Have you ever started coaching someone despite feeling uncertain about their readiness? Do you wish your clients would immerse themselves in deeper thinking?

It's frustrating and unfulfilling when clients don't leverage the potential from coaching. It can feel like you're working harder than they are, striving to create value on their behalf. But remember: your job isn't to create value from coaching - it's to be a catalyst for it.

As a coach, your role is to manage the process, enabling the thinker to access their inner wisdom, connect the dots for themselves and find their own answers that resonate with their personality, context, motivations, beliefs and values. For this to happen, the thinker must be ready and willing to take on the responsibility of creating value and achieving results - they need to be 'coaching ready.'

In this pioneering and sometimes provocative guide, Master Coach Clare Norman explores your influence on the coaching experience from start to finish. With clear guidance, accessible advice and supportive practices you'll gain transformative skills that will shift responsibility for creating value from coach to thinker and, in organisations, the task of screening for coachability to the coaching custodian.

It takes cooperation and collaboration to nurture coachability, agency and self-efficacy. Through Clare's rich experiences, relatable case studies and holistic strategies, you'll discover how to redefine the coaching experience, develop truly engaged thinkers and reignite your passion for transformational coaching.

About the Author

Clare Norman MCC

With over 25 years of coaching experience, Clare Norman is a Master Coach, mentor coach, supervisor and coach educator whose work sits at the intersection of professional rigour and human tenderness. She is sought after by expert coaches and coach training organisations across the world, and is known for her precision, honesty and willingness to say what others in the profession have left unsaid.

Reclaiming Love in Coaching is Clare’s fourth book and, in many ways, the one the others have been reaching towards. Her first, Mentor Coaching: A Practical Guide, argued for the professionalisation of mentor coaching. Her second, The Transformational Coach, introduced the idea of mindset update before sustainable skillsets change follows. Her third, Cultivating Coachability, turned the lens towards the thinker and what they bring to the work. This fourth book names what has been underneath all of it: agape love as the field in which coaching happens, and the quality the profession has abandoned in its pursuit of competency frameworks.

Clare’s purpose is to help people feel seen for who they really are, so they can find their voice and express their needs in service of a more caring world. She is still in the coaching chair herself, still in practice and still learning. She writes from that place. Her international following includes peers and senior leaders who have found in her work a more loving experience of what coaching can be.

Alongside her writing, Clare runs Clare Norman Coaching Associates, which she founded in 2015 after leading learning and development strategy within NatWest and Accenture. She specialises in transition and leadership coaching, mentor coaching and coaching supervision. She is a regular contributor to industry journals, a keynote speaker, and host of gatherings and retreats for coaches who want to reconnect with the heart of the work.

Clare lives in the New Forest, Hampshire, where she enjoys Nordic Walking with her husband and their bloodhound. She paints in watercolour, sings in a choir and practises tai chi and yoga.