What makes coaching different to what you might be expecting?
A lot of people expect professional coaching to be like sports coaching – someone who will watch and listen, then tell us what to do to get better. To tell us where we’re going wrong, to give us methodologies, to make us better. But professional coaching is nothing like sports coaching.
Nor is it like line management, mentoring or training. Again, in all of those, someone else is telling us what to do differently based on what they know and their experience.
I've done a lot of these things throughout my career. But during my coaching training, I’ve had to unlearn many habits that made me good in those previous roles.
Habits I’ve had to break:
Interrupting silences
Trying to connect the dots for people
Giving people suggestions and ideas to try
Assuming I understand what someone is thinking or feeling
Thinking it’s my job to ‘fix’ them or the situation
What makes coaching different from other types of development support?
Coaching embraces the idea that the best way to help someone is not to rescue them. It’s to give them the space to think and work it out themselves, at their own pace. When it comes to how to do something, coaching helps them work out their own best route to get there.
In a work setting, that can feel risky and time consuming. We want things done well and quickly. We’d rather jump in and help than spend time helping someone do it themselves. But that only benefits you in the short term and it doesn’t benefit the person who’s trying to develop at all.
Coaching takes time, patience and curiosity from the coach, and vulnerability, honesty, and sometimes bravery from the client.
It requires the client to ask themselves the questions they have subconsciously been hiding from – or perhaps consciously!
“Why can’t I articulate myself properly?”, “What is it that makes me so scared of public speaking?”, “Who do I need to be?”, “How I am supposed to do that?”
The questions are different for everyone and the answer is usually hidden underneath an initial response, especially the responses we give when we’re so used to giving solutions not problems and trained to be positive not negative.
To ask ourselves questions we don’t know the answer to can be unnerving. But if we don’t ask them, we can’t answer them and it’s only when we answer them that we can start to progress and achieve what we want to.
If you want to know more about coaching, read the What is Coaching? page.