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A coach's job is to challenge her clients to perceive with a different mindset, to seek solutions by looking for opportunities to go beyond the norm, and to support and encourage clients to dance on their growing edge of taking the necessary risks that lead to success.
The coaching relationship is all about helping clients see their own possibilities and design the action steps to make those possibilities a reality.
At times we make bold requests or ask powerful questions that can challenge a person's most cherished -- or unconscious -- priorities. While each coach has their own style, and while some do more teaching or mentoring than pure coaching, at the heart of the practice, coaches should vigorously hold the belief that it is how our clients think about what they can ask of themselves that supports and nourishes transformative change.
Our job is to help clients think on a larger scale than they previously have, to expect more from themselves than they usually do, and to believe as much in their ability to succeed as we do.
In coaching we talk about using power tools to help our clients reach their goals. Although many power tools are discussed, what they all have in common is the intent to break old mental, emotional, or behavioral patterns, and establish new ones.
For example, one power tool discussed in training is that of Trust vs Doubt. Many coachees start their growth process with a lot of doubt that they can have the life they truly want. We live in such a cautionary environment and have such little support for learning how to deeply trust ourselves, that doubt gets beaten into us from a very early age.
But trust is perhaps THE essential ingredient for living large -- that is, for having shining confidence needed to take the risks necessary to succeed at our goals. We must be willing to trust our instincts, judgments, perceptions, knowledge, training, and skills. And perhaps more importantly, we must be able to trust our ability to recover well from choices made with incomplete information, bad timing, or even too much trust in others' opinions and persuasion that lead to undesired outcomes.
In part, trust is developed by taking small risks and having small successes. And, trust grows by reflecting on the track record one accumulates in having recovered from less than optimal choices. But also, trust is an exercise in faith -- a belief in something unknown, unseen, or unprovable at the moment of making a trusting decision.
Trust fuels personal empowerment. The more trust you have in yourself and your ability to make things turn out better than just okay no matter what, the more empowered you truly are.
Coaching question: How will you exercise your trust in yourself today?
Coaches often wonder about the difference between coaching and counseling. A recent forum post captured my interest and prompted this response.
I take as my role the job of helping clients not just see the light at the end of the tunnel and figure out how to get there. As a coach, my job is to help the client jump the tracks and take to the air -- in other words, to leave altogether the paradigm of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and building the track to reach it.
My job is to help coachees envision a completely new view of themselves and their possibilities.
In other words, (and switching metaphors) a fish never imagines it can gallop because it has no frame of reference for being a horse. As a counselor, my job is to help the fish adjust to the disappointment and sense of loss it may experience if it happens to see a horse and want to be one, to teach effective coping tools for the inner urge to leap out of the fish tank, to tame the post traumatic stress of being nearly stepped on by a horse, to heal the depression or anxiety about the inevitability of being a fish, and to reintegrate its identity as a fish with a sense of belonging to its pod or school of origin.
As a coach my job is to help the fish imagine how horse-ness might work in the fish tank, to help the fish identify what it would need to be more horse-like within the parameters of obvious physical limitations, and to guide the fish in creating the action steps for experimenting with incorporating selected horse traits into the fish's world view and behavior patterns.
In other words, my job as a coach is to help clients think big, act brave, take the next leap, and discover they can not just gallop, but fly.
