UNDERSTANDING COACHING

To understand coaching and how it applies to your life or career, lets look at three offerings often confused with coaching.

MENTORING - Involves a developmental relationship between a person with direct experience in the area they are mentoring and a person new to the field who wishes to acquire more knowledge and wisdom about that subject area. A mentor can at times use coaching skills and competencies but is really showing the client how they achieved their success.

TRAINING - involves teaching a set of specific skills to a person that does not currently have those skills. The training material and program is set out and decided upon by the trainer, not the student.

CONSULTING - involves assessing or diagnosing the needs of an organization or individual and offering their own solutions based on their specialized expertise to 'fix' the problem, which they often implement for the client as well.

There are many benefits to each of these services and at times some coaching may be used within each of these approaches. A coach may help you discover that you could benefit greatly from hiring any one of the above to bring you closer to the results you're looking for and then the choice and commitment is yours. A coach will never advise you or tell you what you should or how you should do it. So let's take a closer look at what coaching, by today's standards, is all about.

What Coaching Is

The International Coach Federation, the largest coaching association in the world, provides accrediting systems for coach training programs and is establishing standards and core competencies that all members embrace and adhere to.

"The ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.

Coaching honors the client as the expert in his/her life and work and believes that every client is creative, resourceful, and whole. 

Standing on this foundation, the coach's responsibility is to:

• Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve:

• Encourage client self-discovery;

• Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies;

• and Hold the client responsible and accountable

Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.

Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach's job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client alredy has."

Adding to that, unlike consultants, trainers and mentors, coaches rarely ever give advice. We believe you are the expert in your life & in your business and don't tell you or teach you how you should do things. Rather, through appreciative inquiry (asking you open ended questions that invoke you to look deep within youself for the answers you already have but rarely access) we support you in the process of realizing new possibilities, choices and approaches to consistently improve you results.

HOW COACHES HELP

Coaches help individuals tap into their unique strengths, inherent wisdom and personal authenticity to create meaningful and fulfilling changes in their lives. There are a wide variety of reasons an organization may hire coaches for their personnel and why an executive may hire a personal executive coach to help them maximize their potential and achieve extraordinary results in their professional and personal lives, here are a few of them:

• To accelerate results and reach a goal as effectively and efficiently as possible;

• To bridge any gaps in knowledge, skills, confidence or resources;

• To facilitate mobility, helping one get unstuck and expand their realm of possibilities and choices;

• To increase clarity and one's level of certainty in making decisions;

• To achieve work-life balance and reduce stress & anxiety;

• To deepen leadership abilities including influential & inspiring interpersonal communication;

• To deepen one's sense of purpose and contribution;

• To be more authentic & leverage one's core values and strengths;

• To clarify, experience and enjoy one's personal definition of success.

Since coaching is completely customized to the individual, there are too many possible benefits to mention, however, I truly hope that in reading the list above, one can find at least one reason that would make an investment in coaching worthwhile for the individual and the organization they work for.