Mindset, Methods, Skills & Tools of Impactful Coaches: Highlights from one year 'Making of a Coach'

Tobi

It's not her role as a coach to fix the client's problems. So the client actually needs to be ready, willing and eager to do this work.

Max Friedle

You gotta shut up at times.

Tobi

I drop a question, and then I have the feeling, ah, apparently this question did not land well, it's difficult, maybe it wasn't appropriate. And I already start my mental narrative of what did I do wrong.

Max Friedle

So your lesson for 2026 is, be unprepared and just wing it.

Tobi

We can imagine a client complaining about a certain issue, and then we come with the question, okay, are there exceptions? Has there been a point when you didn't have that problem? Yeah, maybe there was this one exception, but only this one exception. Okay, let's look at that. What happened there? How did it feel?

Max Friedle

What is happening in 2026? What will change for the podcast?

Tobi

Welcome to the anniversary episode, and the very last episode of the Making of a Coach. What, the last episode? Are we stopping? No. On the contrary, we are giving this podcast a fresh start. Throughout the last 12 months I've been meeting experienced coaches and unpacking their journey of becoming a coach. How did they get from a job in HR to a flourishing coaching practice, from passion to profession? In my own entrepreneurial journey these kinds of stories have always been tremendously useful. But of course the journeys of other people are not enough to make your own. They might be a good starting spark and inspiration, but you will need more fuel on the way. What I realized when reflecting on my podcasting journey, and what I can also see you are most interested in, is the question: how can I make my coaching sessions most impactful? What are the mindset, the methods, the skills and the tools that I need to be an impactful coach? These are the questions we have also tackled last year in coaching demos, in topical deep dives, but I want to tackle them much more explicitly this coming year.

Tobi

So, a warm welcome to you, Max.

Max Friedle

Thank you, Tobi. Finally I made it to the podcast.

Tobi

Yeah. And for everybody who doesn't know you yet, Max, who are you and how do you spend your days currently?

Max Friedle

So, I am Max, I'm Tobi's co-founder. I'm a coach, entrepreneur, engineer, adult educator, father, probably many roles that in the end define what I do in my daily life. At metaFox I'm working a lot on our systems, working with our people, the team, and of course co-product development. And the project at the moment is the Academy, where we offer certification programs based on the tools that we already have and which all of you like.

Tobi

Awesome. And as the product owner of the metaFox Inner Journey and the metaFox Academy program in general, you have also developed a coach development framework. You sat down and looked at what that means very concretely for me as a human being who wants to do inner development, and also what that means for me as a coach who needs the right skills to develop others.

Max Friedle

Yes. I looked at the topic of development. In the classical sense we have the teacher and the student, right? And from this perspective we can look at two sides of the same coin, which is the teaching, but it has two very distinct perspectives. And the same is of course true for coaching, for training, for facilitation, whenever we manage the interaction between other people. And so, looking now at the coach side, I identified four different topics: mindset, methods, skills and tools. And combining those, we get the coach development framework. So, we split the world into what is inside of me and mostly unseen, and what's outside and public. And on the other axis we have things I do in preparation, and what I do in the interaction that I am in, the coaching, the therapy, the training. And if I split up the world with those two different dichotomies, I get these four quadrants which I just mentioned. And that is a very practical way, because we can look at what we need to develop as a coach, and in which areas, and where we're strong, where we're maybe not so strong, where to focus. So this gives us a practical way to reflect on our own development. And with this, I would say, let's use that framework to reflect on the year 2025 and go through the podcast episodes that you recorded, Tobi, all the super interesting guests that you had. And let's start with number one, mindset.

Tobi

Yeah. If I look at the mindset quadrant, me as a coach and my inner preparation, I think what stuck out most was: the role of a coach is to hold space, not to fix the client's problems.

Max Friedle

I think this is a nice way to phrase it: the Pam show, her being at the center, everybody looking at her. The exact opposite of what they call teaching from the back of the room.

Tobi

In the context of teaching, yes. And I think Marie, another coach based in Silicon Valley, she used exactly that phrase. She had to learn, she said, that it is leading from the back of the room. So again, she had come from a background in HR and leadership, and also had to realize that she needs to go, metaphorically, to the back of the room, in order to give the client the space to work through their things. And yet another way to phrase it was from Hélène Feuillat, a coach in Belgium. I think she also talked about a similar realization, and in her case she even made it her entire brand. Her website is withhelene.com. So she realized that what she delivers is not a session by Hélène, but something with Hélène. And I just saw this reappearing in so many different shades, and it resonated so much, because this is also really one of my big development areas: allowing other people their problems, kind of stepping back and not coming in with my own

Max Friedle

Yeah. There is a book I read this year, The Surrender Experiment, which is also about, in the end, just being present, and allowing life, allowing your coachee to draw their own conclusions, and being aware that you don't add to it. I'm not saying that it won't work, but just that you become aware that something comes up, it's a thought, I don't have to react to it, I can go back to my breathing. In the end it connects to meditation and everything else. It's this sense of letting go, of not being held hostage by your mind.

