What is coaching?
Posted on March 11, 2024 by Diana Liminovic, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
What, exactly, is this mysterious topic everyone seems to be talking about?
As I have begun to share my coaching journey with others, many have reached out with a surprising number of questions (it would appear that coaching is not as straightforward a topic as I initially believed), such as “What, exactly, is coaching?” “What are the benefits of coaching?” “Who needs a ‘coach’?” “Who are you specifically looking to coach?” and so on and so forth. You may, in fact, be asking the very same questions. So let’s dive into it, starting with the question number one: “What is coaching?”
What is coaching? Imagine the following equation:
Desires / Goals + Mindset – Roadblocks + Plan + Action = Happiness / Fulfillment
This equation, simple as it seems, does a pretty good job at laying out what the coaching process is all about. The coach’s responsibility, first and foremost, is to guide and help the client discover their own unique “recipe” in how to achieve a lasting state of “happiness,” however one defines it. The coach is the agent to assist you in looking at your life from a new perspective and, together, help create a map that clearly lays out how to get from where you are right now to where you want to be. Not only that, the coach also ensures you have the right set of tools at your disposal to enable you to get from here to there.
Benefits of coaching? Consider “Rebecca,” a highly accomplished professional. Before coaching, she would dread waking up each morning. As soon as she opened her eyes, a strong sense of stagnation and lack of motivation hit her like a brick of rocks. She was not sure what had happened; she had always been a “high achiever,” a person with clear goals, a great social life and many hobbies outside of work. To many, she seemed to lead the perfect life, however, as of late, she seemed to have lost the “fire” to fully embrace life.
Post coaching, Rebecca was up well before the alarm was set to ring. Stagnation had given way to purpose; dread to excitement. Her days were now defined by energy—through exercising, meditating, eating well-balanced meals, and—most importantly—having created a plan to pursue a career that genuinely resonated with her core beliefs. Now, she could not wait to get started with her day each morning; in fact, she could barely fall asleep at night due to excitement about what the next day would bring. She had achieved a state of balance in her life: work, hobbies, social life and the need for rejuvenation operated together like a finely tuned symphony orchestra. Rebecca was finally “the Maestro” of her own life.
Coaching, thus, had provided Rebecca with the tools to explore her values and passions. This, in turn, helped her to gain clarity on the goals and routines that brought her genuine joy, creating a renewed sense of purpose and motivation from the moment she woke up in the morning to the moment she closed her eyes at night.
Who needs a coach? Anyone, really, who possesses a burning desire to finally get closer to their dreams by being in charge of their emotions and mental state (and not the other way around); shift their mindset in a way that will impact all things in life, big and small; and—most importantly—go from a state of planning and thinking to what matters the most: discovering that first little step and finally taking action. Whether you are a professional seeking a healthier work-life balance, an entrepreneur getting lost in an infinite pool of potential business ideas, or a new parent juggling the duties and responsibilities between parenthood and your career, coaching can help you not just to merely survive in juggling all of the above, but to truly thrive while doing so.
…and now most importantly…
Whom will I coach? My objective is to work with individuals who genuinely are looking to make a significant shift in their lives and who are willing to make an effort and are ready to take ownership of their happiness. Individuals who seek to achieve a harmonious balance in all aspects of their lives without the apparent need to compromise one area for another. Simply put, the goal I have for my clients is to help them wake up in the morning with a strong feeling of excitement and motivation to get going with their day (like what happened with Rebecca). Clients for whom the “snooze” button is a distant thing of the past.
