Coaching Explored

This article is actually my coaching thesis and whilst it will give you a much deeper insight into coaching and how it works, it is not written for the lay person.

If you are looking for common-sense understanding of what coachign is and what it can do for you, I recommend you go here instead.

Introduction

For millennia, mankind has engaged in existential ponderings: Why am I here? What do I want? How can I get more of it? As our mastery of the planet mushrooms, we are increasingly freed from the burdens of finding food and shelter. We now have more time than ever for recreation, and for reflection on our lives. We can increasingly design those lives to fit our own requirements. Life coaching is a very recent addition to mankind’s “self development toolbox”, and it is life coaching which this essay examines. In it, we’ll look at what life coaching is, and how it works; what it offers, and how it differs from other forms of personal development. We’ll look closely at the coaching process itself, at some of the areas it can be applied in. And we’ll see how different coaching styles can modify that process.

What Life Coaching is

The International Coach Federation says:
"Coaching is an ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Through the process of coaching, clients deepen their learning, improve their performance and enhance their quality of life."

Myles Downey, in his book Effective Coaching defines it on page 15 like this:
“Coaching is the art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of another.”

Fiona Harrold’s characteristically punchy alternative (from her website) says:
[life coaching] is a no-nonsense, down-to-earth, practical set of techniques and strategies to achieve success, fast!
Other definitions abound, but add little more of substance.

Physically, coaching is a conversation between a coach and a client – usually undertaken by telephone. That conversation helps the client to explore, then navigate through some aspect or aspects of the client’s life.

With the coach’s help, the client explores the terrain, which includes both the external world - of buildings, people, cars, money, etc. – and the client’s internal world, from where beliefs, fears, self-image and emotion exert their powerful, and often negative, influences.

Coaching may also involve the client in assignments, which allow them to enhance their learning in some way. These might be to write a reflective essay, to keep a diary, to read a book, join a club, etc.

Through coached exploration of their terrain, the client finds both familiar and unfamiliar landmarks. Some will be obstacles – mountains to climb or rivers to cross. Others will be sources of strength and joy.

As coaching proceeds, the client becomes increasingly familiar with the terrain and develops clarity on how he or she wants to change it and where they want to be within it. Movement to that new and better place is encouraged and supported by the coach.

So – coaching is a practical tool for personal exploration and development. A coach can unlock and release the potential within clients, to bring about major positive improvements in their lives.

What Life Coaching is not

There are many roads to personal improvement, and not all of them are coaching. Coaching has a few characteristics that set it apart:

Unlike therapy or counselling, coaching is primarily present-oriented. A coach will have a good general understanding of how past events can shape a person and their performance in the present (typically through the effects of inherited self-esteem and negative beliefs). And a coach may work with the client to relieve these problems, through affirmations, for example, or other exercises. But fundamentally, coaching deals with what is happening now and in the immediate future. It does not reflect on the client’s past to unravel complex elements within the psyche.

Unlike counselling, coaching is for those who are moving forward from a reasonably stable base. So it is not appropriate, for example, for the mentally ill, or those in crisis, or with drug problems, crippling financial hardship, or a history of abuse.

Often, therapy (or counselling) will focus on a single aspect of the client and work solely on effecting improvements in that area. In contrast, coaching deals with the whole-person performance. Generally coaching will focus on an aspect of the person’s life, but they’ll comprehend the whole person’s performance within that focus area. Sometimes a coach will attend to specific areas (typically self-esteem for negative beliefs) in order to free up progress, but the emphasis is on moving the whole person forward in life.

Unlike mentoring, coaching is not instructional. It does not bestow new vocational skills or provide “answers” through the teachings of an expert, though coaches may provide some learning experiences that equip the client with some new tools. Coaches help the client to find their own way; they do not give directions.

Why Coaching Works

Life coaching is a recipe with just a few ingredients, but it is a magical dish. The ingredients are these:

1. The G.R.O.W. Model

“GROW” is a mnemonic that defines a framework for analysis. Life coaches usually follow it with their clients. Sometimes a T is prepended for a “TGROW” model. The acronym expands like this.

T is for TOPIC – and is the general problem-space that the client wants to explore via coaching. Example topics might be social life, career, or quitting a habit. The client and coach will generally agree on a topic before starting, but a client may present with a very general sense of dissatisfaction, or with several candidate topics to work on. There are exercises available which will help to find the right topic to work on.

G is for GOAL; the client is encouraged to turn a problem statement into a positive desired outcome, then to embody this into a goal. The goal should be made as real and specific as possible, and ideally, will be S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, action-oriented, Realistic and Time-specific).

R is for REALITY. The client is encouraged to explore the problem space (defined by the TOPIC and the GOAL) and other aspects of their life to gain a fact-based and current understanding of how things really are, now.

