What is Coaching?
“A strategic, thought-provoking, and creative process which occurs in interactive conversation that inspires individuals to understand and maximize their full potential.”
It can be helpful to understand coaching by comparing it to other “helping roles” including mentoring, therapy, consulting and teaching.
Each role is useful and helpful in their own way:
Therapy - Helpful for healing, looking backwards and returning to baseline well being
Coaching - Helpful for empowerment, through agency and working towards the future
Mentoring - Helpful for confidence, by gaining wisdom, expertise and experience
Consulting - Helpful for expertise, by gaining objective expert advice and direction
Teaching - Helpful for learning, by gaining knowledge and best practices
Why Coaching?
“Even though people want and ask for help, it is a natural tendency to resist being told what to do. Outcomes are better when people are helped to help themselves. Facilitating self-determined and self-directed change and problem-solving (coaching), rather than giving prescriptive solutions (consulting/mentoring) leads to better results, outcomes, and accomplishments.”
— R. Hicks PhD, University of Texas Dallas