06/10/2026
“I don’t have the confidence to start coaching yet.”
I hear this from new coaches all the time. But I think there’s an important question hiding underneath it.
Is it confidence you’re missing, or competence?
Confidence is your belief in yourself. If that’s getting in the way, NLP gives us some wonderful tools for working with limiting beliefs, clearing interference and accessing more resourceful states.
Competence is different. Competence comes from experience.
You can finish a great coaching training and know lots of processes, models and techniques, but there comes a point where you simply need to coach people. Lots of people. Different people. People who don’t respond exactly the way the training manual suggested they would!
That’s how you learn to listen differently, choose interventions, change direction when something isn’t working, explain what you’re doing and become more comfortable not knowing exactly what will happen next.
And that is where supervision and feedback become incredibly valuable too.
In my latest video, I talk about the difference between confidence and competence, why you probably shouldn’t wait until you “feel ready” to begin coaching, and some very practical ways to start building real coaching experience.
Because sometimes the way to become confident isn’t to work on confidence at all.
It’s to become more competent.
https://youtu.be/RGcd0QUF6iQ
You want to start coaching, but you keep thinking, “I’m just not co...