Tobi

Yeah. And I think we can look at this on two different layers. The more general layer is the one of identity, I would say, which came up a lot in my episode with Todd from the UK. He considers himself a practitioner, not firstly a coach, because he's doing a lot of work with energy and work on your own identity. In the demo coaching that we ran, I think this was also a lot about my identity as a know-it-all kind of expert person, and wanting things to be perfect. So you have this sort of more general layer where you can do this work, and then, very practically, I think you also hinted at this already, Max, you can also do this very tangibly before every session. Ebony, another coach, called it the emotional hygiene work that she needs to do.

Max Friedle

Ah yeah, I remember that episode.

Tobi

Yeah.

Max Friedle

That she doesn't bring her own topics into the session. She is very deliberate about taking extra time before entering a room that she holds for her client, so that this room is a clean room.

Tobi

Exactly.

Max Friedle

That sounds like a very clear, very well rounded learning strategy on the topic of mindset. Methods, then: how we design our sessions, the theories, the methods that we find outside of ourselves. When you think back, the models that you construct yourself and that we use in preparation. So, what are the things that you remember from your conversations that fit into this category?

Tobi

Yeah, the first thing I noted down when I was also listening back to a few episodes was the session with Kristen Harcourt, also a Canadian coach, who said she only works with clients who are ready, willing and eager. And this is sort of what she's also doing in the preparation of her sessions, in order to have her coaching be as impactful as it can be. So she really has this readiness gate, and clients need to be able to pass through this readiness gate, because, as we discussed, it's not her role as a coach to fix the client's problems. So the client actually needs to be ready, willing and eager to do this work.

Max Friedle

That's a very good way to think about it. It reminds me of our own quality guide when hiring, right? The person gets it, wants it and can do it. Plus, values fit. But from a technical perspective we always check these three. And she also has her checks there: is that going to be somebody I can actually help? Which is super important, you know. Are we a fit? And if not, then yeah, nobody's going to be happy in the end.

Tobi

Yeah. And I think even the GROW model has this, the W in GROW is also this will, this willingness. Of course that doesn't come at the entrance to the coaching but later. But I think there we also see this theme popping up, that it's the responsibility of the client to make the change, and we need their willingness as a precondition.

Max Friedle

Yeah. Because then, how can you be the catalyst to help your client go through the process?

Tobi

What happens if you put two engineers on a coaching podcast? You talk about activation energy. Cool. Let's go a bit more tangible into methods.

Max Friedle

Yeah.

Tobi

I think most impactful on me and on my own learning was my diving into solution focused coaching and brief coaching, together with Kirsten Dierolf. And then I also had another episode with Roel Schaart, the Dutch guy. Both of them work a lot with solution focus and brief coaching, and that was one of my biggest learning areas.

Max Friedle

And what does that mean in practice? No rambling, no going over it again and again. I think it's mainly a question of the questions you ask as a coach. So directing the focus of the client to what works already, and how does the world look, how do they feel when things work already? So we can imagine a client complaining about a certain issue, and then we come with the question, okay, are there exceptions? Has there been a point when you didn't have that problem? Yeah, maybe there was this one exception, but only this one exception. Okay, let's look at that. What happened there? How did it feel? How was the world different? How did other people see you differently? So that's one way. And if they really have a hard time coming up with them, then I think another classic from this is the miracle question, where you say, okay, let's take a step back, let's just imagine the sun is rising and a miracle has happened and your problem is gone. How is the world different? How do you feel? What is now possible? What can you do? So again, you look at this imagined reality where the problem is gone, and you imagine what's possible now. So you want to create that future first in the mind and then create it in reality, right, without having to solve every single issue that you have right now. Because first you have to know where you're going, and then you can figure out how to get there.

Tobi

Yeah.

Max Friedle

So we have two methods already. You mentioned the ready, willing and eager quality gate, let's say, for determining if a client is good for you and you're good for them. And then on the other hand we have the solution focused coaching model.

