What is Coaching?
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night worried about the countless action items on your list? Or dreaded going into work because of a challenging meeting that you don’t feel confident enough to lead? Or how about the time when you felt anxiety giving feedback to your direct report? Or how to solve strategic challenges such as disengaged teams or making critical decisions? When managing your own work and your team’s work becomes too much, often, we do not have anyone at work to turn to and express freely how we are feeling and the impact of these situations on our well being. While growth is where we want to focus for our careers, sometimes we are merely trying to survive the day. Although it may seem counterintuitive to take time out of your day to speak to an executive coach, this might be the very thing that helps you to see things more clearly, to find more confidence in yourself, and to prioritize your days/weeks/years around activities that truly help you to grow both professionally and personally.
The Vast Field of Coaching
Coaching is a vast field, there are sports coaches, career coaches, business coaches, life coaches, health coaches and so on. Due to this wide variety of options, it can be confusing to understand what exactly is coaching and what can be expected. In addition, it is often viewed similarly as therapy, many think that it’s not going to solve your problems and it won’t lead to any progress. To a certain extent, that may be true, just like therapy will not solve any problem you do not wish to dive into, coaching is similar, it won’t solve problems that you do not want to face. The simple fact is that therapy does work to reframe beliefs and change old narratives that keep us in the same cycle. Coaching also works in a similar way, but instead of focusing on the past and diagnosing the client with mental conditions, coaching is focused on exploration of what you’re struggling with or trying to make progress in, and ultimately finding insights that will help you to build an action plan and execute against these plans to achieve your goals.
What is Coaching?
Before we move any further though, what exactly is coaching? According to International Coaching Federation (ICF), “coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.” One of my favorite analogy about executive coaching is this: a Sports Coach sits in the driver seat and they are responsible for directing, teaching, mentoring, setting the strategy, and enabling the players to execute in the most effective way towards the strategy. Meanwhile, an Executive Coach sits in the passenger’s seat and they are responsible for partnering with the client in order to leverage powerful questions to explore issues, provide meaningful observation/feedback, help the client evoke insight, and co-create a plan with their client. While it may seem that it would be far easier to just meet with an advisor or mentor that can just give you the answer or solution, coaching provides a space where you confront difficult questions and it provides an opportunity for you to find your own solutions, take new risks, and ultimately learn lessons for the long term. In this challenging process, what you will leave with new knowledge about yourself and use this information to create new mindsets, habits, and ultimately the life/career you truly want.
Conclusion
To summarize, coaching is about partnering with the client in a creative thought provoking process that helps the client to gain their own insights on their goals, challenges, motivations, and more. So while some “coaches” offer solutions and answers (this approach is more similar to consulting or mentoring), a coach that is following the standards and ethics of ICF will host sessions that provide a safe space that allows the client to explore their issues or topics of interest and form their action items that are based on the insights they gain through thought-provoking techniques, imagery techniques, and reframing techniques. The coach is holding space and guiding this exploration and helping to evoke insight rather than offer a direct answer. Why is this a powerful approach? More often than not, we know ourselves best and we are also capable of finding our own solutions with some guidance and exploration. There is also a natural buy-in we have to a solution we come up ourselves as opposed to someone telling us what to do. This potent combination helps you to build action plans that lead to striking results that you want for your business, career, and personal life.
Next learn about the process of coaching.
Sources:
International Coach Federation (ICF). (2024). Retrieved from https://coachingfederation.org/about
