What is Coaching

Posted on September 14, 2021 by Supreet Singh, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

What is coaching?

To quote Lewis Carroll in his book, ‘Alice in Wonderland’,

Alice asks the Cheshire Cat: ‘What road do I take?’
‘Well, where are you going?’
‘I don’t know’
‘Then it does not matter. If you do not know where you are going then any road will get you there’

A Coach allows the Client to go on a path of self-delivery and decipher the best way to achieve success.

ICF defines coaching as

Partnering with Clients in a thought provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.
The coaches honor that client is an expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole.
The coach’s responsibility is to
a) Discover, Clarify, and align with what the clients want to achieve
b) Encourage client’s self-discovery
c) Elicit client – generated solutions and,
d) Hold client responsible strategies and accountable.

This process helps client dramatically improve their outlook on work and life, while improving their leadership skills and unlocking their potential.

Coaching is about asking questions in order to help the clients find his or her own answers – without giving advice.

Coaching is a very powerful tool of communication. When used effectively and appropriately, it raises your awareness; it’s like a laser on your thinking that cuts through a maze of confusion and brings froth, hitherto, unknown ideas and options.
The bottom line is that coaching is about being a catalyst for positive change in a way that’s appropriate for individuals, helping them to the very best they can be- which has a knock on effect for the organization, on teams and organizational performance.

Coaching is not telling someone – What to do; it’s not giving advice or providing solutions. It is not the same as mentoring, training or consulting.

It is informative to understand what coaching is not and why-
a) Therapy – therapy is dealing with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship; whereas coaching believes that the client is creative, resourceful and whole. Coaching encourages the client on a path of self-discovery, it elicits solutions from the clients only and then holds the client responsible for the execution of action points.
b) Consulting – Consultants are generally expected to provide multiple options or multiple solutions to the issues facing organizations. Sometimes there are also, expected to implement changes and show proof. The underlying thought is that the Consultants / consulting organization are solution provider and they have better knowledge / expertise in the relevant field. Coaching on the other hand believes that client has all the knowledge and is an expert in his or her field of experience. The client is not only expected to start a self-discovery process, but also come out with a set of innovative solutions through a process of self-discovery. The client is also held accountable for the execution of SMART goals.
c) Mentoring – A mentor is an expert who provides wisdom and guidance based on his or her own experience. Mentoring includes coaching, but it is not the other way round. In other words, coaching is a subset of mentoring. Coaching does not include advising or counselling and focused instead on individuals or groups setting their own objectives and executing them.
d) Training – In a training program the Learning goals are set by the trainer or organization. In coaching too, the goals are set, however, it is set by the individuals. Coach only helps in self-discovery so that the goals could be identified by the client. The learning process in training is linear, and coincides with the path defined by the learning objective. Coaching the learning is driven by clients’ self-discovery. In training the underline is a transfer of knowledge from trainer to the participants; however, in coaching client is considered, whole and it is expected that he has all the solutions within himself/ herself. Coaching only helps in the process of self-discovery to elicit innovative solutions.
e) Athletic Development – Though a sport metaphor is generally used- professional coaching is very different from Coaching. Though Athletic development may include coaching as an element of creating a buy in by setting smaller goals, but the other way round is not true. A professional coach is expected to have more knowledge in the chosen field and is expected to guide and directs the behavior of individual and teams. Professional coaches may use some coaching methods but the expectation is to use their expertise and experience to improve the performance of their ward/s. Also, professional coaching may not be focused on behaviors that are being executed poorly or incorrectly. Instead the focus is to identify opportunity for development based on individual strengths and capabilities.

Thus Coaching is a client led self-discovery process. The coach is expected to help the client understand the issues / problems and concerns at hand. Work with the client to understand is issue and therefore, come up with the innovative solutions on their own and then create SMART actionable. The actionable are then expected to be executed by the client themselves.

