How do boas coaches demonstrate courage and compassion?

Everything that we seek to promote and encourage in our client, we strive to first nurture in ourselves. So the coach needs to have courage and compassion. Those are two of the essential qualities of a good coach. The compassion is a basis for empathy, a basis for being able to accept the client - wherever they are on their journey, whatever they are doing, however successful they are, however many mistakes they have made, however power hungry they may be, however out of balance their life has become, whatever their organisation's impact on the world. Compassion is the basis for us being able to connect with the individual as a human being, to be able to understand the coachee’s sense of their purpose and meaning, and to support them in becoming more fully and more truly themselves.

Courage is the necessary compliment to that. The courage is what enables us to challenge, to ask really tough questions, or to be able to articulate assumptions which the client may not be able to see, or may not wish to admit to, but which may be shaping their decisions and their actions. We need courage to look someone in the eye and deliver straight feedback. Sometimes it is the courage to stay silent when the client is in an awkward moment. Or the courage to state how we are experiencing and seeing the situation, for example to articulate an underlying power struggle in the boardroom which is affecting all the conversations that take place, but that has never been openly discussed because nobody dared to speak of it.

So courage and compassion in leadership are vital for both the client and for the coach - 'vital' because they keep the whole process alive.