Do you thi
nk of any of these if I say ‘c
oach’?…
Understanding different perspectives
Most people have a clear idea of what a coach is, maybe even what a coach does. The difficulty is matching it with what we, as coaches think we are, and with what we actually do. OK, so my pictures are a slightly extreme set of examples, but I have been wondering if it’s about time for a total re-brand. The idea of ‘coach’ seems to be so ingrained in people’s minds, that it proves tricky to get people to fully understand what coaching is and what it can do for them. What keeps me going, standing on my soapbox, is that people who have had (high quality) coaching are generally sold on the idea. It’s just those who havent experienced it that we struggle to convince.
In some ways the challenge that needs unravelling is all about detail, semantics even, and being rather pedantic in our own use of the term. I spent many hours discussing and writing assignments for my coaching qualifications on the subject of coaching versus mentoring. I’ve had similar conversations with my sporting colleagues – they used to be ‘instructors’, then ‘trainers’, and now… ‘coaches’. The real problem is that people – and often our potential clients -no longer know what to expect.
Should we define coaching?
Maybe it is pointless to get hung up on the niceties of the language, because the key thing is to be able to communicate with people around us in a language that is meaningful to them. If any of you have done battle with research papers and ended up almost screaming for clear, plain English, you might know what I mean. Another common frustration might be the use of jargon (and most professions have it), which isn’t helpful when relaying information to a lay audience: it needs to be readable. I have a friend who is a great research scholar, but she spends a significant amount of time re-writing her work for blogs so that they are accessible to people outside academe. It isn’t dumbing down, it isn’t damaging our language, it is about communicating appropriately for our audience. So, for these reasons, we need to know what our potential clients think coaching is, rather than insisting on what we believe it to be.
Selling the idea
It really isn’t new – we need to provide what our clients need (if we can’t then they need signposting elsewhere). Marketing our services isn’t about what we can do, it is about matching what our clients want with the strengths, skills or experience that we have. If we turn the marketing equation around like this, it immediately makes more sense to look at the possible outcomes of coaching, rather than offering ‘coaching’. Working in this direction also means that listening to what our clients want becomes central to the conversation and the plan. It sounds obvious, but these basic tenets of business so often get lost in the moment.
So, what might coaching be?
I had a eureka moment last Spring whilst working with senior leaders in schools. In education, there are clear set-ups for coaching which are roles that are supportive, informative, guiding and training. In some words, then, closer to mentoring in my book. This means that, mostly, if you are taking to educators about coaching, they will have this idea. If you talk to someone in the caring professions, they may well jump to the other end of the continuum and start by imagining counselling (and that really isn’t coaching).
One day the Head Teacher was talking about a ‘coaching’ session that she had attended which had really got her thinking becasue it was novel. Her coach had used some great tools and practical exercises to create analogies for where she was and where her team were, what the barriers were and where they wanted to get to. It was a new approach and challenged her view of coaching. It helped clarify the terms for me, highlighting how differently people view coaching.
Describing coaching
In truth, coaching is made up of myriad elements and it is this that probably makes it so difficult to describe accurately. We might look at the way that a coach reaches their objectives, very often they’ll describe themselves through the tools that they use, for example’I’m an NLP practitioner’, or, ‘I’m a mindfulness coach’. Alternatively they might look at the specific challenges that they’re going to address, ‘I’m a career coach’, ‘I’m a transition coach’, ‘I’m a performance coach’.
I’m making no value judgement here, but here is the question: how can we separate all these elements when home, health, career, lifestyle are all entwined in each of us? How can we know that a particular coaching tool will be a panacea? Don’t we need to understand exactly what each of our coaches will need?
