What is Coaching
Personal – Professional Coaching
Coaching is a powerful interactive process that helps individuals to develop personally and professionally more rapidly and produce more satisfying and fulfilling results. Coaches work with clients, often in weekly sessions over the phone, in all areas of life including personal development, business, career, finances, health and relationships. As a result of coaching, clients clarify and set better goals, move from stuck to taking more action, make better decisions and more fully use their natural strengths to live a more rich and fulfilling life.
Professional coaches are trained to listen and notice patterns of success and limitations, to customize their approach to the individual client’s needs, and to elicit solutions and strategies from the client. Because the client always knows more about themselves, how they are motivated, how they sabotage themselves, and their dreams for their future, coaches do not need to be an expert in the client’s field. Coaching is one of the fastest, most effective ways help people get from where they are to where they want to be.
Coaches believe that the client is naturally creative and resourceful and that the coach’s job is to provide support, encouragement, to enhance the skills, resources and creativity that the client already has. While the coach provides feedback and an objective perspective, the client is responsible for taking the steps to produce the results he or she desires. A coach is not a therapist. Coaches do not work with psychologically disturbed people. Coaches work with people from all walks of life helping them to bring out their very best.
The difference between coaching – and other fields such as counseling, therapy or consulting is quite simple. The coach does not have the answers. The coach does not provide subject specific technical knowledge or expertise. A coach operates from the presupposition that the client has all the resources. Coaching is about assuming that people already have what they need – they just need to be coached to access it. Like a sports coach, your role is partly to hold your client accountable to their personal best.
- Coaches do not provide answers or expertise in the way a trainer, consultant or mentor might, nor does the coach need to come up with the answer to the client’s problems. The true art of coaching is to gently question and facilitate the client into tapping their own resources so that they come up with the answers.
- As a masterful coach you help your clients stay on track with their own self-selected solutions and plans. The coach asks thought provoking questions to help clients clarify their present state without judgment, and helps clarify their goals and helps the client make steady progress towards goals by providing ongoing structure and accountability.
- Successful people seek out coaches. We have come a long way from the days when people were regarded as ‘broken’ if they had to seek outside help for problems. The tables have turned 180 degrees. Now it is accepted that it is the most successful individuals who seek out coaches because they realize that to fulfill your dreams in a complex world, you can’t do it alone. Recent issues of Newsweek, Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal have been urging professionals to seek out the services of a professional coach.
