What is Coaching?

Coaching is about change, about making changes. A coach is a magician of change who takes the cards you have and help you to play your hand better, or sometimes to change the rules of the game, or find a better game. Changes come from a dream of something better. When we have achieved one dream, we look forward and dream again. There is always a dream beyone the dream.

Joseph O´connor & Andrea Leages

Coaching is unlocking a person´s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them. We are more like an acorn, which contains within it all the potential to be a magnificent oak tree. We need norishment, encouragement and the light to readh towrds, but the oaktreeness is already within.

John Whitmore

Coaching Definitions

Coaching is defined by the International Coach Federation as ´an ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fullfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Through the process of coaching, clients deepen their learning, imporve their performace, and enhance their quality of life.´

ICF goes on to describe the coaching sessions, ´In each meeting, the client chooses the focus of conversations, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions. This interaction creates clearity and moves the client into action. Coaching accelerates the clent´s progress by providing greater focus and awareness of choice. Coaching concentrates on where clents are today and what they are willing to do to get to where they want to be tomorrow.´

 

The major differnce between masterful training, conselling, therapy, consulting or mentoring and masterful coaching can be described quite simply. The coach does not have the answers. The coach does not provide expertise. A coach operates from the presupposition that the clients has all the resources, including the ability to discover and utilise resources.

Ian McDermott & Jan Elfline

ICF Description of Coaching

• Coaches help their clients to build on their natural strengths.
• Coaches believe that the client is creative and resouceful. 
• Coaches beleve the client is resposible for doing the work to achieve the results he or she wants. 
• Coaches look for how all the parts of a person´s life work together.

The coaching realtionship moves the client toward an increased awareness of their choice. The coach encourages the client to develop more behavioural flexibility, to try the unfamiliar, to venture into new territory at his or her own pace. As client s expand their repertoire of behaviors, they are aware at a deeper level that the effort is their own, that they have made the chices and taken the actions that have led to their growth. Credit goes to the client, not the coach. 

You have 50,000 thoughts a day - you might as well make them big ones.

Donald Trump

There are no unreasorceful people, only unresourceful states.

Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place.

Lao-Tzu

The power of coaching comes from the strength of the bond between coach and client