What is Coaching?
There are various types of coaching, often delivered by coaches who have focused on a particular field of expertise from a combination of their own experience alongside specific training. The most recognised forms of coaching are executive coaching, career coaching and life coaching.
Coaching is a structured relationship between a trained professional coach and an individual or team to achieve desired and achievable outcomes, as defined in the assessment sessions. This is helped along with a toolkit of skills to get the maximum impact from the sessions. This can include: analysis and assessment of the client’s needs, examining values and motivation, setting definable and measurable goals, creating a focused action plan and using validated behavioural change tools and techniques to assist them to develop competencies and remove blocks to achieve valuable and sustainable changes in their professional and personal life.
Professional coaching is an integrative approach founded on a mixture of skills from the helping professions, management and leadership theory, behavioural psychology and many other psychological schools of thought.
A thorough, integrative coaching model can encapsulate personal development, beliefs, values, attitudes, emotions, motivation levels and adult and social learning, as well as personal and organizational dynamics and defenses. Basically, all that life can throw at us!
Principles of behavior based coaching have developed over recent years from the fields of evidence based psychology and validated and proven organizational change principles.
The ultimate goal of coaching is to help individuals develop internal and external structures that help them achieve the success they want in all aspects of their life, from personal life to career. Much of this is created through coaching sessions by focusing on increasing potential by exploring and expanding their sense of what is possible.
Coaches encourage individuals to develop the necessary skills, attitudes and knowledge that will help them develop action plans to meet goals. In the coaching process coaches are seen as collaborators that work with the individual by tackling obstacles such as time management, organization, problem solving and navigating through the learning curve by using support, encouragement, teaching skills and goal setting.