What is coaching? What types of coaching are there? When is best to use it? Find the answer to these and other questions below
I love coaching. I love coaching and being coached (although the latter can be a bit uncomfortable sometimes; learning about yourself and facing your demons isn’t always pleasant). I think coaching is one of the most powerful development tools there is, and when used properly, it can help people grow to levels they couldn’t have achieved on their own.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion about what coaching is and isn’t. The fact that there are thousands of charlatans and scammers disguised as coaches doesn’t help one bit.
I have written about coaching before, but I recently realised that I had never written about its basics: what coaching is, its different types, when to use it, and so on. Today we will remedy this oversight, and we’ll finally delve into the fundamentals of coaching.
What is coaching?
Let’s start with the most fundamental question: what is it?
There are many definitions of coaching, so let’s take one from the most prestigious professional body dedicated to it, the International Coaching Federation (ICF). It defines it as follows:
“ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.
We all have goals we want to reach, challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfilment.”
“ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.
We all have goals we want to reach, challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfilment.”
International Coaching Federation
I would like to highlight some concepts from this definition. Coaching is a partnership between equals; the coach and coachee are at the same level. The coach may know a lot about coaching techniques, but they don’t know more about the client’s challenges. They both partner as equals to overcome those challenges and achieve some development goals.
Coaching is about maximising personal and professional potential. As we will see below, there are many different types of coaching. Some are more focused on the client’s personal life, others on the professional one, but they all endeavour to help the client achieve their goals and maximise their growth to reach their maximum potential.
When coaching, we coach to achieve specific goals and overcome concrete challenges. The coaching goals and challenges provide a structure to the coaching relationship and serve as a guide of where the process should take both the coach and coachee.
A coaching process is a goal-centred process, and as such, is future-oriented. The coach and client may talk about the past to bring some light on the present challenge, but their focus will always be on the future and what can be done in the present to achieve the desired future state.
Coaching vs mentoring
Coaching is often associated with mentoring, as they share many characteristics, but are different methodologies with different principles.
In mentoring, the relationship is a bit more unequal. The mentor is more experienced, more senior, or knows more about a specific topic than the mentee. Mentors guide their mentees through advice and sharing examples from their rich experiences. It is a more guided approach.
In a coaching relationship, they depart from an equal footing, and the coach accepts the coachee is the one who should find their own answers. The coach asks powerful questions, explores different perspectives, challenges limiting beliefs, and helps the coachee identify their blind spots, all in the name of helping the coachee find the best answers.
It is much more empowering this way. When the answer is given to you externally by an authority figure or someone more knowledgeable than you, you might accept that authority and internalise that learning. Still, more often than not, it will continue being something external to you. The solution was somehow imposed onto you, and it is more difficult for you to make it entirely yours. When you find your own answer, that answer or solution is yours, it usually works better for your problem, and you make it your own, so your buy-in and engagement with it will be much higher.
This empowerment will also allow you to grow and develop your problem-solving skills, self-confidence and a long list of positive attributes.
Mentoring is an excellent development methodology with a broad use case, and it should have its place in anybody’s development, but if we compare them, I believe coaching is the most powerful of the two.
Types of Coaching
One of the characteristics of coaching today is the sheer number of new coaches born every year, touching all aspects of life. There are life coaches, health coaches, relationship coaches, career coaches, executive coaches, leadership coaches, business coaches, team coaches, etc. There seems to be a type of coach for every walk of life. This makes it challenging to find the right coach sometimes.
The principles are the same, but with some specialisation, so the methodologies and techniques can change. Some, like leadership and business coaching, are focused on professional aspects, whereas others, like relationship and life coaching, touch upon the personal side of the client. This distinction is often meaningless, however. When an executive coach coaches a client, they are coaching the whole person, with both their professional and personal baggage. We are all human beings in all our facets, and if a coach wants to be successful, they must have a holistic approach.
