What is coaching?

Coaching is a guided development where the coach helps you through acting listening and the power of questions comes to your own conclusion. You have to get your identifiable answers. These are the best answers because you are the expert for yourself. COACH acts as an accountability partner to empower clients to choose and follow their success path responsibly to unleash their full potential.

According to Denial Goleman, there are six leadership styles, and Coaching is one of them. Coaching is a future leadership style. John Whitmore says, “Coaching is an unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than to teach them”.

The question is so often asked, Harvard Business Review did a survey on it, which brought me to this point. As the founder of one of the leading platforms for coach training, I wanted to clear the air. Coaching is a new profession which is why there is a slight confusion about:

• What it really is?
• What are the rules?
• What is right?
• What is wrong?

Firstly, if you ever have to explain Coaching to a friend, a family member, or a random person on the street, here is how you can explain i.e., a coach is someone who helps you imagine a greater possibility for yourself and then supports you in achieving it. 

What do coaches do?

As coaches, our job is to help our clients dream a greater possibility for themselves and then help them in whatever way possible to achieve it. Coaching often gets mixed up with the more established professions like therapy or consulting. 

So to make Coaching really clear, let’s understand: 

What is consulting?   

What is therapy? 

Consulting, for one, is the art of looking at analytical data and being able to make recommendations to your clients to be able to get a particular result or to solve a particular problem. Don Cheadle explains it… Consulting is like dissing a really pretty girl that she’ll want you more. Consulting is a multi-billion dollar industry and has helped companies for decades now. 

Therapists, on the other hand, deal with past life trauma. They aim to create behavioral change by working with the past life events of their clients. Therapy has been long recommended to deal with phobias or any dysfunctional behaviors, addictions, and such. So that’s consulting and therapy. 

Coaching is not:

• Coaching is neither of them but borrows from both of them. 
• Coaching doesn’t require you to be a therapist or a psychological expert. 
• It also doesn’t require you to become an analytical genius or outrageously successful.
•  Coaching is not telling.

Coaching focuses on the Individual’s future. It opens a conversation about the possibilities that lie in the future. It works with the client in being able to see this possibility; it then uses the talent of the client to create a path to get to this possibility, further helping the client to make this possibility a reality. This is done through various techniques that are borrowed from therapeutic practices, consulting practices, training practices, and philosophy. 

A coach is sometimes a teacher who would share philosophical insight through metaphors, stories, and case studies to inspire insight into the clients’ minds. A coach sometimes is a consultant who would ask questions and ask the clients to go deeper to be able to find that path that will take them from their current reality to the possibility.

A coach sometimes the therapist who inspires behavioral change, so the client can keep making progress to create a better future for themselves. To explain this further, I want to explain to you a conversation sample that explains coaching a little bit more. 

Girl: It’s a mess. .You must feel horrible. You’ve lost everything, your father, your tribe, your best friend. 

Boy: Thank you for summing that up. Why couldn’t I have killed that dragon when I found him in the woods? Would it have been better for everyone?

Girl: Yep, the rest of us would have done it, so why didn’t you? Why didn’t you? 

Boy: I don’t know. I couldn’t. 

Girl: That’s not an answer. 

Boy: Why is this so important to you all of a sudden?  

Girl: Because I want to remember what you say right now. 

Boy: Oh, for the love of…I was a coward. I was weak. I wouldn’t kill a dragon. 

Girl: You said, wouldn’t that time. 

Boy: Okay, whatever, I wouldn’t! 300 years and I’m the first Viking who wouldn’t kill a dragon 

Girl: First to ride one, though. So…

Boy: I wouldn’t kill him because he looked as frightened as I was. I looked at him, and I saw myself. 

Girl: I bet he’s really frightened now. What are you going to do about it?  

Boy: Probably something stupid 

Girl: Good, but you’ve already done that. 

Boy: Then, something crazy! 

Girl: That’s more like it. 

In this conversation, you might have noticed that the protagonist comes to a conclusion by answering a few questions. It’s a simplistic view, but it explains the idea of Coaching. That is what we do as coaches. That’s what Coaching is. We show up for our clients, we open up the space to create possibilities or show them the possibilities that lie ahead of them, then we support them in approaching those possibilities and creating those possibilities, and live a life that they always desired.