Tobi

Yeah. And I think what came up now as we discussed that is, I used the question, how does it feel, a lot. And that is also something that I of course came a lot in touch with in my own coach education in the NLP world. You do a lot of things with the body, but this has also always been relatively difficult for me. So I'm also often stuck in my mind, in my cognition, and finding what I actually feel in my body is surprisingly difficult. This area came up in another session that I had with Dr. Jasmin Messerschmidt. It was a session that we originally ran in German, there's an AI powered transcreation of it online as well. And with her we worked on pictures. Of course I had worked with pictures a lot already, but what I found very interesting about her approach, the Zurich Resource Model, was how she combines the work with pictures with the body. So we did this calibration exercise where she showed me different pictures, one that was very shocking, it was a picture of a person almost cutting off their finger when cutting a cucumber, and then she brought me into this body scan: what does this picture do with me, how does it feel, where do I feel that, in my chest, et cetera? So we really combined this work with pictures, that I had done a lot, with sensing the body. So I think that is also an amazing method, especially for cognitively strong clients like me, in this instance.

Max Friedle

Very good. Method number three, the Zurich Resource Model method to work with picture cards.

Tobi

Yeah.

Max Friedle

And you also adapted the method. Very nice. So, three methods overall. And I'd say, let's go to quadrant number three, skills. These are the things that you can do, and that you do with your clients, with your participants, with your coachees, in the interaction, in the activity, in the moment. So, what have you learned on this side?

Tobi

So this is a lot about how we do conversation with the client, right? And I think what struck me the most here is not how to do conversation with the client, but how to not do conversation with the client. This came up repeatedly, but I think most prominently I remember again Kristen Harcourt, who said the magic happens after you have asked a difficult question. So the point I want to get to here is silence as an intervention. And I think, having discussed this aspect of, I want to be seen as an expert, as a competent coach, which we discussed earlier, this becomes a very difficult one. Because in my own coaching practice I also notice, I drop a question, and then I have the feeling, ah, apparently this question did not land well, it's difficult, maybe it wasn't appropriate. And I already start my mental narrative of what did I do wrong. But basically the point that she made here was that the magic happens

Max Friedle

Extremely powerful. I remember one of my earlier pre-coach conversations. I coached people, but I didn't know what coaching was, in that sense. I was talking to my sister back then, and at one point she said, Max, can you just stop and listen? And I was like, okay. I think I was like 14 or so, and I was like, okay. That's where I learned the lesson that you gotta shut up at times.

Tobi

Yeah.

Max Friedle

Great. Maybe there is another skill that you want to mention, that you remember, that connects to the episodes of 2025.

Tobi

Yeah. I think, as we've discussed silence, there's sort of the contrary point to that, that I also would like to make, and that I took, for example, from Marie Szuts and I think also Ebony. They both made the similar point that as a coach you are not just a yes man, and sometimes it's time to interrupt the client. And what I mean here is that we talked a lot now about giving the space to the client. But I think there are also many clients, and I'm definitely one of them, who like building their own theories and mental castles and externalizing all of that, and talking a lot about the problem, maybe also talking about the solution, but generally doing lots of talking, being stuck in their sort of cognition mode. And why I'm again referring this to me is because I also know this from my own therapy. When I do therapy as a client, this also happened a few times, that the therapist was really cutting in and asking, Tobi, can I stop you there for a moment? And again bringing me to the body: as you talk about this, how does it feel in your body? So getting the client out of this cognition mode and reconnecting them with the body. And I think that also requires you as a coach to go into this confrontational stance and actually not give them the silence maybe, but interrupt at the right time.

Max Friedle

I think there are two important things that you have to master here. Number one, you have to get permission beforehand to be invasive and to be interrupting, right? So it's part of the contracting that you're doing in the very beginning. And secondly, you have to be able to tell whether this is now a reflection of something new, or whether it's basically rambling about something that has happened and trying to reinforce a narrative that we are actually trying to let go of. And so you need to see the world already through your client's eyes to be able to make that kind of judgment, and then help them escape, or redirect, in either way. Not escape, redirect.

Tobi

Yeah, though I actually like the term escape. Escape your cognition mode. I think I'm often stuck in the prison of my own cognition, and helping the client escape I find actually a quite cool metaphor here.

Max Friedle

When your mind holds you hostage. I think that's the picture.

Tobi

Yeah.

Max Friedle

Amazing. So now, in the skills area, we have silence and knowing when not to remain silent, two very important skills. With that we go on to the last quadrant, which is tools, and the question of what you use there. So, as a reminder for our listeners, the tools are the things which are outside of us, existing beyond us, that can be used by other people. And we use them in the session. So that can be anything from the application of a model that I have, for instance the Wheel of Life. You know, it's an idea, but I can print it out, or use it online, and fill it out and actually work with it. And it can of course also be one of the physical tools that we offer. And maybe we find other things in our conversation here.

