What is Coaching?

Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performance and enhance the quality of their lives.

How Does Coaching Work?

Through the process of coaching, individuals focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce their personally relevant results. The individual or team chooses the focus of conversation, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions as well as concepts and principles which can assist in generating possibilities and identifying actions. Through the coaching process the clarity that is needed to support the most effective actions is achieved. Coaching accelerates the individual’s or team’s progress by providing greater focus and awareness of possibilities leading to more effective choices.

What Are The Benefits Of Coaching?

Individuals who engage in a coaching relationship can expect to experience fresh perspectives on personal challenges and opportunities, enhanced thinking and decision making skills, enhanced interpersonal effectiveness, and increased confidence in carrying out their chosen work and life roles. Consistent with a commitment to enhancing their personal effectiveness, they can also expect to see appreciable results in the areas of productivity, personal satisfaction with life and work, and the achievement of personally relevant goals.

How Can You Determine If Coaching Is Right For You?

To determine if you could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you would expect to accomplish in coaching. When someone has a fairly clear idea of the desired outcome, a coaching partnership can be a useful tool for developing a strategy for how to achieve that outcome with greater ease.

Since coaching is a partnership, also ask yourself if you find it valuable to collaborate. To have another viewpoint and to be asked to consider new perspectives. Also, ask yourself if you are ready to devote the time and the energy to making real changes in your work or life. If the answer to these questions is yes, then coaching may be a beneficial way for you to grow and develop.

Typical Reasons To Work With A Coach (examples)

• There is something at stake (a challenge, stretch goal or opportunity), and it is urgent, compelling or exciting or all of the above
• There is a gap in knowledge, skills, confidence, or resources
• A big stretch is being asked or required, and it is time sensitive
• There is a desire to accelerate results
• There is a need for a course correction in work or life due to a setback
• An individual has a style of relating that is ineffective or is not supporting the achievement of one’s personally relevant goals
• There is a lack of clarity, and there are choices to be made
• The individual is extremely successful, and success has started to be problematic
• Work and life are out of balance, and this is creating unwanted consequences
• One has not identified his or her core strengths and how best to leverage them
• The individual desires work and life to be simpler, less complicated
• There is a need and a desire to be better organized and more self-managing

From the Frequently Asked Questions About Coaching, developed by the Branding and Marketing Subcommittee of the International Coach Federation (ICF)