Coaching is a conversation-based approach to moving someone from where they are to where they want to be.
Along the way coaching creates clarity of purpose and direction, challenges limiting beliefs and self-talk and encourages the client to move towards successful resolution of their issues, challenges and opportunities.
Coaching is a journey of reflection, discovery and self-awareness combined with action, motivation and goal orientation.
It is unique in its focus on solutions over problems within the framework of personal discovery. Neither fully reflective nor fully active, it has a rare quality as a pragmatic, results led journey of self-exploration.
Coaching very often gets confused with mentoring, consultancy, counselling, therapy and training currently. And yet, where coaching shares an area of common focus with another intervention it is also fundamentally different from that intervention on another way – so to continue the comparison, although coaching and consulting share a common focus on solutions, coaching arrives at the solution in a non-advisory way where consulting relies heavily on the expert guidance of the consultant.
So Coaching is the unique combination of being solutions focused, action-oriented, future-focused, non-advisory, facilitative, collaborative and non-expertise driven that makes coaching the thing that it is.
So, we now know what coaching is and what it isn’t – so the next question is:
What would you use it for?
In a nutshell, we can say you would use coaching to unblock someone’s potential and the Coach supports the client to take the action needed to make the change happen. The change itself is ultimately down to the client.
So, to answer the question “what does coaching achieve?”, we can say it achieves “self-initiated change”.
Coaching is all about positive change. Think of it this way, if no change occurred as a result of coaching, then it has not been effective.