Tobi

Yeah, exactly. So if I look back at the Making of a Coach in 2025, we had plenty of tools. We had the Wheel of Life that you mentioned. We also had beliefs and the inner saboteur assessment, that's one of the most recent ones, with Lucy Higgins. There was also working with strengths, for example, in a demo coaching that I ran with Taina and our own strengths discovery tool. And of course we had pictures, and the somatic picture work with Dr. Jasmin Messerschmidt. And I think how we ended up there was one of my very first episodes, with Nami Ishihara, who is a facilitator working with groups. She mentioned the Belbin team roles and how they enable teams to talk about their strengths and weaknesses and their patterns in a non-threatening, non-judgmental way. And this advantage of providing a common language to a group of clients, in this case, I think that is something that came up very often with all these kinds of tools.

Max Friedle

Yeah. In the end, many tools help us to create shared language. It doesn't really matter if you now work with a personality type test, a strengths assessment, or MBTI, or the Big Five, all of these things. Whatever you use, it gives you a shared language to talk. And that is one main point to learn here: other people are different, and that's okay. All of these tools give you a language to not only understand it conceptually, because everybody is clear that of course people are different, but then we don't act like it. So they help with that. And then the other thing that tools really help with, I think, especially given the things that you mentioned, the ZRM model, is that they help you to uncover, to unearth things that you didn't know about yourself. So they help to bring things to the surface that have been dormant, or at least unseen or unclear, but that have been inside of us already. And that is true for the somatic, image-based work, but that's also true for working with strengths and formulating, naming. Naming is taming. Same goes for emotion work.

Tobi

Yeah.

Max Friedle

So the tools really give you more power in that sense.

Tobi

And, reflecting back on this point of people are different, one quote that comes to mind is from my conversation, from my DISC demo with Roel Schaart. And that was, we always learn as children to treat other people as we want to be treated. But his point was, well, actually, wouldn't it be even better if we treated other people as they want to be treated, not as we do?

Max Friedle

Yeah. That comes more from the sales perspective, where you have exactly this change of perspective, but it tells the same story.

Tobi

And I think another recurring theme, now talking about DISC: of course I also had the scientist, Dr. Ronald Franke from the LINC Profiler, who is, to put it mildly, not a fan of DISC. He is very strong on the point that also one of my first guests, Marie Szuts, made: that every personality test or profiling tool can be weaponized, in the sense that it ends up serving as a justification for unhealthy behavior. So saying, oh, I'm so red, I'm the dominant one, and that's why I behave in the group like this, and that's why it is okay, which it obviously is not. But of course that is one thing. I think another issue he's taking there is the boxing of people. So I think it's also always important to acknowledge that the world is gray and it's not red, yellow, green and blue. It's always a spectrum. All of these tools give us dimensions, and we can be more on the left hand side or more on the right hand side, but we are never only on the right hand side or only on the left hand side.

Max Friedle

I was thinking, all models are wrong, and you have said, they are all wrong. And that is so true. In every kind of education program where you learn about whatever profile or personality type whatsoever, everybody should learn about the Barnum effect right afterwards, in a very practical way, just to realize, oh, actually, it's just made up and not real. At least not real in the sense that gravity is real and we can rely on it to work a hundred percent of the time. It's real in a way that it works 10 percent of the time, and that's already great for psychology.

Tobi

Yeah. So the Barnum effect, right? That means you expose people to a test, you tell them, oh, fill in this questionnaire, and then you give them a short personality description and say, this is your result. And afterwards you tell them that literally every single person gets exactly this description and says, oh wow, this is so much me. So that brings us back to the point of, maybe we are not so different after all.

Max Friedle

Well, let me give you a summary of what we talked about in the tools section. We talked about the shared language that we can get by using tools, be it now strengths cards, be it an assessment, be it Belbin team roles, whatever it is, to help us understand each other. And then we have tools that help us uncover things that have been dormant or hidden inside of ourselves, that we can, for instance, uncover with cards, with the ZRM method. And then, in the end, we talked about the possible weaponization of these tools, if people self-identify and with this justify their own behavior.

Tobi

Yeah. So I think what we found in quite a few conversations talking about tools is that it's more powerful to have a few tools at your disposal and become really, really fluent with them. So I think this is a point that Hélène from Belgium made, but also Marie Szuts in one or the other way. And I think, as we saw now when discussing this quadrant, there's really an ocean of different tools. And I think the main takeaway here is to pick your tool and become very fluent.

Max Friedle

That is really like the saying in jiu-jitsu: I have no fear of the man who practises a thousand punches once, but of the one who practises one punch a thousand times. So, be very intentional about what to be good at, and then double down and triple down and 10x down on that exact thing.

