnings and desires of the person. It is intrinsic within the person. You don’t need to motivate yourself or kind of muster up the energy to do the thing, because it is an expression of an intrinsic or innate desire that is emerging from in the person.

If you find that your clients are struggling with motivation or they’re not following through on the strategies or they’re not doing what you’re telling them to do, then chances are there might be just a mismatch between the strategy and their genuine intrinsic desire, or there might be some kind of internal unconscious block that is just causing them to shy away from doing the thing. 

Therefore knowing that just takes a little bit of inquiry through questions and meta magic questions to uncover what’s inside.

There’s some really great foundational skills sprinkled in throughout this three and a half day SuperCoach Academy intensive.

Now you can probably tell why we are so excited! 

If you’re new to this kind of coaching, this will be a really great place to start. 

If you’ve already had some NLP or other type of transformational coaching and Spiral or something else under your belt, this will be an awesome refresher with some insights to help you go deeper into the things that you’ve learnt. There’s always some nuance, some new development or some subtle shift that you can pick up that helps you to become a better coach.

What is the key takeaway for you?

What skills do you think you might already have some good practice in and what are the skills that you’d like to develop further out of these seven skills?

What are the ones you think you already might be good at?

Coaching skills are really just like life skills. They’re communication skills, they’re self-leadership skills, they’re emotional healing and personal growth skills.  

So even if you’re not doing one-on-one coaching, you just want to become a better coach, or be a better leader, to be a manager, to manage your team better or be a better parent, these skills can help you in all of these areas! 

Don’t miss our three and a half day SuperCoach Confidence immersion, look out for the details coming soon.

The transformations for all will be incredible!

Kylie & Mei