O is for OPTIONS. The client finds a set of actions that are available to them, which might move them closer to their goal.

W is for WILL. From the list of options, the client selects those that they will commit to doing.

The GROW model is a general framework which cannot always be operated strictly in order, as listed here, but each element should be visited at least once. Over time – as reality meets theory and as coaching insights arrive, goals may be revised slightly or radically; even the topic may be replaced. (T)GROW is not just an up-front analysis tool, it can be applied iteratively, and hierarchically in the service of the client.

2. External Perspective

There is almost always benefit to be had by seeking input about a situation from someone outside of it. That external perspective – devoid of sacred cows: ingrained pre-conceptions, accepted norms and limitations – is very valuable in delivering an insightful, clear-thinking analysis that is virtually impossible to gain from within the situation. This fact is often embodied in the maxim “it’s easy to solve other people’s problems”. However, this is critically inaccurate. It’s perhaps easy to see how other people’s problems could be solved, but that is not to solve them. To do that, you need to convince the problem owner of your solution, and then to act. That is almost always a complete failure, and is not the coaching way. More on this later.

3. Professional Coaching Skills

So, the coach is operating the GROW model, and they come to the party with this invaluably detached perspective. They also bring with them a powerful set of skills that I’ll discuss more fully later. Briefly, they are:
building rapport, comprehensive listening, asking powerful questions, finding and dealing with limiting beliefs and values, finding smart goals and motivating clients.

4. Not Making Suggestions

It may seem strange to list a negative ingredient, but – like not over-seasoning your casserole - this one is crucial to a successful coaching relationship. Life coaching embodies an underlying rule, which is to not give clients advice. Legal implications aside, there are several good reasons why this is so smart. Firstly, if you’ve ever given a friend advice, you’ll know how seldom it is taken. When you feed in external advice, you place yourself in a position of assumed superiority and this often builds resistance and resentment in the recipient of your pearls of wisdom. Secondly, ideas developed by the client generally come with far higher excitement and commitment than external ideas. Thirdly, it is important to grow the client’s self-esteem; feeding them answers does not do that, but helping them to find their own answers does. And lastly – if you grow within the client the ability to find his or her own ways forward, you’re building a better client.

In some ways, the coaching process is magical. You could almost be a complete idiot, but if you operated the coaching model adequately, your client should see some good results. However, there is much more to be gained by being an outstanding coach and the ingredients that make one of those are discussed in my next section.

What makes an effective coach?

There are, perhaps, as many coaching styles as there are coaches. Clients will need to find a coach that suits them, because it’s critically important that rapport exists between the client and their coach. A perceptive coach will work hard to be a good match for their client. But there are some essential attributes that any coach should embody. They are inter-related, so there is inevitably some repetition in the list below.

1. Rapport must exist between the client and their coach before real work can begin. Where rapport exists, effective coaching can take place. Clients will relax out of their public persona, feeling able to discuss their inner thoughts, weaknesses and vulnerabilities honestly. So any coach must be able to build rapport with their client. The NLP arena offers a set of tools for building rapport. But it is centrally important that the coach holds genuine respect and good wishes for their client, through demonstrating excellent listening skills; that they are honest yet non-judgemental; and that they are genuinely and appropriately (but not ludicrously) positive. Humour often has a role to play in building and maintaining rapport.

“Active listening” can be used to build rapport. See the section on listening below, for more.

Another rapport-building tool, from the NLP world, is to echo the conversational style of the client in your own speech. Often a client will show a strong bias in their use of language, towards a particular sense. For example, they may talk in terms of their visual sense (“I see how that works”), or in terms of touch (“I feel good about that”) or in terms of hearing (“Sounds reasonable to me”) etc. These modes of speaking (and thinking) are known as visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory. This is examined at length in many coaching texts, and notably by O’Connor & Seymour .

It is important to note that building rapport does not mean becoming emotionally entwined with the client, their problems or their lives. Maintaining a professional distance is essential to remaining balanced, objective and useful.

Clients should be encouraged to remain emotionally composed during coaching sessions. Emotional breakdown is not part of the coaching process and doesn’t support the forward-looking, solution-orientation of the coaching model. It may sometimes be necessary to stop a session to allow a client to re-compose him or herself, or to cancel it until next time. This doesn’t meant that the coach doesn’t care about the emotional well-being of the client, and any premature terminations should be dealt with compassionately.

2. Trust must exist between client and coach. The client must trust that their coach will be honest, has their own interests in mind, and is telling the truth, and will maintain their confidentiality, and will respect them from the privileged position of coaching confidante.

3. Honesty should be a central pillar on which any coaching relationship is built. It is a key tool, which is often forfeit in the maintenance of a conventional friendship. A coach should be honest within the context of the coaching relationship, delivering the difficult messages accurately when they can be usefully absorbed. Of course, honesty, in this context, does not mean that a coach should be sure to tell their client in every instance where the coach’s personal stance on an issue differs from the client’s.

