Are you looking for a coach, a life coach or business coach? In this article I discuss what coaching is and is not. I help people in London and you can find out more about my London life coaching and business coaching here.
Do you need support? Anyone who serves in a leadership role knows how true this can be. Lt’s be honest you don’t have to be a Fortune 500 CEO to be a leader. You might run a big or small business, be a school department head or simply run a busy household with lots of daily demands.
Where can a leader safely turn for a listening ear, wise counsel, and the unvarnished truth? Most successful leaders from time to time call upon someone they can trust to walk alongside them, personally and professionally. That’s what life coaches and business coaches do.
What coaching is – the facts
There are two kinds of competencies that every leader needs to acquire for success:
Technical competencies are necessary skills and knowledge that are acquired through education and training by which one learns what to do. Finance, marketing, operations are examples.
Behavioural competencies, by contrast, are all about how one shows up as a leader that causes others to choose to follow. Trust, communication, managing conflict and accountability are examples.
Leaders who fail most commonly do so for lack of behavioural competencies rather than lack of technical competencies. Basically, it’s not so much about knowing what to do, but how you do it!
What coaching is – in detail
Coaching is all about helping people change their behaviours to get better results. The key word is change; if there’s no opportunity for change, there’s no need for coaching. Even the world’s top performers in any pursuit avail themselves of coaching. They know, “You don’t have to be sick to get better.”
As a profession, developmental coaching is relatively young. It grew out of the worlds of psychology and adult education over the past three decades. As such, it can appear somewhat like the wild, wild west with the variety of people and methods that fall under the label of “coaching.”
As an experienced executive leadership development life coach I have a proven method for sustainable results for clients over the past couple of years. I have a very clear point of view about coaching, one that is best understood by what executive leadership coaching is not.
What coaching is not: Consulting
There is a place for consulting, when there’s a problem in need of a fix. But we view coaching clients as smart, resourceful people who are not “broken.” Sadly, in the early years of coaching, it was often imposed to try to fix someone. That rarely works or helps.
What coaching is not: Clinical Therapy
There is a place, at times, when a skilled clinical therapist can help one look deeply into their history and relationships to resolve persistent interpersonal problems. Our view of coaching focuses more on looking through the “windshield” than the “rear view mirror,” we ask where our client wants to go, what’s working well, what could work better, and how to make the changes needed to go there.
What coaching is not: Mentoring
It sounds like the same thing but there’s a key difference: a mentor is an experienced, wiser person who downloads that wisdom and expertise to a novice. They are not on the same level. Coaching, in contrast, is a working alliance, a partnership between two people walking together on level ground. The coach leads from behind in the relationship: asking the right questions, listening deeply, observing behaviours, and offering different perspectives that stretch the client to make the difficult changes he or she has set for the engagement.
Leadership is the co-creation of coordinated movement of a group of people toward a common goal. Moreover, leadership is accomplished through the exercise of influence that flows through relationships.
With the above definition, you’ll see how the working alliance with a coach can help leaders be their most effective. If you are interested in life coaching for business or personal life, get in touch today.