Why Coaching Skills Should Be Life Skills
- Jul 19
- 7 min read
In this series, Elizabeth Ballin, PCC, offers reflections from her coaching and mindfulness practice on how people discover insight, meaning, and resilience in the changing landscape of modern life. Her perspective is rooted in years of working with people from many cultures and in a driven curiosity that understands human growth as life in motion.
This article explores how learning to coach others unexpectedly became a journey of self-discovery, transforming the way one coach thinks, listens, responds, and relates to the world. Through awareness, curiosity, mindfulness, and self-compassion, coaching became more than a profession, it became a way of living and a guide to navigating every relationship, including the one we have with ourselves.
The client I didn't expect to change
When I first trained as a coach, I believed I was learning a profession. I wanted to help people make better decisions, navigate difficult relationships, and live more authentic, meaningful lives. What I didn't expect was that I would change the most.
Learning to coach myself
As I learned coaching principles, I began coaching myself. The open-ended questions I asked clients became questions I asked myself, opening up possibilities I'd never considered. Instead of searching for the right answer, I became interested in what was happening beneath the surface. I found myself asking what truly mattered, not only professionally, but personally and even existentially. What kind of person was I becoming? What values did I want to guide my decisions? What did I want my life to stand for?
Without deciding to, I began incorporating these skills into every part of my life. They changed how I related to family, friends, and colleagues, and how I managed conflict, disappointment, and uncertainty. Coaching ceased to be something I did. It became the way I lived.
Awareness: The space between reaction and choice
The first lesson that came to me was awareness. Awareness sounds simple, yet it's the start of almost every meaningful change. It taught me to notice how my thoughts, emotions and body responded before I reacted. Sometimes my response was far greater than the situation itself, and coaching encouraged me to ask why.
Those reactions were often rooted in behaviours learned years earlier. Recognising a pattern didn't erase the past, but created something equally important, space. Once I could see a pattern, it no longer controlled me. Awareness doesn't remove trauma, but lets us recognise how our past may still shape our present. In coaching, that awareness often marks the beginning of change and sometimes reveals the need for a therapist who understands these dynamics and can help reshape them.
Listening without waiting to speak
The next lesson that came to me was listening. Like many people, I believed I listened well. In reality, I often listened while preparing my answer. Coaching taught me that listening means entering another person's world before trying to change it. Advice, I discovered, lands better when offered gently through experience and understanding rather than instruction. There's a world of difference between "You should" and "I've discovered" or "I wonder whether"
Mindfulness became far more than a relaxation technique, it became a way of calming the waters. Learning to slow my breathing, become present, and step back from a moment's emotional intensity let me think more clearly and decide more wisely. No longer driven by my immediate reactions, I developed a greater sense of agency, choosing my response rather than being carried along by them.
Curiosity over certainty
As I continued coaching myself, curiosity replaced certainty. I became more interested in understanding than being right, and learned to see situations through others' eyes. Every person carries a different history, beliefs, and experiences. That single shift transformed many of my relationships, softened my judgment, made my conversations richer, and made conflict something to understand rather than win.
I also learned to set goals differently. They were no longer rigid destinations but stepping stones, letting me move forward while staying open to new learning and unexpected opportunities.
Learning to be kind to myself
Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was self-compassion. For much of my life, I believed being hard on myself made me stronger. Coaching taught me otherwise. By accepting my memories, joyful and painful, as experiences that shaped me rather than defined me, I found it easier to move forward. Acceptance didn't mean approval. It meant acknowledging reality as it was, so I could respond with greater wisdom rather than resistance.
I also noticed how naturally we're drawn towards what is wrong. Our brains have evolved with a negativity bias that once helped us survive, but it can become the dominant lens through which we see the world. Coaching encouraged me to lean towards the glass being half full, not through blind optimism, but by noticing possibilities, strengths, and opportunities alongside problems. My belief in these skills is grounded not only in my clients but in my own life.
When coaching met real life
There was a period when I worked in an unhealthy environment where bullying became part of my daily experience. During that time, I coached myself, returning again and again to awareness, curiosity, reflection, mindfulness, self-compassion, and open-ended questions. Those skills didn't remove the pain or uncertainty, nor provide instant answers. What they gave me was clarity when my thinking was clouded, perspective when my emotions threatened to overwhelm me, and the courage to keep moving forward.