4. Listening Skills. Effective coaching is intimately tied in with first class listening. You cannot understand a client unless you listen to them keenly. And you can’t effectively coach someone you don’t understand. Furthermore, the silence implied when the coach listens, is valuable thinking-space for the client .

It is a rule of thumb that the client should be speaking (and the coach listening) 70% of the time.

Listening is a challenging skill to master, in its many complexities. It is unfortunate that listening in general life, is not seen as a useful skill – and in fact – not often acknowledged as an activity in its own right – worthy of study and improvement.

So – what’s to learn? First the basics: it’s important that the coach remains alert and focussed on the session. She or he can prepare for this by coaching from a supportive environment, free of clutter and noisy distractions. He should probably take notes, too. A good coach is not passively receiving sound when they are listening. They are certainly not waiting for someone to stop talking so they can speak. Rather - they are actively analysing and understanding the workings of another mind, through the medium of speech. This understanding comes in at several levels.

In order build and to keep rapport, and to maintain the flow of thoughts, a good coach will practice “active listening”. This means doing those things that demonstrate attention and approval to the speaker . On the phone, this comes down to “verbal nods” – like “uh huh”, “I see”, and “yes”. In person, there is a range of non-verbal gestures that can be used to signal positive attention and to build rapport. There are also some NLP tools available .
Careful listening can be used to determine which of the sensory modes the client commonly uses and to echo those. See the section on rapport above for more on this.

As well as being alert, any coach should approach a coaching session with a clear mind and a positive mental attitude in order to make the best use of this verbal flow. I generally take up to half an hour to prepare myself for coaching. Partly, this is to re-aquaint myself with my client’s situation through studying my notes, and to re-appraise where we are in the coaching process. But it’s also to clear out mental clutter, to put aside any anxieties my day may have bestowed on me, and to make myself fully available for listening to my client actively and helpfully.

As well as turning on the key mental faculties, some coaches may find that they need to turn some faculties off . My mind for example, has a strong tendency to want to reach rapid conclusions - long before there is adequate data for a safe analysis. I also tend to be highly judgmental, and I tend to want to leap in to finish or to tidy up what people say. In addition, I have a childish and petty dislike for certain conversational styles or commonly used (or misused) phrases; these personal attributes are all best left outside of the coaching session (and in fact, they’re best left. Period!). Sometimes, I will make a note in my coaching notes on how I should modify my behaviour for a better coaching session. For example, with one client whose verbal delivery was slow and not very articulate, I felt huge pressure to speed him up and to “help him out” by saying what he meant (or, more likely, what I meant). I wrote “DON’T EXPLAIN FOR HIM” at the top of our session notes to remind me not to do this, and I used breathing techniques to remain focussed on him and what he was saying, rather than his pace. I also tried to use pacing to slow down my own verbal speed. I may make such notes at the top, before the session, as in this case - or I may make smaller inline notes as the session progresses if I find problems with my approach. When I review these notes in preparation for the next session, I will keep these modifications in mind.

When all this is in place, we’re ready to begin the understanding process. If what the client is saying is ambiguous or otherwise unclear - it’s important to ask for clarification. You might say something like “Please tell me more about what you just said” or you might echo back what you understood: “so you feel you are under-valued by your boss because your feel your last pay award was too low?”. Testing understanding in this way is a very valuable tool in the coaching toolbox; not only is it a fail-safe mechanism for routing out misunderstandings, but it provides the client with an opportunity to re-internalise their thoughts – perhaps refining them or deepening their understanding of them in the process. This touches on questioning skills, which we’ll look at in the next section. There’s a small potential pitfall in paraphrasing; the coach should resist any temptation to tidy up or embellish a situational summary in an attempt to pull the client in a desired direction. The goal is to verify meaning, not to influence it.

A good life coach can go further with her listening skills, digging beneath the surface of what is said by relating it to what they know, or think they know. Specifically, they can keep in mind the coaching topic and the coaching goal, and relate those to what they understand of the client and to what that client is saying and has said. This cross-referencing process can often illuminate interesting areas for exploration. Sometimes there are subtle or even huge contradictions in what the client says; sometimes there are puzzling omissions. Careful questioning can be used to gain clarity for the client and the coach in these cases. Sometimes wonderful breakthroughs happen as a result. Other times a gradual refinement takes place over time. The transformation is often no less spectacular.

The final part of listening it to let the client know that you have understood. This is best done by paraphrasing and summarising.

There are a few other tools in the coach’s listening toolbox.

