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What IS Coaching

(and some tips on choosing a good coach...)

 

'You can't change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods.'

Buckminster Fuller

 

What is coaching? The bottom line on this is that if you ask six different people then you will get six different answers. So I will give you my perspective on coaching and how to choose a good coach.

 

Broadly speaking, coaching is a means of improving individual performance and helping the individual utilize more of his or her potential. Now as I appreciate, that definition is a bit like saying that medicine is for making people 'well' so let me clarify what I mean. Just as there are those in the healing professions who use acupuncture and herbs, and those who use professionally tested drugs, there are coaches who use different psychological models for helping people achieve growth goals. And as there are healers specializing in different areas of health - literally from head to toe - there are coaches specialising in everything from dating to yoga.

 

Coaching can help with all of the following:

 

• Improvement in performance

 

• Breakthrough in limitation

 

• Activation of higher level skills and understandings

 

• Fulfillment of hopes, dreams, visions and goals

 

• Becoming more resourceful

 

• Further development of self as a person

 

• Transformation from an old way of operating to an entirely new way

 

• Etc

 

However, and there is a BIG however... Just as not all medicines are equally effective, neither are all coaches. And just as the effectiveness of a medicine is judged by the effectiveness of the changes it facilitates, so a coach can be evaluated by how effectively he facilitates a change. Common sense, right?

 

But what is at the heart of a coach's core effectiveness is his understanding of how the change process works. Why is this important? Because from the individual right up to a big corporation there are specific and yet common factors that affect the extent to which a change will take place. There are certainly coaches that are very good at doing what they do, but if you ask them how they do it, they don't know. And then there are those who just dive in with a grab-bag of techniques and shot-gun you with them until they get a hit.

 

There is an art to coaching, but also a science. Below are a brief summary of the factors involved. Read them, and if you want to, ask yourself 'which of these do I recognise as being involved in a significant change that I have made in my life?' Don't worry if you don't tick them all because some may have been unconsciously used - and that is the point. A coach who understands how to use these factors will always be able to evaluate where in the change process you are - and work accordingly.

 

• Is the pain of keeping things the same great enough to want to change?

 

• Is there a compelling vision to move towards?

 

• Do I understand how things currently work, and why they need to change?

 

• Have I made a decision to change?

 

• Do I have a new inner plan for how things need to be in order to make the changes I want?

 

• Am I translating this into visible behaviours and practicing the changes I want to make?

 

• Am I able to reinforce and count the 'new baby steps' as I demonstrate the new behaviours?

 

• Do I have a process for testing how 'solid' and durable my changes are?

 

Of course, a coach needs a variety of other skills centred around listening, questioning and empathising but the important thing about knowing this is that it enables the coach to investigate what mental structures will create change using the clients own personal resources (thoughts, feelings, beliefs, memories). The coach does NOT need to be an expert on the field he is coaching in but rather just have a basic familiarity with it because his job is to facilitate the answers to the questions above - which act together to create a change, they are the 'laws of change' so to speak which, like gravity, apply in most circumstances.

 

Furthermore, it is helpful (if not essential) that your coach comes armed with a set of assumptions about how basically psychologically healthy people operate: their strengths and where they focus their attentions. Many coaching models come out of therapy and contain ideas about how fragile people are, and how they resist change. If you want to improve yourself, take things to the next level and make your life better, do you want your coach to stroke your hand and think (or even worse, say) 'You poor little lamb? Who hurt you?'

 

No way! In coaching you need to search for 'truth' with a small 't' and that refers to the ideas you have bought into and regarded as being 'the way it is' in your mind.

 

Enlightenment consists not merely in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, but in making the darkness visible. The latter procedure is more difficult, and therefore, unpopular.

Carl Jung

 

Coaching also consists of helping you become aware of your mental 'blind spots' and sometimes, as the great therapist (oh, the irony) Fritz Perls said 'awareness, per se, is curative'. Any coach who wishes to help others become aware of their blind spots must first, 'take the beam out his own eye' (Matthew 7:5) and this is something that I have dedicated myself to doing for the past few years.

 

It is an ongoing process and it can be hard without someone prepared to point out the obvious things you yourself cannot see. You have probably had the experience of seeing someone who (to them) cannot see where they are going wrong. You may have even been able to help the person expose the self-deception, and the powerful other options that were available to them, leading them to new highly effective choices of action. A coach can do this in a way that a friend often cannot because our agenda is to help you make the change, not to hide you from painful truths you need to hear in order to enjoy unprecedented levels of growth.

 

In a way, coaching can be akin to helping bring a new life into the world and surprisingly the word 'matrix' actually means womb . A coach work in the matrix of the mind to form new ways of thinking and acting and it is not always comfortable but virtually always worthwhile. Coaching is about growth and transformation and like the butterfly we need to struggle to 'birth' out of the chrysalis of our old ways, but our wings become stronger in the process. If a coach cannot 'hold the space' and allow the new you to emerge out of the conversations that take place, if he 'cuts you out' then you might flap about because you have not developed the strength to fly in this new form.

 

This is where a coach needs to test whether a potential client has the strength to face him or herself. So if you are a person that knows for yourself that you are, then you have passed the first test!

 

Coaching also needs patience because both client and coach need to explore the construction of the particular problem and/or intended change. Radical changes can and sometimes do occur in one session but sometimes it takes time to find the leverage point. And then, as Archimedes said 'give me a long enough lever and I will move the world'. We find the leverage point and the whole world shifts.

 

At other times we need to just sit on the merry-go-round and go in circles re-visiting the issue from different angles. But the good thing is that each time you come back around you can notice something new, leading to the tipping point of the change.

 

And this is not the only place you'll notice the changes. As the place where the changes are seen will be seen on the outside, that is where you'll have the proof that you've changed - when you're actually doing the new behaviours which lead to the improved results you want in the first place.

 

The thing about the coaching relationship is that it is a bit like the way Morpheus described the Matrix to Neo. Nobody can really tell you what being in a coaching partnership is like, you have to see it for yourself just like you don't know what it is like to parachute or win an Olympic medal if you never have.

 

But you can still be curious...

 

Douglas Cartwright is a Meta-Coach who wants to help you Live Your Words. He has extensive training and experience in facilitating people to improve their performance. If the above article has interested you visit http://www.livingwords.net and contact us for your free introductory session to find out how we can serve YOU.