Demystifying Coaching

Coaching is really about a conversation that explores and probes. It is not always about “goal-setting” and achieving per se. It can be, but it is always about a result and an outcome for the times you spend with your coach. A great coach can get right into the heart of a conversation and unpack your thinking styles and reflect it to you in a way that gives you a better insight into yourself to generate the change you are looking for.

Coaching is about getting into your higher level of thinking, where you store your meanings and values. It is about helping you explore how you think, how you reason, what motivates you,  what you want, how you could do it and the action that can be taken to achieve it. It can also be about behavior change, perception change or changing how you operate in the world. The possibilities are endless.

According to Michael Hall, an Executive Coach and author of Executive Coaching; one of the most obvious conversation is the clarity conversation. This is about getting clear aspects of yourself that you were previously unaware of or needed more understanding on. There is the decision conversation, where you explore an aspect of your life or business and make a decision from the coaching session. There is the planning conversation which could be about career change following the clarity conversation about what really motivates you. There is the experiencing conversation, where you may wish to try out and practice internal resources needed to reach your goal, for example, confidence, conviction or assertiveness. Then there is the change conversation, where you want to work on changing aspects of your thinking to become a higher performer or to improve your social and emotional awareness of what is going on inside you. And for those who love a challenge, there is the confrontation conversation, where you can be coached on your blind spots and resistance to move forward. The last one is for those with a strong sense of self, who can take that hard look at themselves and not shrink back, but embrace it and use it as a catalyst for transformation.

During the coaching process the coach is able to track the many layers and patterns of your thinking and raise it to a whole new level of awareness about ‘how you think about what you focus on.' A coach is an expert in the process of coaching to an outcome, using a range of quality tools. The tools are used to uncover thinking styles and perceptions of experience, values and meanings. They help the coach to uncover the motivation to change, explore levels of performance operating and the blocks to higher performance. Coaching is therefore highly-systematic and when combined with a flexible style of coaching it can really transform how people perceive external events and behaviors.

Coaching is always about thinking things out in a way that makes progress and where you take action on what you have discussed with your coach. Coaching could be on career change, business decisions or overcoming challenging experiences. Coaching is always about exploring the inner game you play and how you attend to that on the outside. There is no prescription to coaching and therefore there are plenty of possibilities on where you can take your coaching conversation.

I would like to add that Coaches are not experts in your life, business or relationships. What they have is experience and awareness of many areas of life. At the heart of coaching, the coach is an expert in the process of the conversation and can offer many levels of coaching, be it life coaching, business coaching, career coaching or executive coaching. 

I hope this clarifies any misconceptions that you may have had about coaching...keep following!