Coaching is about unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
Eric Parsloe states that coaching is “directly concerned with immediate improvement of performance and development of skills by a form of tutoring or instructions”. It is about thinking in terms of potential not performance.
Coaching has almost has become a buzzword – it is in danger of being misrepresented, misperceived and dismissed as not so new and different and as failing to live up to its promises.
Contrary to the claims of “The One Minute Manager” there are no quick fixes in business and good coaching is a skill,an art perhaps that requires a depth of understanding and plenty of practice if it is to deliver its astonishing potential. Essentially it is a conversation – within a productive, results-orientated context.
It is about learning – yet a coach is not a teacher – a coach can observe patterns, set the stage for new actions and then work with the individual to put these new, more successful actions into place.
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Through various coaching techniques such as listening, reflecting, asking questions and providing information, coachees become self-correcting and self-generating (they generate their own questions and answers).
Having a coach is more about having someone who asks the right questions than providing answers. Coaching is about change and transformation – the ability to grow, to alter maladaptive behaviours and to generate new, adaptive and successful actions.
Motivation is intrinsic. “Building awareness and responsibility is the essence of good coaching.” “I am able to control only that of which I am aware. That of which I am unaware controls me. Awareness empowers me”
Awareness is perceiving things as they really are; self-awareness is recognizing those internal factors that distort one’s own perception of reality.” |
