Part IV: Using the Results

Coaching Fundamentals

Your Role: The EQ-i 2.0 Coach

As an EQ-i 2.0 Coach, your role is to work with your client on the areas of the EQ-i 2.0 he will develop. If you have education and experience in counseling, you may, in certain circumstances, choose to counsel your client. If you do not have a background in counseling, you will refer your client to a professional if appropriate (many times this is accomplished through an organization’s internal Employee Assistance Program) For example, as you are providing feedback to a client on his EQ-i 2.0 results, he tells you that he’s been feeling overwhelmed and depressed lately. If you are a coach, and not a counselor, your response would be to refer your client to a professional.

As a professional who uses psychological tests you should confine your testing and related coaching activities to your area of competence (as demonstrated through your education, experience, training and credentialing) (APA, 1999). If the time comes when you feel unequipped to discuss a particular matter with your client, you are ethically responsible to ensure that client has another professional to seek help from. You may never need to use a referral, but if you do, you should be able to easily provide your client with that contact information.

According to the ICF (“Core Competencies”, 2011), a coach's responsibility is to:

• discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
• encourage client self-discovery
• elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
• hold the client responsible and accountable.

If you are not a professional coach, there are still some foundational principles you can demonstrate in order to effectively debrief your client’s results:

• Follow your client’s energy. You may want to better understand your client’s responses to the Impulse Control subscale, but if your client would rather start at Independence, then that’s where you start.
• Listen more than you talk. Asking open-ended questions helps because it forces your client to give you more than a one-word response.
• Come from a place of curiosity, not judgment. We make judgments all the time; asking non-judgmental questions and making non-judgmental statements goes a long way to ensuring you stay on the curiosity path. Some good examples are: How do you find yourself using Assertiveness at work, what does it look like? It sounds like you get frustrated when you don’t speak up in team meetings, is that right?
• Add suggestions for development strategies only after your clients come up with some ideas of their own. What works for one person may not necessarily work for another and you may need to tap into what each client is willing to do – otherwise you will find at your next coaching session that little progress has been made.
• Hold your clients accountable for their progress. Help keep them accountable by ensuring they identify a support network of people who will give them feedback as they work on their development, and help share their successes.

You can do this by:

• Listening actively (maintain eye-contact, recap what you’ve heard, nod to acknowledge understanding).
• Paraphrasing back what you heard, both what the client said and the emotion behind what was said.
• Guiding your client through a self-discovery process - many ‘a-ha’ moments come from what we are led to self-discover.