The good thing about having so many types of coaching is that the clients will find the coaches best suited to help them solve their specific challenges. A good generic coach should be able to help their clients in any sort of situation, but the specialisation means the coach will be equipped with the most suitable techniques and approaches for the particular issue nagging the client.
A word of caution on the proliferation of coaches mentioned above. Nowadays, everybody seems to be a coach; some people call themselves coaches with little or no training. Be careful with these. Coaching a client is a big responsibility and a challenging task. If you are looking for a coach, make sure they have undergone the necessary training and have some experience. I recommend hiring only coaches certified by one of the big international coaching federations, such as the ICF or the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).
When to use coaching
Coaching is one of the most potent development methods there is. It helps coachees find answers to their problems, develop new skills and competencies, know themselves better, and gain self-confidence.
With so many different benefits and types of coaching, the applications of coaching are wide and varied. It can and should be used in very different situations.
It can be used in any situation where the client wants to gain self-awareness and self-knowledge. Due to its methodology, based on questioning and looking at things from different perspectives, it is ideal for identifying blind spots the coachee has about themselves. When coaching, the coach often acts as a mirror, reflecting what they perceive from the coachee and helping them learn new things about themselves.
Coaching is also an ideal tool to use when facing a big challenge, dilemma or problem, being stuck and unable to find a solution. It doesn’t work well for engineering problems for obvious reasons. Still, it is ideally suited for issues related to relationships, emotions, “soft skills”, and anything related to the big decisions of life.
The coaching types more associated with the professional area, such as executive coaching, leadership coaching or business coaching, will often focus on developing new competencies and skills or solving work-related problems. Coaching has traditionally been associated with leaders and has had an elitist whiff to it. Still, nowadays, its access is being democratised, and employees and managers at all levels of organisations are using it more and more to develop leadership competencies, face new challenges and grow into new roles.
We shouldn’t finish this section without talking about self-confidence, that elusive but all-important human characteristic. When you have enough self-confidence, everything seems to work out well for you, all pieces fall into their place, and life feels easy. When self-confidence isn’t there, everything becomes more difficult, obtaining good results gets hard, and it is easy to enter into a vicious circle of ever worse results and lower self-confidence.
A coach can help a coachee leave the low self-confidence trap. They won’t do it by acting as a cheerleader and telling them how great they are (this is the image some people have of coaches, but it isn’t real), but by helping them know themselves better, identify their strengths and development areas and work on them.
When you identify your blind spots, you know yourself really well, and you know you have shortcomings, as we all do, but that it is possible to work on them and overcome them, it is difficult to remain with low self-confidence for long.
It is a long way, but it is a journey that can be travelled in company. You can figuratively hold hands with your coach and walk the path together.
Put a coach in your life
I will always extol the virtues of coaching, of course. I started this post saying I loved coaching, didn’t I? I am a coach, so this was to be expected.
Still, I hope I have been able to transmit to you, dear reader, why coaching can be beneficial or helpful, regardless of your job, personal situation, or moment in life you are in. It can be conducive to gaining self-knowledge and achieving your personal or professional objectives.
Have you ever used coaching? If so, what did you think about it? If you disagree with anything I said, please leave a comment, as I’d love to hear your opinion and get a different perspective.
If you haven’t used it, why not? Many affordable options are available today, and it is a worthwhile investment. Think about the goals you have in life and what you need to learn and do to achieve them. You can probably do it alone, but if you allow me to give you some advice (even if we coaches don’t usually give it!), go and try a coach, and you’ll see the results. You can thank me later.
Read more: How Coaching Exercises Can Help You Develop into a Successful Future Leader
2 comments
I agree that there is much value to both being a coach and being coached, I recently came across a TED talk about a surgeon that recognised coaching as a tool that can deliver exceptional value to avoid complacency that comes with established professional competence; which in their case can cost lives. If the most experienced and successful athletes are accompanied by a coach, why shouldn’t we?
Thanks Chiara, great comment! I haven’t seen any surgeon using coaching services, but as you said, it can be helpful for anybody and any profession.