Using silence is one of them. Unlike normal social interactions, coaching silences are not to be avoided at all costs. They may evidence deep thinking in the client that could bear juicy fruits. Or they may indicate bewilderment, fatigue, emotional resonances and so on. A coach should consider when it’s best to let these develop, rather than squashing them with noise. How far to take this depends on the client and the situation. If the client becomes uncomfortable, then there is a risk of rapport breakdown; at the same time, a spell in the discomfort zone is often where big breakthroughs happen. And sometimes it will be entirely appropriate to step in early. If the client loses her train of thought, for example, the coach can re-connect her quickly, and without problems – and not to do so is probably unkind (or may indicate that the coach wasn’t listening!).

Another toolbox skill is to listen for how the client says something. The intonation of what they say conveys additional information, which is available to a keenly listening coach. The coach can test this information with the client: “Are you worried about that?” or more openly: “how do you feel about that?”.

Another listening tool is the use of what I call “squeezers”. These are short phrases designed to get a little more of whatever’s been coming from the client. Examples might be “can you give me one more?” or “what else?” and so on.

So, effective listening is a huge part of effective coaching, and a coach will listen with their whole, open, positive mind. What they learn from their listening is the raw material on which the coaching is largely based.

In a practical coaching session, listening and questioning will go hand in hand, and so we’ll look at questioning next.

5. Questioning skills are a second cornerstone on which effective coaching rests. Here’s why. One of life coaching’s underlying concepts is that the coach does not give advice or instruction. This is a sound concept, as explained elsewhere in this essay, but it does leave a coach in a difficult position, as they must find ways to allow the client to discover important things about themselves without directing them. The key is to ask powerful questions. Questions are the magical key to unlocking awareness in the client. There is a rich repertoire of questions available to the coach, and a few pitfalls to be avoided along the way.

There will be some clients who are initially uncomfortable with being questioned at all. They may feel that this reduces their status inappropriately. This should be dealt with early on in the coaching relationship and this work forms a part of rapport building. Clients should have the coaching process – and the role of questioning within it – explained to them, and permission to use it should be obtained.

Coaches should be very sensitive in their use of language and its effect on rapport. I have two recent examples of small things my coaches did, which illustrate this point. The first coach had the habit of starting questions with “I want you to tell me…” I found this to be a constant niggle; for me, that formulation had a dictatorial air to it which I disliked, and it had a constant drip-drip eroding effect on our rapport.

Another coach used the word “admit” a lot; she might say, for example: “In an earlier session, you admitted that you have self-esteem issues…”. For me, the word “admit” conveys the notion that in “admitting” something I have been involuntarily exposed in some unattractive or criminal act! I mentioned this to her, and we agreed that she could easily use the word “agreed” instead of “admitted”. This would work just as well - without any loss of useful meaning, and it would drop the unintended baggage. In this case, my coach’s open, straightforward manner made me comfortable with sharing this with her. In fact, she provides a form inviting such feedback. She was surprised to hear my thoughts on the word “admit”, but was grateful that we had visited it and our rapport grew as a result.

Other clients may be very concerned about not giving “the right answers”. Again, re-assurances should be given early on – there are no wrong answers - and a friendly, supportive rapport should be developed to overcome any remaining anxiety.

Coaching questions are usually different from everyday questions. Everyday questions tend to be linguistic transactions in which the questioner solicits information from the respondent for the questioner’s benefit. For example “What time is it?” A coaching question is not generally seeking information in this way. Rather – it is inviting analysis and reflection in the mind of the client – to give that client clarity. Of course, the coach also uses the results to drive the coaching process, but primarily, coaching questions are keys for unlocking clients’ minds.

Most often, good coaching questions are “open” – which is to say that they do not invite a yes/no response, but instead - invite a more extensive response. These are the who/what/where/when/why questions. The “why” question should be used rarely and very carefully as it is often seen as being too direct and interrogative. Open questions are a coach’s friend because they grow awareness, involvement, and a reflective, open attitude and a higher level of responsibility within the client. They place the coach in the listening mode, which – as we have seen – is where they should be at least 70% of the time.

Closed questions – those permitting a yes/no response – are answered much more quickly, and they do not generally provide the benefits which open questions do. However, they do have a role to play. I use them when it seems helpful to invite my client to succinctly re-examine and re-state an existing commitment. I might say, for example: “Jeff, is this goal still your life’s dream?” I would only do this if I felt sure that it was, and that he just needed reminding of the goal that he had chosen for himself and of the consequences which flowed from it. If he wavered then I would use open questions again to re-examine the area.

There is also a related class of question which are not quite closed, but which invite a succinct response. I call these “funnel questions” because they invite a distillation from the general to the specific. For example, in the WILL phase of the GROW model, I may ask a client “How committed are you to …?” or “So – what will you do for next time?” These questions follow deep analysis rather than inviting it. They draw strands together and summarise a plan into a clear, crisp commitment to do things.

So there is a spectrum of “openness” in coaching questions, and those nearer the open end are generally more useful. But there is far more to effective questioning in coaching than asking open questions.

