Core Competency #3
Establishing Trust
and Intimacy with
the Client
Ability to create a safe,
supportive environment that
produces ongoing mutual
respect and trust.
Kelvin Lim, PCC
Kelvin is the founder and principal
coach of Executive Coach International.
A professional coach since 1997,
Kelvin has worked with more than
20,000 people in China, Singapore and
internationally. Follow him on LinkedIn.
With the proliferation of the Internet, smartphones and
social media, the borders of the world are collapsing. We
are reaching out to a lot more cultures and sometimes, we
meet people from backgrounds that we never expected to
encounter. As a coach, it is important to prepare yourself for
this inevitability.
It’s human to hold certain assumptions about cultures different from
our own. Every person has a different context that has been shaped
in part by his or her political, social and economic background.
Some of my clients from India, for example, grew up in rural
communities but, by furthering their education, obtained positions in
“modern” industries, such as the IT sector. My clients from China are
experiencing the effects of living in a nation that modernized recently
and rapidly; as a result, they are always looking for opportunities
to find and leverage a trend in order to stand out, be different and
be heard. Many of my clients from the United States evince the
“Declaration of Independence” mentality: They know that they are in
pursuit of their own happiness, and they really go after that.
From the Toolbox
Coaching Across Cultures
Sometimes in a coaching engagement, these different contexts can
clash. I owe everything I know about cross-cultural coaching to all my
clients who are from different cultural backgrounds, who gave me an
opportunity to work with them. They educated me on how they would
like to be coached.
Unders х