Coaching Vs. Mentoring

Gaurav: How would you define what coaching is? And what is mentoring? How are they different from each other? 

David: The idea that coaching is directive and mentoring and not is complete total nonsense. Okay, let’s go back to the origins of coaching for most of its history and coaching, the word coach came as a joke, in 1851. 

For me, it was because the coach was a tutor, a very high priced tutor taking students as if they were being dragged behind a bunch of horses, through their exams, and the students had not done any work. So they need a high price directive tutor, okay, and then he got it, then it got applied to rowing. And it was felt that coaching was unsportsmanlike that gave you an unfair advantage, and then to tennis. And so pretty much all of its history, coaching has been a highly directive form of Jewishness.

And, then the look into it went away and who began to change the way that people thought about this. And consciously or unconsciously drawing upon the history of mentoring, in order to look to say, Well, actually, people have got the answers within themselves.

But what Timothy Galway and others missed out was this concept of wisdom. Mentoring is placed in the concept of wisdom, the original mentor was Athena, the goddess of wisdom.

And, and so what mentors do is actually help somebody become wiser, it’s much more about growing up, becoming the person you want you aspire to be. And so it’s about the stages of somebody’s development moving through, sort of teenage that kind of mentality of a teenager, and gradually growing into a mature human being at different levels. The work of Robert Keegan, on the evolving self is wonderful in terms of tracking that journey to real maturity and wisdom.

Whereas coaching is about skills and primarily and all of goalwards was how do you learn this skill of playing tennis, for example. And coaching is gradually expanded into territory such as behavior, and personal transformation. So it started to meld with the origins of mentoring. But if you want to look for the real history of mentoring, we go back to the court of King Louie the 16th, the son King, and his son, the dolphin that who was supposed to take over from him was a total complete, right.

And a little occurred called Finland that was given the task to educate this young man. And he emulated what the goddess Athena did. So he sat down with this young prince, whenever the prince had an experience, you had your tears or rage or whatever, sit down with him, and he would share he would get him to talk about it. It’s getting to look into himself and to understand his experience. And then to relate that experience to the person he aspired to become.

Gradually, he turned this young brat into a personal young man to become a leader or ruler. In fact, this is the first leadership book in Europe. So that the whole context here is one we’re coaching as a newcomer, it’s taken a lot of clothes off the close of mentoring, but it’s much narrower and it’s concepts.

That is, although you get things like life coaching, life coaching is not mentoring.

How Much Narcissism Is Good For A Leader?

Gaurav: David, coming to the next question, you spoke about the learning part of it, the practices that we were talking about. And without mentioning the names, because I’m sure as much as I have my journey, you have your journey, people have their own journeys. But I’m really curious, where does that narcissism come from?

 David: It’s a general question, not only for coaches, but for people as well. The leader says, well, where does that narcissism come from? I think, of course, we all have to admit, we have some narcissism in this. Some people have more than others, it’s when we have too much narcissism, that it becomes a, that becomes a real problem a little bit is really important for taking care of ourselves. But having a sense of our own value and what we can contribute to the world. If we’ve had no narcissist, then we would, we would not be able to, to give as much as we do. 

So when it’s excessive, it’s what drives people, and their inability to be honest with themselves. So when it gets in the way of their humility that’s when one needs to check. 

“Narcissism and humility are two things that balance each other. So when we are, if we are unable to be humble, because we are so narcissistic, then we have a real problem.”

And we see this in so many leaders. And it’s one and particularly this where narcissism is combined with some sociopathic traits.

 These leaders become divisive.