6 Pulling together ideas
The role of coach developers is to support coaches to improve their practice, but your impact depends on several variables such as your skills, the coach’s openness, their perceptions of the development process and initiating your relationship productively.
You have read about the need to get to know coaches as people and find some shared mutual connections that allow empathy and rapport. In effect, you have explored the first three steps in the Behavioural stairway model (Figure 7) introduced in Session 1.
Once rapport has been established you can start to exert some influence on the decisions and judgements that coaches make and help them develop their practice. One professional training route where building empathy, rapport and influence is a feature is the training of teachers. You will explore this next.