Coaching Styles

The debate about what coaching is or isn't has popped up this week in various classes and with several clients. The official position is that coaching is not mentoring, teaching, counseling or consulting. Really?

I think this depends on what your personal style is, what the client needs and what your contract with them is, and what licensure you are operating under. It isn't as compartmentalized, and cut and dry in actual practice as the espoused ideal makes it sound. In this week of the opening of the Summer Olympics, perhaps we need to rethink what athletic coaches do for their charges -- can you imagine an olympic coach not mentoring, teaching or counseling at various points in an athletes' training? I can't.

While it may be useful to hold the intention to not be exclusively a mentor, teacher, counselor or consultant in the "coaching" context, I assert that all of these shades of difference are called for at one time and another with just about every client, if we are truly serving their best interests and genuinely helping them achieve their goals. Perhaps it is useful to keep an awareness ever present in ourselves of the distinctions, but also of the usefulness of each role and the types of moments in which each role would be more useful than "coaching" per se.

Coming from a background as a counselor and a teacher for 18 years, perhaps it's just being difficult to shed those skins and to find the "coach" costume can be restrictive to my range of motion. That's possible, and I'll own that I don't see it to be necessary. In fact, I believe it would be a disservice to my clients if I neglect using all of my skills and experience for their benefit.

What drove me crazy as a mental health counselor was the notion that we were supposed to be something other than human, with human flaws and characteristics. I never bought that idea as particularly healthy, for myself or as an authentic role model for my clients. Now I hear coaching instructors stating that we shouldn't make judgments, or give advice, or be much of anything but an unopinionated sounding board.

Uh, no. That's not a very powerful model of coaching to me, and would not be authentic to my personality or coaching style.

I was greatly relieved the other day when one of my favorite coaching instructors confessed to doing some teaching with her clients. YES!! I thought. Finally, someone who is real, and uses all of who she is in service to her clients. That's the model I aspire to. That how I already work with people.

The coaching model of powerful questions and requests that move clients into action towards making a big difference in their lives is what sets the profession apart from most of these others, in my view. But my coaching style will also incorporate teaching what the client needs to know in order to answer those questions, fulfill those requests and know what actions to take. And my style will also incorporate the counseling needed to help the client face fear, shed shame, and claim confidence, as those as mental and emotional health issues.