Leading questions are those which indicate that the questioner has a preferred answer. For example: “Do you really believe that?” indicates that the coach does not believe that – and further more – that the coach thinks the client should not believe it either. Such questions are not really questions – but expressions of opinion. They direct the client into the coach’s way of thinking, they devalue the client’s viewpoint, and they are prejudicial. They have no place in the coach’s questioning toolbox.

Some of the most powerful questions are those which challenge the accepted beliefs within a client’s mental world. It’s sometimes said that if you ask a fish how warm the water is, he’ll ask, “What is water?”. Zoological improbabilities aside, the point is that we often don’t see what surrounds us in our lives. It’s so much a part of our environment that it is accepted without question and may not be perceived at all. Mapping this to the coaching situation – those pandemic elements in a client’s mind are beliefs about the world and themselves. “Beliefs” are those items of knowledge, which are accepted without proof. They are “known” to be true. They may be so much a part of the client’s thinking that they are not even recognised as thoughts at all – they are simply “the way things are”.
I have an example from my own coaching practice. My client wanted to improve her very poor relationship with her ailing, difficult mother. I asked my client what her options were, and she came up with a very small list of poor candidates, and could not be squeezed to improve it! To encourage progress, I asked my client to forget about her mother for a moment, and instead, to imagine she’d just found a long-lost aunt. I asked her to think about how she would build a relationship with that aunt. The barriers fell! From her resolute stance: “It’s hopeless, have no good options here, we’ll just endure it until she dies”, my client re-discovered chocolates, flowers, frequent visits, dinners out, long walks, shopping trips, help with household chores, greetings cards, letters, displays of affection, patience, increasing access to her baby, and more. Referring back to my fish analogy, what we did was to find the water and take its temperature. We found that it was COLD! Through this “thought experiment” my client was freed to think of her mother as a woman, and so remove all the assumptions, beliefs and behaviours relating to her mother, which had hitherto locked this miserable relationship into its place over so many years.

Generally, a coach will concern herself with finding and exploring beliefs that do not serve the client well. The so-called “self-limiting beliefs”. These beliefs are usually acquired in childhood – through parenting and schooling experiences. Whilst a mature client may have acquired an adult’s intellect they may still be operating from beliefs acquired, irrationally, at the age of seven. Examples of self-limiting beliefs concerning the self are “I am ugly/stupid/no good with numbers/can’t sing/forgetful/will never amount to much”. Self-limiting beliefs about the world include “people are fundamentally selfish/evil/cruel”, “ordinary/nice people are not successful”, “it’s selfish to prioritise my own wishes over those of others”. “Coaches listen for evidence of these beliefs. Through careful questioning, they bring them to the surface and invite the client to explore them. I have lived with far too many of these. On a trivial level, I realised only recently (I’m 44), that I don’t really hate cats at all. But my father did, very vocally, and often. And sometimes with the aid of a catapult! And I absorbed it, and held it to be true. Even more bizarrely, I “hate” watching kissing on the TV ? Or do I? Certainly, he did, and I simply soaked it up as a child, and I’ve held it to be true – without ever having examined it - ever since. I’m currently hammering through the process of erasing this one. The reflex is still there: change the channel! Look away! Say “Oh GAWD, look at that!”, but I’m self-talking this irrational reflex into destruction. These examples are trivial, but others are not. If a client believes they are unavoidably and permanently unattractive to the opposite sex, for example, then their entire lives can be crippled; their capacity for happiness miserably reduced. This is big stuff, and well worth resolving. Exactly what questions to ask must depend on the situation, but they will generally be open questions, which invite the client to talk about and around the belief being worked on. “You mentioned your wealthy uncle there. How do you feel about his wealth?”. Then perhaps later: “and how do you feel about wealthy people in general?”. Sometimes, when the client externalises the belief and hears it coming back in from their own mouth, they will have a revelation that what they said – what they thought was nonsense. Other times, further probing is necessary.

There is a related class of questions, which I call “empowering questions”. These invite the client to examine their believed limitations, which hitherto have prevented progress. Externalising these beliefs enables the client to see them for what they are (or more typically, for what they are not) and then to step over them, and into breakthrough. They can make progress of the kind they didn’t believe they were capable of. The classic question in this group is “What’s stopping you from doing X?”. Often, what follows is a list of offerings that the client will generally recognise as being non-obstacles shortly after they’re spoken. You can hear the smiling! Sometimes, it takes a little more. Perhaps a lack of money is given as a reason why a dream cannot be realised. So the coach can ask: “What would you do if money were not an obstacle?” The response that follows allows the client to mentally step over that fundamental obstacle and look around the terrain on the other side. They can try it on for fit. They can probably see that money isn’t really a showstopper after all. The generic form of this question is the magic wand invocation: “What would you do if you had a magic wand in this situation?”. The truly bizarre extension of this is “I know you don’t know how to do this, but what would you do if you did?”. It works with amazing regularity, and serves to illuminate the complex interplay between the conflicting elements of a human psyche.

