Introducing Coaching…
Suppose you were offered a way to recognise and realise all your goals, to find and utilise your unique strengths, to manage yourself more effectively, to identify and work around your limitations, to focus your intention and your resources and, above all, to make changes to your life for the better. Would you be interested? This is what coaching has to offer.
In my view coaching is more than a set of skills: it is a different way of being, one that characterises excellent coaches whatever their particular training or style. If comes from a profound coherence between what the coach does, what they believe and who they are. This is what makes good coaching seamless in practice. It’s what lie’s behind its power to help people make changes and in the process discover more what they have it in them to become.
At its heart, coaching is about partnership - not just the obvious one between client and coach, but also partnerships between reason and emotion, reflection and action. Coaching is interactive: it is a dialogue between equals. It involves a pooling of expertise. The client is the expert on herself and her situation and the coach is the expert on helping her discover how to make the changes she wants to make in her work and other part of her life.
Coaching recognises that small changes, if properly targeted, can have far reaching results. That’s why the best coaches are experts on leverage. It is, however, concerned primarily with process rather than actual content. It is marked by clarity in some areas: clarity of purpose, role, boundaries and ways and means. It’s also characterised by open-endedness in other areas because of the need for inquiry, exploration, reflection and experimentation. It is a process that is highly tolerant of doubt and ambiguity, and yet at the same time sharply focused.
Coaching is all about learning - for the coach as well as the client. Each coaching partnership is unique, making its own operating rules, its own discoveries and its own journey of progress. The best coaching takes no prisoners and pulls no punches, yet it develops the clients’ acceptance of themselves and others. Over time I have noticed that coaching becomes habitual - not because its conversations continue indefinitely, but because its patterns of reflection, enquiry, experiment and evaluation transfer from the coach to the client. It becomes part of the client’s own way of dealing with their experience. It also becomes a way of thinking that can cascade through organisations and families.
Be it formal or informal, executive or life coaching, coaching can be of benefit to most members of the community. Good coaches have a natural ability to enable clients to take stock, clarify their purpose, become focused and achieve greater ease. There are also the foundation of coaching skills. Just about anybody who is working with other will be more effective if they can do this.
Hence the value of a coaching approach.