Life Coaching Styles: Which is Best?

We get into coaching because of an empathetic desire to help people find fulfillment in their lives. It’s common for beginner coaches to want to know how to “do it right,” with a focus on ensuring that they’re delivering a powerful experience for their life coaching clients. In CLCC, we talk a lot about how to emphasize development of your own unique coaching style—at which point, many people wonder, which life coaching style is best?

Compounding this problem is the number of people online vying for authority by insisting that their way, their approach, their 5-step program or protocol, is “the one that works.” Sometimes there are people who even criticize the approaches of others as a way to defend their approach. If one coach posts a motivational rallying cry to “stop stalling, and start taking action,” another coach might pop up to say that that type of message is wrong or even harmful, and that the best life coaching approach to use with clients is all about somatics and nervous system regulation.

The Best Life Coaching Style is Client-Lead

At the Certified Life Coach Collective, we take the position that there is no “best” life coaching style, because there is no one-size-fits-all coaching. It’s a central competency of life coaching to be client-lead and use interventions that are designed in collaboration with the client, moving at the coaching client’s pace and within their capacity. This means:

• What works well for one client might not work well for a different client

• The same client might respond well to one type of intervention at one point in their process, and respond better to a different type of intervention at a different point

Psychologically Informed Coaching Approaches

Clinical research studies specifically centered around which coaching style or coaching modality is most effective are limited, but we can take a psychologically informed approach to coaching by recognizing what it has in common with psychotherapy: the goal of prompting shifts in internalized beliefs that translate to shifts in behavior. 

Therefore, psychologically informed approaches to coaching would use a mixture of interventions with clients such as narrative reframing (eg, reframing a belief such as “I can’t” to “I am trying”); cognitive approaches or dialectical approaches that combine narrative reframing or directly confronting limiting belief systems with mindfulness and tapping into the body; somatic approaches that focus on nervous system regulation. 

There’s also a treasure trove of research showing that simply exercising more and getting into a regular sleep cadence has a strong impact on someone’s mental well-being and their feelings about how capable they are of change.

All of these approaches can be folded into the coaching experience with your clients.

Your Unique Life Coaching Style

One of the most interesting findings into what constitutes an effective therapy experience is the importance of the relationship between therapist and client, and that translates to coaching as well. Famed therapist Irvin Yalom once wrote that “the relationship itself is the therapy” and research has also found that the style of therapy matters less than the relationship between therapist and patient.

We can translate that to coaching, when we talk about your unique coaching style. Some coaches are stylistically more extroverted, more likely to cheer their clients on, to speak with enthusiasm—and their clients love knowing they’ve got such a strong supporter in their corner. Others are quieter, asking slow questions for consideration—and their clients love that the coaching experience is one that takes them out of their busy day-to-day and offers an opportunity for more methodical contemplation. 

Also, it’s important to remember that coaching styles are different than coaching competencies. A coach’s “style” might be comprised of things like their affect, tone, or the interventions used (a more somatic style vs a more cognitive style, which could also be thought of as different coaching approaches or different coaching modalities).

Coaching competencies are defined as the benchmarks of effective coaching practice and should be present in coaching sessions regardless of a coach’s style.

At CLCC, we bring in guest coaches to demonstrate their coaching for the group, precisely for this reason. We want our participants to see that when the same coaching competencies are used—competencies like asking open-ended, forward leaning questions and active listening—two different coaches might deploy them in very different ways. 

So Which Coaching Style is Best?

Again, we’ve got to differentiate between coaching styles and coaching competencies.

If a coach is deploying coaching competencies, then there really isn’t a best “style” in universal terms.

There is only what’s best for the client. Some clients resonate with different styles. It’s that simple.

How you market your coaching business will often give people the first idea of what your style is like. Craft of Coaching guest Kira Sabin freely drops f-bombs on her sales pages, while another Craft of Coaching guest, Laura Simms, tells you a full-on narrative of how she came to pursue the coaching work she loves. Both women are incredibly hard-working coaches who care deeply about their clients, and different clients will resonate with what they have to offer.

Both are bringing coaching competencies to the table, every single session. Both put the client in the driver’s seat of their lives.

The important question is less about which coaching style is best, and more about how you’ll get the training you need to be able to define for yourself, your unique coaching style.