What is Coaching and Is It for Me?

This is the question I often get whenever I introduce someone to this field. In my personal life, I have been through therapy. In my career, I have acquired units and had training in Counseling, done consulting jobs, and trained as a Coach. In my exposure in these different fields, I can say that these fields have similar elements, but also offer different approaches in serving its clients. In this post, I’ll share frameworks and provide my perspective which would be helpful to explain what Coaching is.

Across all services -- coaching, counseling, consulting, therapy, mentoring – clients seek help from professionals because they have an intense desire to overcome a challenge or solve a problem. However, these fields differ in terms of time direction and the communication structure and how these relate to the client’s experience.

From a time perspective, Counselling and Therapy investigates past events in the client’s life to understand how these affect them in their present moment which will eventually help them manage their emotions or thoughts moving forward. On the other hand, Coaching and Consulting or Mentoring acknowledges the role of the past, but moves quickly and focuses more on understanding the client’s present predicament in order to help them move towards their desired future.

From a communication structure standpoint, Therapy and Consulting or Mentoring both acknowledge that the professional (the therapist/mentor/consultant) is the expert about both content and the process. Therefore, the statements usually used in the conversations are mostly declarative. Counselling and Coaching both acknowledge that, although the counsellor and the coach are the experts in terms of the process, the client is the expert in the content, their story. As such, statements used in conversations are mostly interrogative and highlights questions.

In summary, given this framework, Coaching is helping clients achieve a desired future by asking them powerful questions to provoke insight and inspire change.

Another good insight about coaching is provided by a survey done by Diane Coutu and Carol Kauffman for the Harvard Business Review in 2009. According to their survey, coaching borrows some techniques and methodologies from both the fields of consulting and therapy wherein a combination from these fields focus on the future, fosters performance, and help clients discover their own path.

Is Coaching for Me?

Coaching traces its roots back to that of sports coaching and is largely linked to motivation and improving performance. Since then, coaching has evolved in different contexts such as in business, finance, health, organizational development, and personal development. Even so, they all, more or less, cover the same base – that of crafting motivation and improving the client’s mindset in order to reach their highest potential. One thing that I would also like to highlight is that coaching offers a space for the exploration of problems and challenges which clients currently face and identify areas for clarity and growth instead of diagnosis and treatment.

If these path resonates to what you need at this moment, feel free to explore with me what coaching has to offer.

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