Mastering your Recovery Coaching with Skilled Professionals
This is where heart-led recovery coaches learn to live their purpose
Recovery Coach Essentials
Coaching Competencies: The 3-Legged Stool
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Discover the core skills that hold effective recovery coaching together:
asking good questions, listening deeply, managing your own stuff, and
treating the person as resourceful.
Skills Practice: Coaching Competencies
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Put the core coaching competencies into practice. Work with asking good
questions, active listening and treating the person as resourceful while
beginning to integrate Motivational Interviewing skills into the conversation.
Mindful Coaching
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Learn how presence changes a coaching conversation. Notice what is
happening in yourself, quiet the urge to fix, and become more fully
available to the person in front of you.
Skills Practice: Mindful Coaching
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Put mindful coaching into practice. Learn to notice your own reactions
while staying present, listening carefully and resisting the temptation
to move too quickly toward solutions.
Managing Your Stuff + Treating People as Resourceful
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Learn to recognize when your own experience, opinions and solutions are
entering the conversation, while developing greater trust in the person
you're coaching to find their own way forward.
Skills Practice: Managing Your Stuff
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Put Tuesday's learning into practice. Coach through situations that tempt
you to advise, fix or take over, while practising curiosity, restraint
and treating the person as resourceful.
Reflective Statements Through Active Listening
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Go beyond simply hearing the words. Learn to reflect meaning, emotion
and possibility in ways that help someone feel genuinely understood.
Skills Practice: Reflective Listening
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Practise listening for more than facts. Work with simple and complex
reflections, meaning and emotion to help the person hear themselves
more clearly and deepen the conversation.
Establishing Empathy
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Empathy is more than being kind. Explore how coaches create the
experience of being understood without assuming they know exactly
what someone else feels.
Skills Practice: Establishing Empathy
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Practise creating an experience of being understood. Use listening,
reflections and curiosity to communicate empathy without assuming,
interpreting or making the conversation about your own experience.
Recovery Coach Mastery
Cognitive Dissonance
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“I want to change, but…” Explore what happens when someone's actions
and values collide, and how a coach can work with that tension without
pushing for an answer.
Skills Practice: Cognitive Dissonance
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Practise conversations where what someone says they value and what they
are doing don't quite line up. Learn to explore the discrepancy with
curiosity rather than confrontation.
Generative Moments
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Some questions change the direction of a conversation. Learn to
recognize and create moments that invite new thinking, insight
and possibility.
Skills Practice: Generative Moments
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Practise recognizing openings in a coaching conversation and responding
with questions and reflections that invite discovery rather than simply
gathering more information.
Reoccurrence Prevention & Management: Part 1
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Look beyond simply avoiding relapse. Explore vulnerability, triggers,
warning signs and the conditions that help someone protect and
strengthen recovery.
Skills Practice: Reoccurrence Prevention
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Practise coaching conversations around vulnerability, triggers and
warning signs while helping the person identify their own strengths,
resources and strategies for protecting recovery.
Reoccurrence Prevention & Management: Part 2
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What happens when recovery gets shaky or substance use returns?
Explore how coaches respond without judgment, panic or taking control.
Skills Practice: Responding to Reoccurrence
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Practise responding when substance use has returned. Learn to remain
curious and non-judgmental while helping the person explore what happened,
what they need now and what comes next.
Designing a Life in Recovery
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Recovery is not simply about stopping something. Explore how coaches
help people begin imagining and building a life with meaning,
connection, purpose and possibility.
Skills Practice: Designing a Life in Recovery
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Bring the program together in a coaching conversation focused on what
someone wants to build, not simply what they want to leave behind.
Practise helping people explore meaning, connection, purpose and
possibility while remaining firmly in the coaching role.