Across the coaching industry, you’ll see that important tools are used to make coaching practices more effective. Great coaches will use a variety of tactics and tools to help clients achieve their goals and improve their professional or personal development outside of the standard coaching session.
Although the coaching process can be constructed for a new client using a variety of different tools, you’ll want to consider a few of these as part of your coaching practice. These tools come in all different shapes and sizes. Quizzes, questionnaires, workbooks, collaborative working documents and provide an arsenal of methods to improve your coachee’s well-being.
Why is coaching important?
Coaching is important for a few critical reasons. Here are five fundamental reasons that clients should consider online coaching:
- Personal and professional development: coaching can help an individual identify where they’re strongest (and where they’re weakest)
- Performance improvements: coaching can also help an individual improve their output in the workplace. By working with a coach, coaching clients or teams can develop new skills, overcome obstacles and achieve their full potential
- Increased self-awareness and confidence: coaching can help increase self-awareness and develop a better understanding of motivation, values, and goal setting. This can lead to an increased level of self-confidence and a strong sense of purpose.
- Better decision-making: coaching can help individuals make better decisions by providing them with supportive and a non-judgemental environment in which they can explore their options and assess the potential outcomes of their behavior.
- Improved relationships: coachees can oftentimes benefit from improved relationships after experiencing life coaching or business coaching. Teaching them effective communication skills, conflict resolution strategies and building trust are powerful tools to improve their life or business relationships.
Ultimately, coaching is an investment in oneself that can lead to significant personal and professional development through coaching programs and exercises.
Coaching assessment tools
Here are 15 of the most common coaching assessment tools. These can be essential to any coaching practice depending on how you implement them into your coaching toolkit :)
1. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The purpose of the MBTI is to make the theory of psychological types understandable and useful for coachees.
2. StrengthsFinder
The Clifton StrengthsFinder was designed based on a 30-year study of the innate talents found in our society. Through two million semi-structured interviews, Donald O. Clifton and his team studied the underlying elements that brought individuals success in a wide variety of areas.
You can also compare the StrengthsFinder versus the DISC assessment.
3. DISC Assessment
The DISC assessment (also known as DISC® Classic 2.0) is a tool used to help a coachee better understand oneself, others, and the various behaviors that come up in their relations with other people.
4. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Assessment
The EQ is an emotional quotient score. It’s used to understand emotion on a deeper level. While IQ tests are used to measure cognitive capacity, you’d apply an EQ assessment to your coachee to help understand their emotions more effectively.
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5. The Wheel of Life
One of the best tools to use in your coaching conversations is the wheel of life. It’s commonly used by life coaches and can help coachees consider areas in their life that might be off balance.
And, you can read more about using the wheel of life here.
6. Values Assessment
A values assessment is an important tool to be used to allow your coachee to better understand the traits that best describe them. Industry leaders like Brené Brown have done an exceptional job of creating resources to easily organize and record values.
7. Goal-Setting Worksheet
Goal setting is an effective coaching practice because it allows you and your clients to identify opportunities and work towards an end result. This can be done by using a worksheet, document, journaling, or implementing coaching software to make positive steps toward a desirable outcome.
Consider using a Weekly Goals Template as well.
8. Time Management Assessment
A time management assessment is a coaching exercise that allows you and your coachee to identify areas of improvement for how time can be better utilized. This is commonly used in life coaching or business coaching to make sure that the most important things are where the most time is spent.
9. Stress Inventory
The stress inventory assessment is used by life coaches and is often times used at the beginning of the coaching process to identify major causes of stress in one’s life. Great coaching doesn’t mean just check-in on the easy stuff, the best coaching comes in f
10. Communication Styles Assessment
There are four communication styles. The analytical communicator, the intuitive communicator, the functional communicator, and the personal communicator. This assessment allows the coachee to understand how they communicate and how other people communicate with them.
11. Conflict Resolution Styles Assessment
The conflict styles assessment is comprised of five main styles. These help coachees or mentees understand how to approach conflict systematically.
12. 360-Degree Feedback Assessment
Very frequently used by business coaches or executive coaches, the 360 feedback assessment is a process by which an employee’s subordinates, peers and colleagues all contribute to an evaluation.
13. Personality Assessment
One of the best coaching tools used by coaching practices all over the world is the personality assessment. The personality assessment is also a proficiency in professional psychology that amounts to empirically supported measures of the traits and styles of a client.
14. Interest Inventory
The interest inventory, (also known as the Strong interest inventory, SII) is often times used in career coaching to help the coachee better define their interests. It was originally developed to help the exiting military find suitable jobs, but it was later used to help coachees come up with a step-by-step method to find a great career based on personality.
15. Brain Dominance Assessment
The brain dominance assessment (also known as the left brain/right brain test) is an educational tool to measure which personality traits are more dominant for an individual. For example, left-brain people are more systematic and organized. Right-brain people are more intuitive and creative in nature. Understanding this can be important, say as a Career Coach you’re helping your client find their next role, and it can be extremely valuable to make sure the job is a right fit for their personality.
How to implement these coaching tools
The question of implementation really comes down to your coaching practice. You need to fundamentally understand how you intend to help your clients and decide on which niche you intend to focus on. Because there are so many different ways to get from A to B, there won’t simply be one simple path to problem-solving or helping your clients. Your
What’s next? You might want to use tools in your coaching practice with your coachees. You can also consider using coaching software to implement these tools. If you’d like to take advantage of any software, you should try Practice, it's free for 7-days and you can run your entire coaching business in one place.
