What Is Coaching?
Coaching is a powerful, thought-provoking, collaborative and creative process that inspires great results where the coach in conversation, partners with the client to maximize their personal and professional potential.
Coaching accelerates the process of great performance and closes the gap between where the client is now and where they ideally want to be. To support clients in getting there your coach will challenge you to go further than where you would normally stop and acts as a catalyst to discover options and ideas you might not have thought of alone.
Your coach will support you to keep yourself on track, accountable to yourself and focused on achieving your goals.
Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.
You can read the ICF Core Coaching Competencies here.
Nevertheless, no definition will ever encompass the range of possibilities available through coaching. You simply have to experience it.
Why do people typically work with a coach?
As a client, some of the reasons you might typically decide to work with a coach could be to …
- identify your mission or vision and move towards it.
- make a bigger impact on the world.
- make significant changes in your life.
- set better goals and reach them faster.
- be more effective and increase performance.
- find your ideal job/career.
- get ahead professionally.
- become more financially successful.
- manage change and deal better with uncertainty.
- make better decisions.
- keep up with the speed of life.
- have more balance between your personal and professional life.
- reduce stress.
- have a collaborative partner.
- simplify your life.
- have more fun.
- improve your relationships with the people around you.
You can read the ICF Code of Ethics here.
