What is Coaching?
Coaching is a conversation-based approach to personal development that helps someone move from where they are in their lives to where they want to be. It achieves this by providing a reflective space to think and feel, challenging limiting beliefs and perceptions, changing behavioural patterns and encouraging the client’s innate resources. By engaging with the coaching process, the client achieves a greater sense of clarity and purpose which then enables them to move towards successful resolution of their issues, challenges and opportunities.
The client works with an explicit goal, which the coach might help them to articulate. The goal might be something very specific, like finding a new job, or it might be a broader goal, such as wanting to feel more confident. Coaching is fundamentally concerned with personal change and as such, intention, motivation and action are all integral elements of the client’s process. The orientation of the work is towards the future, from the ‘here and now’ to the ‘there and then’. Having said this, the client’s past is invariably examined to some degree in order to help the them understand their current feelings, thoughts and behaviour, so that they might move forward to attain their desired outcome.
The philosophical stance in coaching is ‘person centred’. The coach views the client with unconditional positive regard. The client is not seen as disordered, ‘wrong’ or in need of ‘fixing’. Rather, the client is seen as valued, whole, ‘good enough’ and resourceful. The client is the expert on their own lives and the role of the coach is to facilitate the client’s own self-understanding. Fundamentally, the client possesses within them all the answers to their own questions, dilemmas and challenges.
Why Coaching?
So why come for coaching?
People come for coaching generally because they experience something getting in the way of them achieving their potential or living their life more fully. These blocks might show up as:
• Confusion
• Stress
• Feeling overwhelmed
• A sense of being stuck
• Lacking confidence
• Feeling hopeless or disempowered
• Vulnerability
• Fear
• Lacking a sense of meaning or purpose
Blocks like those listed above can affect any area of a person’s life including family, personal relationships, work, health and well-being, or they might have a more global impact.
Often these challenging and uncomfortable experiences can act as a catalyst for someone to examine their life more closely and ask themselves what they really want from their life. Prompted to look at their life by challenging circumstances, a person might decide they want:
• Greater confidence
• More energy
• Greater satisfaction from their work
• More intimacy in their life
• A greater sense of ease and relaxation
• To be healthier
• A clearer sense of life purpose or vocation
Coaching works to remove blockages, unlock a person’s potential and support them to take the action required to make changes in their life. The client’s desire to change and willingness to look at their own thoughts, feelings and behaviour are critical to this endeavour.
How does coaching work?
The coaching relationship creates optimal conditions in which the client can gain greater self-understanding and then take action to effect lasting change in their life.
The attitudinal stance of the coach creates an atmosphere of trust between coach and client. The relationship is one of collaboration in which both client and coach together actively seek the best outcome for the client. The coach views the client with unconditional positive regard and sees them as whole, valued and resourceful. The coach listens with attentiveness and precision, giving ample time for the client to think and feel and make sense of their experience. The power and potency of the client’s story being witnessed is not to be underestimated.
Research into conversation-based approaches to personal growth consistently shows that it is the quality of the relationship between client and coach which is the greatest determining factor in terms of positive outcome for the client.
The coach also actively challenges the client in order to facilitate growth and learning. By using a range of tools, techniques, questions and exercises the coach helps the client to move beyond their difficulties. The coach pays particular attention to the client’s thinking patterns, limiting beliefs and the different lenses through which the client sees the world. A client’s actions can often be driven by unconscious ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’, and the coach helps the client to unearth these drivers of behaviour and make them conscious.