Coaching is a creative partnership with your client, focusing on designing and implementing specific, meaningful changes in your client’s personal and/or professional life.
1. Solution Focused
Moving your client towards their desired future outcomes, instead of concentrating on past experiences or reasons for present dissatisfaction.
2.Systematic
Understanding the holistic nature of your client, seeing how positive change can fit into their bigger picture.
3.Client Centered
Trusting your client’s inner resources and skills, respecting their agenda and future outcomes. Coaching is an advice free zone.
4.Action Oriented
Pursuing change in specific, inspired steps that lead to fundamental shifts in attitude, behavior and habit formation.
What is the difference between …
Counseling vs. Coaching
Unlike therapists and counselors, coaches don’t focus on the childhood or past experiences that might be the root of the way a person lives or feels. Instead they help their clients get clear on what they want in the future, why they want it, and how they are going to achieve it
Consulting vs. Coaching
Consultants diagnose the needs of an organization or individual and offer their own solutions based on their specialized expertise to ‘fix’ the problem; solutions which they often implement for the client as well. Coaches use tools and processes to help clients to generate their own solutions and then hold them accountable for following through.
Sport Coach vs Coaching
Someone new to coaching might hear the word “coach” and think football, but sports coaches generally are in charge, setting the goals and the path to victory. Teaching, correcting, and managing are all skills a sports coach would use. Professional life, business or executive coaching is the opposite; it’s the client who sets the goals.
Let’s get specific…
Coaching provides a safe and supportive environment that produces on-going mutual respect and trust. As a coach, you will learn how to quickly build rapport with your clients using simple yet powerful tools such as backtracking. Backtracking allows you to clarify your understanding of new information, while offering the client greater awareness of their thoughts.
Coaching goes way beyond just hearing what people are saying; it stretches into syntax, tone of voice, and body language. As a coach, you will learn how to view the world through your client’s perspective, to understand the meaning of what they say in the context of their values and goals. Active listening is an incredibly important step towards better communication skills.
Coaching is only about moving forward, not looking backward. As a coach, you will use open-ended questions everyday to evoke discovery, insight, commitment and action that moves your clients forward. Open-ended questioning is a simple concept that shifts your conversations from plain and boring to expansive and thought provoking.
Coaching opens the door to a new, extremely powerful kind of goal setting. As a coach, you will become outcome orientated, always evaluating if your client is on track and taking action to reach their goal. Coaches use S.M.A.R.R.T (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, relevant and timely) goal setting to ensure total understanding and accountability.
Coaching systematically explores specific concerns and opportunities that are central to the client’s agreed goals. As a coach, you will help clients prioritize issues and guide them through difficult decisions. Remember, coaching does NOT mean giving advice. Real coaches empower their clients to identify positive action on their own. Mastery of designing actions opens a whole new dimension in the way you create long-term success.
Coaching instills long-term positive change. As a coach, you will use precise time management tools to promote your client’s self-discipline and hold them accountable for the results of intended actions. Changing attitudes and behavior to reach agreed goals is significantly easier when accountability is present.
Source: Erickson.edu
