1. What should I look for when selecting a coach?
The most important thing to look for in selecting a coach is someone with whom you feel you can easily relate to in order to create powerful partnership. Here are some questions you may want to ask prospective coaches:
- What is your coaching experience? (number of individuals coaches, years of experience, types of situations)
- What is your coach specific training? Do you hold an ICF Credential, or are you enrolled in an ICF Accredited Training Program?
- What is your coaching specialty or client areas you most often work in?
- What specialized skills or experience do you bring to your coaching?
- What is your philosophy about coaching?
- What is your specific process for coaching? (how sessions are conducted, frequency, etc.)
- What are some coaching success stories? (specific examples of individuals who have done well and examples of how you have added value)
2. Within the partnership, what does the coach do? The client?
The role of the coach is to provide objective assessment and observations that foster the individual’s or team members’ enhanced self-awareness and awareness of others, practice astute listening in order to garner a full understanding of the individual’s or team’s circumstances, be a sounding board in support of possibility thinking and thoughtful planning and decision making, champion opportunities and potential, encourage stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations, foster the shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives, challenge blind spots in order to illuminate new possibilities, and support the creation of alternative scenarios. Finally, the coach maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics.
The role of the client or client team is to create the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals, utilize assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others, envision personal and/or organizational success, assume full responsibility for personal decisions and actions, utilize the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives, take courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations, engage big picture thinking and problem solving skills, and utilize the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach to engage effective forward actions.
3. What will coaching ask of me?
To be successful, coaching asks certain things of the individual, all of which begin with intention:
- Focus - on one’s self, the tough questions, the hard truths--and one’s success
- Observation - the behaviors and communications of others
- Listening - to one’s intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks
- Self discipline - to challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and to develop new ones which serve one’s goals in a superior way
- Style - leveraging personal strengths and overcoming limitations in order to develop a winning style
- Decisive actions - however uncomfortable, and in spite of personal insecurities, in order to reach for the extraordinary
- Compassion - for one’s self as he or she experiments with new behaviors, experiences setbacks--and for others as they do the same
- Humor - committing to not take one’s self so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation
- Personal control - maintaining composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity
- Courage - to reach for more than before, to shift out of being fear based in to being in abundance as a core strategy for success, to engage in continual self examination, to overcome internal and external obstacles
4. What factors should I consider when looking at the financial investment in coaching?
Working with a coach requires both a personal commitment of time and energy as well as a financial commitment. Fees charged vary by specialty and by the coach’s level of experience. Individuals should consider both the desired benefits as well as the anticipated length of time to be spent in coaching. Since the coaching relationship is predicated on clear communication, any financial concerns or questions should be voiced in initial conversations before the agreement is made.
5. How is coaching different from other service professions?
Professional coaching is a distinct service which focuses on an individual’s life as it relates to goal setting, outcome creation and personal change management. In an effort to understand what a coach is, it can be helpful to distinguish coaching from other professions that provide personal or organizational support.
Therapy. Coaching can be distinguished from therapy in a number of ways. First, coaching is a profession that supports personal and professional growth and development based on individual-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is forward moving and future focused. Therapy, on the other hand, deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past which hamper an individual's emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with present life and work circumstances in more emotionally healthy ways. Therapy outcomes often include improved emotional/feeling states. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one's work or personal life. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability and follow through.
Consulting. Consultants may be retained by individuals or organizations for the purpose of accessing specialized expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, there is often an assumption that the consultant diagnoses problems and prescribes and sometimes implements solutions. In general, the assumption with coaching is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery- based approaches and frameworks.
Mentoring. Mentoring, which can be thought of as guiding from one’s own experience or sharing of experience in a specific area of industry or career development, is sometimes confused with coaching. Although some coaches provide mentoring as part of their coaching, such as in mentor coaching new coaches, coaches are not typically mentors to those they coach.