WELCOME TO THE SECOND OF A FOUR PART SERIES TO HELP YOU CREATE YOUR OWN PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN FOCUSING ON THE FOUR MASTERY AREAS FOR EVERY COACH. THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES YOUR SENSE OF MASTERY OF COACHING.

This is the area that coaches tend to spend the most time on in terms of their own development as it often speaks to their passion for learning and helping more than the others mastery areas.

At the same time, many coaches spend an extraordinary amount of time learning new coaching ideas and models hoping that by increasing their knowledge and skill base, the customers will magically show up.

It's important to understand the purposes for gaining new knowledge and skills in the area of coaching - to serve better or to be more attractive to clients, or both.

Below are a series of questions for you to explore about your coaching knowledge, skills and behaviours as they relate to the ability to provide a quality service to clients in general. These questions might also help you realise some areas for further development which have an appeal to the type of clients yo u are working with now and/or want to be working with in the future.

You may want to write your insights in a notebook or some other manner that works best for you. As you increase your awareness, consider what decisions you want/need to make next. Then you can continue to work from there to establish a plan of action. Remember that if you're already working with a coach or have plans to start soon, it could be highly beneficial to share your insights with them and together co-design your plan.

• How would you define the "foundation" knowledge you feel a coach "should" have?
• How confident are you that you have the foundations of coaching thoroughly understood?
• How confident are you that you are competent at using these foundational tools as compared to simply knowing the theory of them?
• What assessment and/or profiling tools do you use now? What tools do you think you need to add to your repertoire?
• What topic-specific coaching tools do you use now and/or need to add? For example, if you're working in Health and Wellness coaching, what tools specific to that area are essential to be competent in?
• What does your "target market" expect you to be an expert at?
• What do you want to be an expert at?
• How do you gain the necessary "practice" of new tools to develop your confidence and competency? Who do you have to practice with?
• How confident are you at researching information when needed to support clients with immediate needs where you didn't already have resources at hand?
• How confident are you at developing your own tools?
• How extensive is your library of tools and resources? What's missing?
• What advanced knowledge and skills do you have? What do you need to work on? Where can you go to get that knowledge and/or to learn those skills?
• There are so many wonderful things in the world of coaching to learn about. How do you choose, prioritise and plan what you'll learn and when?
• Do you currently receive coaching, mentoring and/or supervision related to developing your coaching knowledge, skills and behaviours? What could you gain if you did?
• How "evidence-based" is your coaching? What are you and your client measuring for effectiveness?
• How do you reflect on and/or self-evaluate coaching performance? How often do you do this?
• How do you check in with your clients to ensure they are getting from coaching what they had intended?
• How do you specifically ask your clients for feedback about the coaching process and potentially even you and/or your style specifically?
• How well do you accept client feedback when it's positive?
• How well do you accept client feedback when it's constructive and focused on where you might need to develop?
• How well do you accept client feedback when it's not delivered well at all and is focused on where you might need to develop?
• How well do you communicate back to the client what you'll take on board and how you'll demonstrate the changes in behaviour?
• Do you ever conduct client satisfaction surveys where they can provide feedback anonymously? How often do you do this? How do you share the results with your client base and/or use the information for testimonials or other marketing strategies?

There are numerous other questions you could be exploring here so this list is just to get you started.

The next instalment of this series will explore Mastery of Business, or in other words what you need to develop in terms of knowledge, skill and/or behaviour that would be of service to establishing and developing your coaching business or if you are an internal coach for an organisation, to promote your services to stakeholders.

Noel Posus is a master coach with 20+ years experience as a professional educator, coach and author. He won the prestigious "Coach of the Year" award in 2008 and 2009 and is an ambassador/leader for the coaching industry. www.noelposus.com