Tobi

Finding the tool, and becoming a master.

Max Friedle

Yeah, exactly.

Tobi

Yeah, thanks so much. I think that concludes our fourth quadrant. So, Max, which one was your highlight, and which one would you like to take into your 2026 and apply in your practice?

Max Friedle

So for me, definitely Jasmin Messerschmidt's ZRM methodology. Although I've already been working with pictures for, oh, six, no, eight years, there's still more to learn, and I hadn't read about her work until then. I hadn't exactly heard of it, and I just thought that I could do it, but then it turned out to be a really nice, structured way of working with picture cards, which we have now also adapted for our own program. And that connects to what I'm doing in 2026, taking the metaFox Academy into our Inner Journey program, our first program. On day two we use this methodology in the context of picture cards, and the participants love it. It is so crazily effective, and it's something that people have never done before and also can't imagine how powerful it can be.

Tobi

Yeah, I think I pick what we've discussed in the mindset section, this aspect of, not being the expert, it's not the Tobi show, but I'm here to hold the space. And that connects very well for me also to the solution focused coaching world, bringing in this lightness, and seeing just what the client brings, instead of always preparing. Because I think when I do coaching I often already have some idea of what will come up, what the client will bring, and already kind of sort my tools. And I want to do that less. I just want to be there more and then act in the moment, instead of preparing and, by definition, then also bringing biases when doing so.

Max Friedle

So you have to unlearn everything you ever learned and be unprepared. So your lesson for 2026 is, be unprepared and just wing it.

Tobi

Exactly. I think unlearning is a great theme. Stop being the good student.

Max Friedle

So let's hear what's happening in 2026 with the podcast. Because in 2025 you took the initiative, you launched this platform, you invited people, and we always heard from your guests from two sides, right? So we had the coach side, with methods and tools and how they bring effectiveness to their clients, and then on the other side we had this look at their business acumen and how they are building their business. What is happening in 2026? What will change for the podcast?

Tobi

Yeah. So I think, if you listened and saw what we discussed, it already becomes quite apparent that when it is about becoming an impactful coach, it is about these things: your mindset, your methods, your skills and your tools. And that's what I want to bring more of. And that's quite different from the starting hypothesis. So if we now sort of build in public and share what my consideration was: in the very beginning, in my role as a metaFox co-founder, I had been talking to coaches for years, mostly about how they do their practice, how they work with picture cards, et cetera. But whenever I then asked the question, what is your biggest problem, what came up most of the time was, well, finding clients, setting up my business. And so when we started the podcast, I also thought, wouldn't it be great to build a resource that helps with that? Because if I look at my own experience as a founder, as an entrepreneur, then I think I always learn a lot in conversations with other people, with people who have walked the path that I am walking. That's exactly what the initial idea was with the podcast. And if we look at the early episodes here, my first conversation with Marcel, with Hélène, with Nami, they were all kind of going through the CVs of people. And I think there's a place for that. I believe you can learn, as a young aspiring coach, from hearing other

Max Friedle

Yeah, this shows that no plan survives contact with reality, and that you have to start somewhere, make mistakes, improve, make some more mistakes, improve, until you find something that works reliably. And so we'll hear more about the nitty gritty aspects of coaching itself, of team building, maybe supervision, therapy, whoever you show us, and less about the CVs of people. But overall it will be much more about the practice of coaching, and maybe aligning this with the coach development framework, so that we have a way to model the different episodes into one coherent story.

Tobi

Yeah. So if this was a contracting for our common coaching journey, I would say my role will be the one of unpacking what makes an impactful coach: the mindset, methods, skills and tools behind that.

Max Friedle

And that goes with the name rebrand, The Impactful Coach, right?

Tobi

Exactly. So, with a crying and a laughing eye, we will bury the Making of a Coach, that season, if you want, in podcast speak, and launch The Impactful Coach. That's it. I say farewell to the Making of a Coach format. However, you are of course very welcome to go back and listen to it. I think all the episodes that we mentioned today, and the content that we recorded last year, is pretty timeless, and I still believe that the stories of other people have their place to inspire us. At the same time, I'm super excited about opening a new chapter. And I guess this is also a good moment to say thank you to Julika Franke, who has helped me open this new chapter, understand what I want and also understand what metaFox needs, and who has even given this baby its new name. The conversation with Julika where this happened is not on record, unfortunately, but lots of other wisdom from Julika is on the last two episodes. So go back to these if you want to make a change in your offering, in your positioning. I will start The Impactful Coach here in two weeks, to really dig into methods, unpack tools, and learn about the mindset and skills of impactful