3. How can you determine if coaching is right for you?*

To determine if you could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you would expect to accomplish in coaching. When someone has a fairly clear idea of the desired outcome, a coaching partnership can be a useful tool for developing a strategy for how to achieve that outcome with greater ease.

Since coaching is a partnership, also ask yourself if you find it valuable to collaborate, to have another viewpoint and to be asked to consider new perspectives. Also, ask yourself if you are ready to devote the time and the energy to making real changes in your work or life. If the answer to these questions is yes, then coaching may be a beneficial way for you to grow and develop.
 

4. What are some typical reasons someone might work with a coach?*

There are many reasons that an individual or team might choose to work with a coach, including but not limited to the following:

• There is something at stake (a challenge, stretch goal or opportunity), and it is urgent, compelling or exciting or all of the above
• There is a gap in knowledge, skills, confidence, or resources
• A big stretch is being asked or required, and it is time sensitive
• There is a desire to accelerate results
• There is a need for a course correction in work or life due to a setback
• An individual has a style of relating that is ineffective or is not supporting the achievement of one’s personally relevant goals
• There is a lack of clarity, and there are choices to be made
• The individual is extremely successful, and success has started to become problematic
• Work and life are out of balance, and this is creating unwanted consequences
• One has not identified his or her core strengths and how best to leverage them
• The individual desires work and life to be simpler, less complicated
• There is a need and a desire to better organized and more self-managing

7. How do you ensure a compatible partnership?*

Overall, be prepared to design the coaching partnership with the coach. For example, think of a strong partnership that you currently have in your work or life. Look at how you built that relationship and what is important to you about partnership. You will want to build those same things into a coaching relationship. Here are a few other tips:

• Have a personal interview with one or more coaches to determine “what feels right” in terms of the chemistry. Coaches are accustomed to being interviewed, and there is generally no charge for an introductory conversation of this type
• Look for stylistic similarities and differences between the coach and you and how these might support your growth as an individual or the growth of your team
• Discuss your goals for coaching within the context of the coach’s specialty or the coach’s preferred way of working with a individual or team
• Talk with the coach about what to do if you ever feel things are not going well; make some agreements up front on how to handle questions or problems
• Remember that coaching is a partnership, so be assertive about talking with the coach about anything that is of concern at any time.

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8. Within the partnership, what does the coach do? The individual?*

The role of the coach is to provide objective assessment and observations that foster the individual’s or team members’ enhanced self-awareness and awareness of others, practice astute listening in order to garner a full understanding of the individual’s or team’s circumstances, be a sounding board in support of possibility thinking and thoughtful planning and decision making, champion opportunities and potential, encourage stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations, foster the shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives, challenge blind spots in order to illuminate new possibilities, and support the creation of alternative scenarios. Finally, the coach maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics.

What does coaching ask of an individual? To be successful, coaching asks certain things of the individual, all of which begin with intention….

• Focus—on one’s self, the tough questions, the hard truths--and one’s success
• Observation—the behaviors and communications of others
• Listening—to one’s intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks
• Self discipline—to challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and to develop new ones which serve one’s goals in a superior way
• Style—leveraging personal strengths and overcoming limitations in order to develop a winning style
• Decisive actions—however uncomfortable, and in spite of personal insecurities, in order to reach for the extraordinary
• Compassion—for one’s self as he or she experiments with new behaviors, experiences setbacks—and for others as they do the same
• Humor—committing to not take one’s self so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation
• Personal control—maintaining composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity
• Courage—to reach for more than before, to shift out of being fear based in to being in abundance as a core strategy for success, to engage in continual self examination, to overcome internal and external obstacles.
   

The role of the individual or team is to create the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals, utilize assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others, envision personal and/or organizational success, assume full responsibility for personal decisions and actions, utilize the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives, take courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations, engage big picture thinking and problem solving skills, and utilize the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach to engage effective forward actions.

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10. How is coaching distinct from other service professions?*

Professional coaching is a distinct service which focuses on an individual’s life as it relates to goal setting, outcome creation and personal change management. In an effort to understand what a coach is, it can be helpful to distinguish coaching from other professions that provide personal or organizational support.

• Therapy—Coaching can be distinguished from therapy in a number of ways. First, coaching is a profession that supports personal and professional growth and development based on individual-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is forward moving and future focused. Therapy, on the other hand, deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past which hamper an individual's emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with present life and work circumstances in more emotionally healthy ways. Therapy outcomes often include improved emotional/feeling states. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one's work or personal life. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability and follow through.
   
• Consulting—Consultants may be retained by individuals or organizations for the purpose of accessing specialized expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, there is often an assumption that the consultant diagnoses problems and prescribes and sometimes implements solutions. In general, the assumption with coaching is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.
   
• Mentoring—Mentoring, which can be thought of as guiding from one’s own experience or sharing of experience in a specific area of industry or career development, is sometimes confused with coaching. Although some coaches provide mentoring as part of their coaching, such as in mentor coaching new coaches, coaches are not typically mentors to those they coach.
   
• Training—Training programs are based on the acquisition of certain learning objectives as set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached with guidance provided by the coach. Training also assumes a linear learning path which coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum plan.

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