You’ve heard the phrase “coaching” or “life coach,” but if you don’t have a clear idea of what it means, you’re not alone.
Coaching first gained steam in the 1980s as “executive consulting,” when CEOs and other top managers found they needed a sympathetic, unbiased and supportive “other” to kick around ideas, talk about their concerns and generally let their hair down without worrying being judged or the topic of office gossip.
Since then, coaching has branched out beyond business to cover virtually every aspect of life — including health, sales, relationships, finances, public speaking and much more. In fact, due to the specialized skills that coaches bring to the relationship, coaching around any topic or issue is common.
Coaching comparisons
How does coaching compare to other skills or disciplines?
- Managing: Working with a group of people to achieve a common objective.
- Training: Teaching people how to do the things they don’t know how to do.
- Mentoring: Usually done by an industry expert who shares his or her knowledge with someone in the same field.
- Counseling: Helps people come to terms with issues that they cannot get beyond on their own.
- Coaching: Helps identify clients’ skills and capabilities, enabling them to use those abilities to help them be and do their best; takes the insights gained from counseling and helps create a plan to use those insights to move forward.
Coaches don’t need to have specific industry knowledge to work with clients. Rather, they work with anyone who is willing to make changes using a range of communication skills to help clients:
- Shift their perspectives
- Discover their own, different solutions to achieve their goals
- Challenge assumptions
- Reframe beliefs that are holding them back
- Implement new skills and strengthen existing ones
- Support changes
- Identify specific personal, business or professional goals
- Be accountable to their own goals and objectives
- Focus
Action-based: Clients do their own work
Coaching is movement-oriented and action-based. Clients do their own work. While a coach can help a client prepare for a job interview, for example, she cannot do the interview.
All conversations with a coach are confidential, offering an ongoing, supportive, non-judgmental relationship within which the client can succeed. She brings no preset expectations or limiting beliefs that clients may find in their personal relationships.
Because coaching is holistic, what the client sees as an issue in one area of his life impacts the others; the coach and client work together to address all issues.
Virtually everyone can benefit from coaching. It’s about their willingness to invest in themselves and do the work to get to where they want to go.
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Are you interested in a free, confidential, one-hour coaching session to get the feel of the experience? Call Jackie Harder at 305/451-9295 or email Jackie@Key-Dynamics.com to set up an appointment.