Coaching does not include – transfer of knowledge, external setting of goals / objectives, linear learning process, and an external agent who is expected to guide, cajole, push, review execution of action plans

Golden rules of Coaching

a) The solution to Client’ s issues lie within the client – This may sound unusual- what it means is that
The client is treated as whole and complete and
Background of the issue and the solution is known to the client, and coach’s job is to ask the right questions so that through the process of self-discovery the client provides the solution.

b) Coaching is founded on Trust and Confidentiality – Coaching can be successful, only if the client walks down the path of self-discovery – for this the client must be able to share all information – in conscious or hidden in subconscious mind. To be able to do so, without any hesitation, the client must have full confidence in the confidentiality of the information. Thus coach must maintain the Trust and confidentiality of all the information shared during the assignment.

Coaching Models

GROW Coaching Model

One of the most used and well known model originally identified by Sir John Whitmore, has 4 stages Goal, Reality, Options and Wrap-up.

Goal – At the outset of any coaching assignment, it is imperative to establish what client wants to achieve – short term or/ and medium or/ and Long terms goals. Just as success in life can be measured when the goal is set and achieved, so also, is the case in coaching.

Reality – Once the goal is established, the next step is to understand where is the client wrt the goal, what steps he has taken so far to achieve the goal – what is the success they have achieved, what are their current level skill, knowledge, attributes and what is the reality of what is expected out of them.
This step builds the awareness of current strengths, levels, etc. and the gap they need to fill to achieve their goal.
This is the second step in the learning process – being Conscious of Unconscious – i.e. know what they don’t know.
This will set them up to start the process of self-discovery, by giving them a jolt, provide them of the length/ difficulty of journey.

Options – this is the step that coach helps the client to look at all the Options on table. The client will come with a lot of options that he may have tried or known the others have used and would like to walk on the same well-trodden path.
The Coach is however, expected to stretch the client, through various techniques/ tools/ Exercises to ferret out Innovative Solutions, that may not even be considered viable in past.
The Client is expected to think freely – not only use conscious/ logical mind to put across what is considered to be safe and also touted as successful steps used by others or in past; but also use his subconscious mind to identify – risky/ un-thought off / even unviable solutions. The idea is to think out of box and put all the solutions on the table.
This step is important, as the client is forced to accept some ideas that he felt may not be acceptable as viable solutions, and as the solutions came from within client’ s self, the buy in is high.

Wrap up – Also known as Way Forward or Will. This is the stage where action plans are drawn up, with timelines. At this point in time Coach is also, expected to understand the commitment level of the client and make sure to change the action plans in case, the commitment levels are low.

The TGROW Coaching

This is a variation of GROW model, adapted by Miles Downey. The 4 stages are same, however T stands for Topic. This is the long term goal or Topic that the client wants to discuss for the assignment of multiple session.

OSKAR Coaching Model

This is a solution based approach- the coaching session is based on solutions rather than problems – adapted from ‘The Solutions Focus ’ by Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow.

At its core the idea is to focus on solutions rather than problems, focus on building strengths rather so that it over powers weakness if any. By directing the energy towards the solution and focus on strength the client feels empowered and energized.

Integral to solution focused approach is a set of SIMPLE principles, and a good coach willing to take the solution based approach to help the client and adopting them in the session. The other USP of this coaching is that the solutions can be achieved very quickly with asking of just a few solution focused questions rather than lengthy problem analysis.

Outcome
In this model the Coach needs to confirm if the client really is a customer for change. At the outset you are also clarifying:
• what your client wants to achieve – this may be in the long, medium and short term
• what they want to achieve from the session itself and how they will know it has been useful to them
• The ‘future perfect’ in other words the perfect scenario desired by your client. At this point you might want to ask the miracle question which really helps the client strongly visualize and in detail their desired outcome.

Scaling
Once client has a clear picture of their desired outcome you can then establish where they are already in relation to this.
E.g. On a scale of 1 – 10, where 1 represents x and 10 represents y, where are you in relation to this goal.
Know How
Build on this foundation by establishing what positives- What internal and external support the client has to achieve the current rating. This stage builds up awareness of the Strengths and thus helps building confidence.
Affirm and Action
Affirming – this is about providing positive reinforcement of what you have heard…reflecting back positive comments about some of the keys strengths and attributes your client has revealed e
Action – Create a SMART Goal
Review
Final stage of the OSKAR coaching model reviewing progress against actions plans agreed. The emphasis is on reviewing the positives:
• What is better?
• What did you do that made change successful?
• What do you think will change next?