Elevating Performance

Elevating Performance

How does a professional coach develop their performance from within before developing their tools?

Prepared by CPQ Academy — Under the supervision of Dr. Nasser Al-Frehi, Founder and Innovator

You sit before your client, listening, asking one question, then another… and in that same moment, another question runs through you: is this the best I can offer right now? That small question, if asked honestly after every session, is where true performance elevation begins.

Many professionals, as mentors and trainers, search for a new tool, an additional model, or a certificate to add to their portfolio, believing this is the path to better performance. But from my experience, and from working with hundreds of mentors through CPQ Academy, I see that true performance does not begin from the outside; it begins from within the session itself: from the way you listen, from the moment you choose a question over advice, and from your ability to observe yourself as you work.

In this article, I share with you a practical framework I have built based on documented scientific evidence, for elevating the mentor's performance from within, moving beyond the mere accumulation of tools without genuine development in practice.

Performance is Not Talent, but Deliberate Practice

If you believe the difference between you and an outstanding mentor is innate talent, I invite you to reconsider. The real difference, as decades of research on acquiring high expertise in any profession—including therapeutic and consulting professions—confirms, lies in a specific type of exercise known as "deliberate practice."

This is a focused practice that precisely targets a specific weakness, is assessed through immediate feedback, and is repeated regularly until it becomes part of your professional nature.

Therefore, if you merely count the number of sessions you hold each month, you are likely repeating your old performance without progressing. But if you take a deeper step—reviewing the recording of your last session (with your client's permission, of course), identifying just one moment where you could have asked a deeper question, and then actually trying that in your next session—you are the one building genuine performance. Try this exercise weekly, and you will notice the difference yourself before your client does.

Reflection During and After the Session: The Mind of the Reflective Practitioner

More important than any technique learned in any course, there is a more essential skill during the session itself: noticing yourself as you work. Researcher Donald Schön described this ability in his seminal work on "the reflective practitioner," explaining how professionals—from architects to therapists—develop their professional wisdom not from books alone, but through reflection in action and reflection on action.

This has direct relevance for you as a mentor: reflection during the session means noticing the moment you shift from a question to advice while it is happening, so you can correct course immediately before the opportunity passes. Reflection after the session means giving yourself five honest minutes, asking: where was I fully present? And where was I managing the session instead of accompanying it?

Try writing your answer, not just thinking about it; writing anchors the observation and transforms it into actual learning. Five daily minutes of this kind, if you commit to it, make a greater difference than any additional training course.

Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence as a Foundation for Performance

Technical competence alone is not enough to be a high-performing mentor. Researcher Daniel Goleman, in his theory of performance based on emotional intelligence, linked the quality of professional and leadership performance to self-awareness and emotional regulation, confirming that knowledge and technical skill alone are insufficient without the ability to read your internal state while working.

If you don't know, you are being governed by your emotions without realizing it, and this shows in your performance even if you don't notice it. Therefore, before every session, ask yourself a simple, honest question: in what internal state am I entering this session, and does this state serve my client, or does it serve my own comfort?

When the Mentor Burns Out: Performance is a Matter of Energy, Not Just Skill

You may think your performance is purely a matter of cumulative skill, but the reality runs deeper. In a study conducted on two hundred sixty professional sports coaches in Canada, it was found that a significant proportion of them suffer from professional burnout directly linked to weak self-regulation capacity, and that a simple program to strengthen this regulation tangibly improved their performance and professional satisfaction.

The same result applies to you as a mentor: your performance is not just a matter of cumulative skill, but a matter of internal energy that requires conscious management. When you are exhausted, you listen less, ask shorter questions, and lean toward ready-made solutions—all of this is a genuine decline in your performance, even if the same number of sessions appears on your calendar this week.

Genuine Presence: What Happens Between You and Your Client Shapes Your Performance

There is a dimension to your performance that no report or survey can capture: the quality of presence between you and your client. Since the 1950s, researcher Carl Rogers demonstrated that constructive change in a client only occurs when they feel that their therapist or mentor is genuine and congruent with themselves (not playing a role), holds unconditional acceptance for them, and has a real ability to understand their world from within.

Later, comprehensive meta-analytic reviews, covering thousands of therapy and coaching cases, confirmed that the strength of the "working alliance" between you and your client—that is, the degree of agreement on goal and task, and the degree of the human bond between you—is among the strongest recurring factors in predicting outcome quality, regardless of the school or approach you follow.

In other words: you may memorize twenty training models, but if your client doesn't feel that you are genuinely present with them, your actual performance falls far short of your theoretical performance.

Tracking Your Performance Wisely: Feedback is a Double-Edged Sword

You may think that regularly requesting feedback guarantees continuous improvement, but the matter is more nuanced than that. A comprehensive meta-analytic review covering more than one hundred experiments found that feedback raises performance by a moderate average overall, yet more than a third of cases showed a decline in performance after receiving feedback, especially when the comments focused on the person themselves rather than the task being performed.

This means that the way you request feedback, or offer it to a fellow mentor, is no less important than requesting it in the first place. Ask your supervisor or colleague to direct their comments toward what you did in the session, not toward who you are as a mentor; the difference between "this question didn't serve the session's goal" and "you're not good at listening" can be the difference between feedback that elevates your performance and feedback that triggers defensiveness and lowers it.