Coaching defined

The term 'coaching' has come to mean many different activities. Early use in the business world often carried a remedial connotation - people were coached because they were underperforming or their behaviour was unsatisfactory. Now coaching is more usually seen as a means of developing people within an organisation in order that they perform more effectively and reach their potential.

Professional Coaching is a partnership between a coach and an individual that supports the achievement of results, based on goals set by the individual. Through the process of coaching, individuals focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce their personally relevant results.

The individual chooses the focus of the ‘conversation’, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions as well as concepts and principles which can assist in generating possibilities, potential and actions. Through the coaching process the clarity that is needed to support the most effective actions is achieved.

Coaching accelerates the individual’s progress by providing greater focus and awareness of possibilities leading to more effective choices. Coaching concentrates on where individuals are now and what they are willing to do to get where they want to be in the future. Coaches recognise that results are a
matter of the individual’s intentions, choices and actions, supported by the coach’s efforts and applications of coaching skills, approaches and methods. The coaching process depends on the person being coached taking responsibility for taking action and making their own decisions, not on the coach providing solutions.

Coaching can be seen as a collaborative process in which clients discover answers for themselves through the coach’s use of questions.

There are four cornerstones to this approach:

1. The client is naturally creative, resourceful and whole.
2. Coaching addresses the client’s whole life.
3. The agenda comes from the client.
4. The relationship is a designed alliance.

Coaching presupposes that the client is not ‘broken’ – they work perfectly, and it’s not the coach’s responsibility to ‘fix’ them. The client is an expert on themselves and the skill of the coach, and their role, is in allowing the person to come up with their own solutions. This doesn’t mean that the coach brings nothing to the relationship – they have knowledge based theory, methods, exercises and questions that help the person move forwards. Nevertheless, the coach’s skills are based around processes, not solutions.

In essence, coaching has two main facets. First it is performance focused, which means it is concerned with helping individuals perform tasks to the best of their ability. Second, it is person-centred, which means that the individuals being coached are seen to have the important insights.