Coaching

Barb Pierce

BEng, MBA, CD, Certified Executive Coach

•  Coaching is an action-oriented, future-focused practice with the aim of helping you determine and achieve your personal goals.
• Coaching focuses on awakening your resourcefulness and creativity as opposed to being an advice-giving or teaching forum
• Life, business or executive coaches use questions in a skillful manner to help you become more resourceful in how you deal with present and future situations
• Through coaching, you develop new capabilities, opportunities and skills

What Coaching Is Not 

Sometimes people use the words coaching, therapy, mentoring and consulting interchangeably. Although there are many similarities, the processes and outcomes are quite different.

•  Therapists tend to focus in the past tense and in times of personal crisis, whereas coaching focuses on the present and future.   Therapy deals most often with the past, so that a patient can exist more fully in the present.
• Mentors share knowledge and experience. Although a mentor may at times use coaching skills, a mentor is typically a more experienced person who guides and passes on her knowledge and experience to others. Coaches may tell ‘stories’ called metaphors to help their clients see their situations in a new light, but they do not give specific advice.
• Consultants are hired for their skill and experience. They give specific advice and often teach their clients how to do a process or task. In the coaching context, advice-giving may create client-coach co-dependency with the client looking to the coach for ideas rather than from within.

 What Coaching Is

The focus on attaining your potential is what sets coaching apart from therapy, mentoring and consulting.  Those professions were created to solve problems.  In coaching, the coach and client work together as a team to focus on what is working in order to build upon success.

 Clients hire coaches to:

• Be more purposeful
• Be more successful
• Be happier
• Be more decisive
• Have more income
• Have more simplicity
• Have more balance
• Have less stress, illness or self doubt

 Regardless of the specifics, clients hire coaches to help them to become more resourceful and insightful about why they are where they are and how to move forward.