“Specifying questions” are those which invite the client to move away from the general to the specific with a view to gaining clarity on an issue. This dialogue fragment will illustrate:

Client: I’m very unpopular
Coach: What leads you to feel that you’re unpopular?
Client: People at work don’t speak to me
Coach: Are you saying it’s mainly at work that you feel you’re unpopular?
Client: Yes, I suppose so
Coach: How popular are you outside of work?
Client: OK, I have lots of friends outside work, I was thinking about work
Coach: Great! At work then, who do you feel should be talking to you that isn’t?
Client: There’s a bunch of about four girls. They’re always having fun and making noise. They don’t like me.
…

The client is invited to provide specific information for the general conclusions they are voicing. Often the conclusion is too general – and not supported by the facts. With this realisation, the client can see the problem as being much smaller, with limited impact and it’s far more manageable.

“Insightful questions” are those which invite the client to deliver their insights about a situation. These can sometimes deliver the biggest movement. Examples abound “What’s in this [situation you’re clinging to but say you want to leave] for you?”, “What do you really want?”, and “What does it mean to be successful?” These question types can engage the client with a powerful resonance, which can deliver great benefits.

6. Encouragement and positivity are important ways to keep clients motivated and moving in productive ways. Almost inevitably, clients will find themselves frustrated and low from time to time. The coach should be a source of positive energy for the client, without becoming a necessary crutch. The coach’s ability help the client accurately contextualise and calibrate their feelings is a valuable resource which can keep the client on track. However, I have a personal dislike of coaches for whom everything is “fantastic” before it is even understood. I believe that such blanket labels demean the coaching relationship, erode trust and degrade the coach’s perceived integrity. Coaches should certainly be accurately positive, and they should work to re-calibrate biased negativity in their clients. And they should try to find the positives in any situation. But above all they should be honest. It should go without saying that a coach should never bring his or her own personal mood swings to the coaching session.

7. Non-judgemental coaches won’t judge the values or beliefs of their clients, which may differ radically from their own. A coach may choose to explore client values and beliefs in the usual coaching way – through questioning and listening – if these values and beliefs are not currently serving the client well. However, the coach’s opinions are not presented to the client. There may be cases in which a coach’s views are so at odds with the clients that he or she feels unwilling to coach that client further. In these cases, the relationship should be ended and the client invited to find another coach. This should be done in a way that does not leave the client with new problems!

8. Encouraging responsibility in their clients is something all coaches should be doing. Clients should be encouraged to recognise their role in determining what happens to them, moving from victim thinking and problem stating to controller thinking and solution stating.

9. Challenging coaches will try to extend their clients into new and better ways of thinking and being. There is a delicate balance to be maintained which is carefully tailored for each client. Clients should be coaxed out of their comfort zone into places where real growth can occur, but they should not be coaxed so far or so often as to become miserable and demoralised. Clients should be helped to extend themselves to fit their potential.

10. Maintaining momentum – both within individual sessions and within the ongoing coaching schedule – is another area the life coach must pay close attention to, and this is not easy. The life coach wants to provide the client with a positive experience from each session and within each coaching relationship, but they also want to promote real progress – and so it’s important to keep an eye on the clock and the calendar. Within sessions, clients may need to be gently re-focused on the issue at hand, and there may be a need to tackle a resistant problem from different angles or using different tools, in order to get the progress needed. In the broader coaching schedule, the coach wants to provide continuing positivity, energy and measurable progress for the client, and this is sometimes tough! Coaching partnerships often tackle highly resistant problems – problems which may have persisted for many years, and the client will need to step outside their comfort zone and do hard work in that new environment. This is a serious challenge.

11. Confidentiality must be maintained by the coach, and the client must know and trust that confidentiality is being maintained. Only then will they feel able to be completely open and honest about the things.

The benefits of coaching for clients

In general, the coach’s goal is to facilitate progress in the specified area(s) for the client. Since each coaching relationship is unique, with specific coaching goals, the client gains will be correspondingly disparate.

But in general terms, clients can expect to gain the following benefits:

1. A Positive Companion. The coach is a well-intentioned colleague for the journey being made. Rapport will be maintained. The client can draw strength and comfort from the relationship.

2. Goal Construction & Clarification. Some clients may present with problem statements, which a coach can help to turn into goals. Other clients will already have amorphous dreams which, again, coaching can examine, analyse, and refine into tangible, well-defined, and realistic goals.

