What is Coaching?

Coaching works due to three factors:

Synergy: The coaches and the clients work together as a team, in synergy to achieve the client’s goals.

Structure: The coaches create a structure for the clients that encloses all the goals and aspirations of the clients.

Expertise: Coaches are experts who are trained with strategies and techniques to bring the goals set into life.

So, the fundamental belief that underpins coaching is that we already possess the answers we seek. A coach’s role is to assist the coachee in obtaining these responses. This is accomplished through a variety of conversational techniques, including interrogation, active listening, observation, and reflection.

When these techniques are used, the coachee gains increased self-awareness and frequently a new insight. Having a non-judgmental, non-biased person available to provide focused attention enables the coachee to comprehend how to proceed.

The Pillars of Erickson Coaching Methodology

• Solution-Focused

Moves your client toward their desired future outcomes, instead of concentrating on past experiences or reasons for present dissatisfaction.

• Systemic

Emphasizes the holistic nature of your client, seeing how positive change can fit into their bigger picture.

• Client-Centered

Allows you to trust your client’s inner resources and skills, respecting their agenda and future outcomes. Coaching is an advice-free zone.

• Action-Oriented

Pursues transformational change in specific, inspired steps that lead to fundamental shifts in attitude, behaviour, and habit formation.

What Coaching Is NOT

There has long been discussion on what makes coaching different from other similar procedures as an intervention in individual and organisational development. Alternatives that also aim to help people fulfil their potential include consulting, counselling, therapy, mentorship, and other process interventions like NLP, TA, Positive Psychology, and Appreciative Inquiry. All of these are used with both people and businesses.

Some of these strategies work best for people, while others are better suited for companies (such as consulting) (such as therapy). Until recently, coaching was also mostly seen as an individual behavioural intervention. These processes differ from one another in a way that resembles a communication and time matrix. These interventions range from past-focused to future-focused. Both the directive method of telling and the exploratory approach of asking are used in some of these treatments. No action is ever right or wrong. Each solution might be more effective in a certain setting.

You can include the organisational and individual context as the third axis of the matrix to fully look at how everything fits together. 

What unites all of these situations is that the client—whether an individual or an organization—wants a result that necessitates overcoming obstacles on the internal, external, or both sides of the equation.

Coaching Vs Consulting

Most consulting is done in an organisational setting. In order to assist the client with the difficulty they confront, it requires the experience and skills that a consultant brings with them. Coaching and consulting are both future-oriented. While coaching is an exploratory technique for creating awareness, consulting is a direct solution-based approach. 

Since the consultant is an expert whose duty it is to fix the problem, consultation typically produces quicker results. Although it is quicker than coaching, the coaching-related awareness-creation is not present. This indicates that even when a problem has been resolved, no anchoring has occurred, and the client’s satisfaction might simply be fleeting. However, there are coaching-based consulting strategies that take a more partnered consulting approach. As the adage goes, you get the best of both worlds.

Coaching Vs Therapy 

In order to help the client overcome any traumas stemming from previous experiences, many psychological behavioural therapies are focused on revealing past (conditioned) experiences. Different remedies adhere to various procedures. However, they are all historically oriented and, to a certain extent, all based on the directive telling method. 

This was changed by Carl Rogers to a client-centred explorative method, which gave rise to counselling. Coaches are typically cautioned not to adhere to therapeutic approaches, even if they are equipped to do so because coaching is a future-based, inquiring approach. It is essential that coaches obtain express client consent before utilising any therapeutic approaches or tools with their clients.

Coaching Vs Counseling

In comparison to other psychological therapeutic therapies, counselling is significantly more similar to coaching. It places more emphasis on listening and inquiring. However, it continues to put more of an emphasis on aiding clients in overcoming previous experiences, particularly those involving emotional trauma. Many topics, like relationships, sorrow, and loss, that were historically firmly in the purview of counsellors, are now skillfully addressed by coaches utilising outcome-oriented techniques.

Coaches don’t concentrate on a person’s history or early events that may be the cause of how they live or feel, in contrast to therapists and counsellors. Instead, they assist their customers in becoming crystal clear about what they want, why they want it, and how they plan to acquire it.

Coaching Vs Mentoring

There has been much discussion about how mentoring differs greatly from coaching and is even “out of limits” ethically. Because mentoring requires skill, or “telling,” this is the reason. The role of the coach is to serve as a mirror, not as the expert in the room. However, when considering this from a practical standpoint, mentoring frequently crosses over into coaching, which isn’t always a bad thing.