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Coaching

What is professional coaching?
Coaching is a process of partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Coaches honour the client as the expert in his or her life and work, and believe every client is creative and resourceful. 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
  • Hold the client responsible and accountable
This process helps clients dramatically improve their outlook on work and life, while improving their leadership skills and unlocking their potential.


How can you determine if coaching is right for you?
To determine whether you could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you would expect to accomplish in coaching. When an individual has a fairly clear idea of the desired outcome, a coaching partnership can be a useful tool for developing a strategy for how to achieve that outcome with greater ease.

Since coaching is a partnership, ask yourself whether collaboration, other viewpoints, and new perspectives are valued. Also, ask yourself whether you are ready to devote the time and energy to making real changes. If the answer is yes, then coaching may be a beneficial way to grow and develop.


How is coaching is different from Psychotherapy?
Professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal change. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand coaching by distinguishing it from Psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or in relationships. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past that hamper an individual's emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with the present in more emotionally healthy ways.   These issues may and often do come up in the course of coaching for individuals, which is why it is helpful to have a psychotherapeutic background when providing coaching as the means to the goal.  However coaching will be the focus.

Coaching, on the other hand, supports personal and professional growth based on self-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is future focused. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one's work or personal life. The emphases in a coaching relationship are on action, accountability, and follow through.


What are some typical reasons someone might work with a coach?
An individual may choose to work with a coach for many reasons, including the following:
  • Something urgent, compelling or exciting is at stake (a challenge or opportunity) 
  • A gap exists in knowledge, skills, confidence or resources
  • A desire to accelerate results
  • A lack of clarity with choices to be made
  • Life does resemble your hopes, wishes and dreams
  • Success has started to become problematic
  • Work and life are out of balance, creating unwanted consequences
  • Core strengths need to be identified, along with how best to leverage them
  • Feeling stuck or stagnant, or wanting more and not knowing how to get it


What does the process look like?
Coaching typically begins with a personal interview (either face-to-face or by teleconference call) to assess the individual's opportunities and challenges, learn about the unique qualities that make you you, define the scope of the relationship, identify barriers, as well as priorities for action and establish specific desired outcomes. Subsequent coaching sessions may be conducted in person, online, or over the phone with each session lasting a previously established length of time. Between scheduled coaching sessions, the individual may be asked to complete specific actions that support the achievement of one's personally prioritized goals. The coach may provide additional resources in the form of relevant articles, checklists, assessments, or models to support the individual's thinking and desired actions. The duration of the coaching relationship varies depending on needs and preferences.
  • Assessments: A variety of assessments are available to support the coaching process, depending upon the needs and circumstances of the individual or business. Assessments provide objective information that can enhance self-awareness, as well as awareness of others and their circumstances; provide a benchmark for creating coaching goals and actionable strategies; and offer a method for evaluating progress.
  • Concepts, models and principles: A variety of concepts, models and principles drawn from the behavioral sciences, management literature, spiritual traditions and/or the arts and humanities may be incorporated into the coaching conversation to increase self-awareness and awareness of others, foster shifts in perspective, promote fresh insights, provide new frameworks for looking at opportunities and challenges, and energize and inspire forward actions.
  • Appreciative approach: Coaching incorporates an appreciative approach, grounded in what's right, what's working, what's wanted, and what's needed to get there. Using an appreciative approach, the coach models constructive communication skills and methods to enhance personal communication effectiveness. She or he incorporates discovery-based inquiry, proactive (as opposed to reactive) ways of managing personal opportunities and challenges, constructive framing of observations and feedback to elicit the most positive responses from others, and visions of success as contrasted with focusing on problems. The appreciative approach is simple to understand and employ, and its reach can be profound, opening up new possibilities and spurring action.



How long does a coach work with an individual?
The length of a coaching partnership varies depending on the individual's needs and preferences. For certain types of focused coaching, three to six months of working may work. For other types of coaching, people may find it beneficial to work with a coach for a longer period. Factors that may impact the length of time include: the types of goals, the ways individuals prefer to work, the frequency of coaching meetings, and financial resources available to support coaching.


How do you ensure a compatible partnership?
Overall, be prepared to design the coaching partnership with the coach. For example, think of a strong partnership that you currently have in your work or life. Look at how you built that relationship and what is important to you about it. You will want to build those same things into a coaching relationship. Here are a few other tips:
  • Look for stylistic similarities and differences between the coach and you, and how these might support your growth as an individual.
  • Discuss your goals for coaching within the context of the coach's specialty, or the coach's preferred way of working with an individual. 
  • Talk with the coach about what to do if you ever feel things are not going well. Make some agreements up front on how to handle questions or problems.
  • Remember that coaching is a partnership, so be assertive about talking with the coach about any concerns.



Within the partnership, what does the coach do? The individual?
The coach:
  • Provides objective assessment and observations that foster the individual's self-awareness.
  • Listens closely to fully understand the individual's circumstances. 
  • Acts as a sounding board in exploring possibilities and implementing thoughtful planning and decision making.
  • Champions opportunities and potential, encouraging stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations.
  • Fosters shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives. 
  • Challenges blind spots to illuminate new possibilities and support the creation of alternative scenarios.
  • Maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession's code of ethics.
The individual:
  • Creates the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals 
  • Uses assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others
  • Envisions personal and/or organizational success 
  • Assumes full responsibility for personal decisions and actions 
  • Utilizes the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives 
  • Takes courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations 
  • Engages big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills 
  • Takes the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach and engages in effective forward actions

What does coaching ask of an individual?
To be successful, coaching asks certain things, all of which begin with intention. Additionally, clients should:
  • Focus on one's self, the tough questions, the hard truths and one's success.
  • Observe the behaviors and communications of others.
  • Listen to one's intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks.
  • Challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and develop new ones that serve one's goals in a superior way.
  • Leverage personal strengths and overcome limitations to develop a winning style.
  • Take decisive actions, however uncomfortable and in spite of personal insecurities, to reach for the extraordinary.
  • Show compassion for one's self while learning new behaviors and experiencing setbacks, and to show that compassion for others as they do the same.
  • Commit to not take one's self so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation.
  • Maintain composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity.
  • Have the courage to reach for more than before while engaging in continual self examination.

How can the success of the coaching process be measured?
Measurement may be thought of in two distinct ways: external indicators of performance and internal indicators of success. Ideally, both are incorporated.

Examples of external measures include achievement of coaching goals established at the outset of the coaching relationship, increased income/revenue, obtaining a promotion, performance feedback that is obtained from a sample of the individual's constituents (e.g., direct reports, colleagues, customers, boss, the manager him/herself), personal and/or business performance data (e.g., productivity, efficiency measures). The external measures selected should be things the individual is already measuring and has some ability to directly influence.

Examples of internal measures include self-scoring/self-validating assessments that can be administered initially and at regular intervals in the coaching process, changes in the individual's self-awareness and awareness of others, shifts in thinking that create more effective actions, and shifts in one's emotional state that inspire confidence.
This information is based on publications from The International Coach Federation