3. Action Planning & Monitoring. Coaching will allow the client to build and execute a plan that is designed to move them closer to their goals. As execution proceeds and reality inevitably meets theory, the coach is there to provide support to keep things on track. This support takes many forms: maintaining motivation, developing a balanced perspective, staying upbeat, refining goals, exploring difficulties positively, and so on.

4. Removal of Limiting Beliefs. Through keen listening and smart questioning a coach will find, expose and explore client beliefs that do not serve them well. Removal of these beliefs will free the client to make progress towards goals.

5. Results. Through all of the above, the client should obtain progress in the topic they are being coached on.

6. Personal Growth. Through the coaching process, the client will grow personally. Their confidence, sense of power will be higher, and their understanding of the world and of themselves will be keener. They’ll acquire some new skills that will continue to serve them in their lives.

Coaching applications

It is said that coaching can be applied to any topic, and this is substantially true, with the exceptions we noted earlier (drug abuse, serious mental illness, etc.). Coaching can also be used iteratively and hierarchically to cover any problem space in sensibly sized chunks.

When discussing coaching applications, we can divide the applications into two broad categories: corporate and personal life coaching.

Corporate coaching happens when employers use coaches to improve the effectiveness of their employees. This branch of coaching is growing fast. Specific applications within the corporate environment abound: personal productivity, personal relationships, grooming, and so on. It has been shown that coaching combined with training boosts the effectiveness of that training from about 25% to 88%, though exactly how you measure this is beyond me.

Personal coaching covers everything that isn’t corporate coaching, and that covers pretty much every aspect of human existence.

Very commonly, coaching is used to help clients to change the path of their working lives. This might mean gaining a promotion, finding a new job, finding a new career, or starting a new business. Even within the same job, clients can be helped to gain more respect from their colleagues, or to build better relationships with specific individuals.

Health lifestyle is another popular area of personal life coaching. Clients may seek coaching for weight loss, taking up a sport, quitting a destructive habit, and so on. However, as noted earlier, serious medical conditions are not suitable topics for coaching.

Relationship management is another popular area which clients ask for coaching in. They may want to find their life partner or grow their social set or change its emphasis, improve a particular relationship, move away from a relationship or a class of relationships.

Fulfilment of personal dreams is another popular coaching theme. Clients may want to write a book, travel the world, build their own house, emigrate, parachute, and bungee jump. Not necessarily in that order…

Personal growth is another popular area for coaching to work on. Clients may want to be more tolerant, less angry, more assertive, more focussed, more energetic, or less stressed. They may want to take up a creative hobby, they may just want to grow somehow.

Then there are the quite prosaic coaching topics. Clients may want to run a tidier home, to manage their finances better, to find a nicer home or a newer car.

The GROW model of coaching, is entirely generic. It is a process, which can be applied to almost any human aspiration.

Coaching Styles

As mentioned earlier, there may be as many coaching styles as there are coaches. Some elements of coaching style will be intrinsic to the coach and their personal make-up. Other elements will be embedded in the coach through training and personal experience. The coach will select other elements for the task in hand.

Coaching styles are often analysed with reference to a push/pull spectrum, which is defined by, among others, Downey . This spectrum traverses the extremes of the PUSH style, where the coach solves problems and edicts solutions, to the PULL style, where the coach provides support but not answers nor suggestions for a client – instead, enabling them to solve their own problem.

The Coaching Academy is a firm advocate of the pull style, and strongly directs that coaches do not make suggestions. It is sometimes said that the coach should be a neutral conduit – a blank sheet of paper - providing no content of their own, simply facilitating the clear thinking of the clients. We explored the reasons for this earlier, and an old adage seems apposite: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime”. (Is this the same fish that is ignorant of the water surrounding it, one wonders…life coaching, it seems, is a fishy business). As life coaches, we want to encourage growth inside our clients, from which life changes can flow. In any case, imposed solutions don’t always embed well; they can generate defensive behaviours, sabotaging behaviours, and resentments; they may not maximise client drive, and they may damage the client’s self-esteem.

For all that, some high profile coaches in the real world often stray far from the Pure Pull end of the spectrum. Fiona Harrold is a clear example of someone who is into serious pull. She frequently asks leading questions, makes suggestions and issues directives . She is very successful.

Cheryl Richardson has a different coaching style. In her book Take Time for Your Life she takes an approach with more pull than push. From many years in practical coaching, she has identified a set of common problems faced by many of her clients. From these she has designed a set of exercises designed to allow her clients to explore these problem areas, and to discover useful ways of removing them.