In the process, I discovered bravery and resilience. Coaching didn't change the circumstances I was living through, rather, it changed how I lived through them.
Trusting myself
Looking back, I realise the greatest gift coaching gave me was discovering I could trust that I could find solutions.
I couldn't always find the answers right away, but I trusted the process coaching had taught me. I trusted I'd do the best I could with the understanding I had at the time. Honest reflection and open-ended questions expanded my imagination, revealing possibilities that might otherwise have remained hidden. I trusted that my intentions were good and that, if life did not unfold as I had hoped, I could accept the outcome, learn from it, and move forward.
That trust didn't remove uncertainty, but it let me live with it. A fly lands on my finger. I stop to smell a flower. I jump into a river. I lost a friend. I laugh at a silly sitcom. Every moment becomes part of my story, whether I ever speak about it or not.
What AI can never replace
As coaching becomes more widely discussed alongside artificial intelligence, an important difference stands out. Artificial intelligence knows only what I choose to share. It can introduce new ideas, explain concepts, ask thoughtful questions, and become an extraordinary teacher. Yet it cannot accompany me through the infinite stream of experiences that shape who I am.
Every second leaves another mark. Every memory, disappointment, moment of joy, conversation, relationship, hope, and loss becomes part of who we're becoming. Every encounter we have also leaves its mark on someone else's life. That endless accumulation of experiences is unique to every human being.
AI cannot know those moments unless I share them, and even then it cannot experience what they mean to me, nor can they always be put into words. AI can help me think, but it cannot know what those experiences feel like or the meaning I give them. The meaning of a life is created by living it, shaped by the infinite experiences that only the individual can truly know.
Becoming your own guide
The deeper purpose of coaching is to help us become our own guide. As I learned to coach myself, I discovered lasting change came from listening more carefully to myself, asking better questions, developing self-compassion, embracing my experiences rather than running from them, and allowing those experiences to become a source of wisdom.
The coaching skills I learned transformed my work, but more importantly, they transformed my life. They influenced the way I listened, reflected, loved, disagreed, forgave, and made decisions. They gave me the confidence to trust myself. It was not because I'd always be right, but because I trusted I'd approach life with honesty, curiosity, compassion, and the willingness to keep learning.
It shows up in every relationship
I did not learn any of this as a child. I learned it mid-career, mid-crisis, as an adult making sense of a difficult season of life. Yet these are not skills that belong only to adults in professional training who arrive late and by chance. They belong everywhere a relationship exists.
Parent who learns to listen before advising raises a child who feels understood rather than managed. Child who learns to be curious rather than certain grows into an adult who can sit with disagreement rather than needing to win it. Partner who learns self-compassion stops mistaking their harshness for honesty. Manager who learns awareness catches their reaction before it becomes someone else's bad day. None of this requires a coaching certification, only the willingness to practice it, the way I did, not doing so well at first, but then doing better in the ordinary conversations of an ordinary life.
Conclusion
These skills have helped my clients make the changes they were seeking. They have shaped my own life just as profoundly, at home and at work, with my children and with strangers, and they continue to do so. They are not simply coaching skills reserved for a coaching relationship. They are not simply parenting, leadership, or relationship skills. They are the skills that shape every relationship we will ever have, including the one we have with ourselves. They are life skills, and they should be taught as such, to parents, to children, in friendships, in marriages, in workplaces, everywhere a human being learns to be with another human being.
Read more from Elizabeth Ballin
Elizabeth Ballin, Professional Certified Coach
Elizabeth Ballin, PCC, is an ICF-accredited professional coach and mindfulness practitioner working globally with people and professionals from many backgrounds. She combines emotional insight, cultural intelligence, and practical structure to support meaningful growth. She brings a lifelong multicultural awareness, deepened by twelve years of coaching across more than twenty cultures, which helps her attune to the emotional and practical realities her clients face. Her writing spans themes such as curiosity, creativity, well-being, communication, judgment, and the inner shifts that support meaningful growth in the complexity of modern life.
