The best way to answer that question is, firstly, by explaining what coachingisn’t.
A coach isn’t a consultant. A consultant is somebody who helps with the day-to-day running of your business, or who is parachuted in to solve a specific business issue. They will usually have an expertise in their clients’ field of work and they’re sometimes brought in to be the ‘bad guy’ who makes the tough internal decisions the client doesn’t want to make.
For example, a consultant will look at the client’s processes and, if they’re not working, they’ll instigate whatever’s required to get the business back on track.
A coach isn’t a mentor. Like a consultant, a mentor is – usually – an expert in their client’s field who’s brought in to give the client industry-specific support and teach them the skills to become more successful in their job.
For example, an inexperienced restaurant owner may hire an experienced restaurant owner as a mentor because they’ve already achieved what the newbie is trying to do, they’ll have the knowledge of what’s necessary, and they’ll know the pitfalls to avoid.
A coach is entirely different.
A coach doesn’t need to know anything about your job or the industry you work in. A coach is focused on unlocking their client’s full potential by teasing out what the client already knows and identifying the traits and abilities the client may have forgotten: latent skills, talents, and ways of thinking that will positively change and improve how they perform in their role.
Unlike a consultant, a coach doesn’t enforce changes – a coach gives their client the confidence to make their own changes and find their own solutions by accessing the qualities that are already inside them. Unlike a mentor, a coach doesn’t provide a roadmap of what to do and what not to do – a coach asks the kind of searching questions that will lead their clients to find the answers they didn’t realise they already know.
To be honest, I prefer to think of myself as a questioner rather than a coach because many people have negative associations with coaching and the subject of coaching often gets a bad rap.
Why is that? There are a few reasons. If you don’t understand what coaching is, and you’re not open to the value you can gain from it, all this talk of ‘unlocking your unrealised potential’ can either sound a little bit New Agey (it isn’t), a little bit uncomfortable and psychoanalytic (it isn’t that either; no good coach will ever adopt a bad Sigmund Freud accent and tell you all your problems started because you were once frightened by a duck wearing an Elvis Presley jumpsuit) or a little bit like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs (which no coach would ever do unless they’re on very good terms with your grandmother.)
There’s also the problem that, in the not-too-distant past, workplace coaching often had connotations that it wasn’t really for your benefit, it was because you weren’t doing your job the way your boss wanted it to be done and if the ‘coaching’ didn’t work bad things might happen further down the line. For the record, that kind of coaching probably wasn’t coaching at all, but more a confused mix of consulting, mentoring, and reinforcing what you already knew how to do with a few tweaks thrown in. It was something that was imposed upon you rather than something you saw as positive to your own development and it’s no wonder that many of the people who experienced it are so cynical when they hear the word ‘coaching’ now.
It also doesn’t help that, because coaches don’t have to understand the job you’re doing in order to coach you effectively, the people who are being coached can sometimes have the “How can you coach me when you don’t know what I do?” attitude.
In order to address that, this feels like a good time to throw in a sporting analogy.
Even people who are cynical of coaching will know that all successful sportspeople and sports teams have coaches. Without those coaches, they’d probably never have won all the trophies and medals that are glittering on their shelves. But, more often than not, their coaches were never superstar athletes in their own right.
Arsene Wenger never played football beyond semi-professional level but he studied coaching and eventually became Arsenal FC’s longest-serving and most successful manager. Likewise, Jose Mourinho’s footballing career was relatively short and unremarkable until he realised he was a better coach than a player, which led to him working alongside Bobby Robson and eventually managing some of the greatest teams in the world. As both a coach and a manager he was known for his ability to inspire his players, communicate his vision, and keep them united through success and adversity. “A coach must be everything,” Mourinho said, “A tactician, motivator, leader, methodologist and psychologist.” The fact that he’d never achieved greatness as a player didn’t stop him from instilling greatness in the players he worked with.
Or let’s look at the world of golf. Hank Haney coached Tiger Woods between 2004 and 2010 and, during that spell, Woods won six majors and 31 PGA Tour titles. And yet, although Haney was an excellent amateur golfer, he never played on the PGA Tour. Even as a teenager his focus was always on coaching. In fact,one of Haney’s most famous comments about golf coachingencapsulates what all coaching should be about; “My philosophy as a teacher is to teach my students to become their own best teacher by getting them to understand the flight of the ball and how it relates to the swing.”
Finally, let’s quickly mention Timothy Gallwey’s famous book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ which, when it was originally published in 1974, quickly revolutionised thinking about coaching and demonstrated how coaching in sport is no different to coaching in business, or in life. “For the teacher or coach, the question has to be how to give instructions in such a way as to help the natural learning process of the student and not interfere with it,” Gallwey wrote, advocating that once we know how to distract our inner voice and trust our mind and body to take over, everything we do (from hitting a tennis ball to achieving our business goals) will be improved immediately. A good coach will show you how to do that, and they’ll know the right questions to ask to raise your awareness, empower change, and guide you towards achieving your personal best...
Read more: https://hillcoachingcompany.co.uk/2019/08/what-is-coaching-what-makes-it-unique/