There is more to any coaching style than its position on the push/pull axis. Each coach will include a different kit of coaching elements. Some coaches work purely through conversation during coaching sessions. Within that conversation, they will use a different mix of question types as discussed earlier. Others will prescribe exercises or suggest books to read. Some coaches will stick rigidly to the GROW model, closing each session with a clean list of tasks to be accomplished for next time, whilst others will adopt an informal conversational style and may not prescribe “homework” at all. Coaching styles also differ in the degree of ownership taken by the coach. Some coaches take full ownership of the coaching agenda; once the topic is defined they plot a course and steer the client to it. Other coaches do not. My current coach starts each week with the question “So, what’s happening with you?” and takes it from there. She does not necessarily tie our coaching sessions together into a larger game plan, preferring instead, to take her lead from me each week. In fact, we do follow a larger game plan, but it feels more like mine, and each week, her question to me, invites me to reflect on all that is in my life, and to re-acknowledge my chosen focus. I don’t know if this is intentional or not, but It works for me!

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is a large area that resists succinct definition. It examines how we think - our habits, the role of words and language, programming, conflicts, memory, mental filters, and more. O’Connor & Seymour’s “three minute seminar” says essentially, that NLP is about knowing what you want, seeing what you’re getting, and changing what you do until you get what you want. Consequently NLP is centrally relevant to the coaching arena. NLP provides a key set of tools for some coaches – others don’t use it at all.

It’s important to remember that any coaching process must operate via a personal relationship, between the client and the coach. Humans are diverse in their personalities, abilities, beliefs, preferences and values. So maintaining a coaching style that strengthens the coaching relationship is important and can be difficult. We saw in the section on rapport how a coach can select their style of language to engage the dominant style of their client.

The coach may also select style elements to suit the kind of coaching she is engaging in (corporate, personal, etc.), the client she faces, the topic they are addressing, the point they are at, and the current condition of their rapport. That style will move over the course of a coaching relationship – and may even change within the course of a single session.

Finally, in our discussion of coaching styles, we should recognise that straight life coaching is only a part of the huge subject of personal development. There are many ways to engage a human mind and to inspire or guide it to a better life. Some of these offer useful ingredients to the coach. For an inspirationally positive boost in life outlook a coach good do a lot worse than to recommend a Richard Wilkins seminar or one of the growing number of Chicken Soup books. To inject courage and context, why not recommend Susan Jeffers’ book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway? To change beliefs, coaches can borrow from the world of affirmations to set exercises for the client, or they may prescribe a reading dose of Helmstetter or Hay. The bibliography lists many other books, which can be used in whole through prescribed reading, or in part through borrowed exercises or quoted passages. The TV world is now growing its awareness and its output in the personal development area. My personal passion is to increase human effectiveness through group coaching experiences.

So there is a large and growing body of information and a variety of formats from which we can draw.

Conclusion

Life coaching is still very new. Most people I speak to have never heard of it. But it is a service whose time has come. There seems to be a natural flow of development in societies that we can see at work, in various stages, in the different nations of the world today. As we climb up Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”, we move through rural and into industrialised existences we leave our preoccupation with survival behind and find time for recreation, self esteem and self actualisation. Life coaching supports these higher levels in common-sense, practical ways.

In the months and years to come, Life Coaching will sweep the country, and the country will be the better for it.

Bibliography

1. The 10-Minute Life Coach, Fiona Harrold, Hodder/Mobius
2. Take Yourself to the Top, Laura Berman Fortgang, Thorsons
3. What to Say When You Talk To Yourself, Shad Helmstetter, Thorsons
4. Introducing NLP, Joseph O’Connor & John Seymour, Thorsons
5. Notes from a Friend, Tony Robbins, Pocket Books
6. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey, Simon & Schuster
7. Take Time for Your Life, Cheryl Richardson, Bantam Books
8. Be Your Own Life Coach, Fiona Harrold, Coronet
9. Effective Coaching, Myles Downey, Texere
10. You Can Heal Your Life, Louise L. Hay, Hay House
11. Self-Therapy, Janette Rainwater, Crucible
12. First Things First, Stephen R. Covey, Simon & Schuster
13. Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, Bloomsbury
14. Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers, Arrow
15. Mindfulness Meditation for everyday life, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Piatkus
16. In The Meantime, Iyanla Vanzant, Simon & Schuster
17. Way of Meditation, Christina Feldman, Thorsons
18. Getting Things Done, Roger Black, Michael Joseph
19. 60 Ways to Heal your Life, Lynda Field, Element
20. The Manual, Mick Cooper & Peter Baker, Thorsons
21. Dare to Connect, Susan Jeffers, Piatkus
22. Principle Centred Leadership, Stephen R. Covey, Simon & Schuster
23. How To Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie, Cedar
24. The Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck, Arrow
25. How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Dale Carnegie, Cedar
26. One-Minute Stress Management, Dr. David Lewis, Cedar
27. Making Friends, Andrew Matthews, Media Masters
28. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl, Washington Square Press
29. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, Richard Carlson, Hodder & Stoughton
30. Chicken Soup for the Soul, Canfield & Hansen, Vermillion
31. Do It! John-Roger & Peter McWilliams, Prelude Press

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