What is coaching?
How can coaching be defined and what does it try to do?
Put simply, coaching enables a person or group of people to move from where they are to where they want to be through a process of empowered, client-owned reflection, decision and action. Key to the aim of coaching is self-discovery, awareness and change. Coaching does not stop at reflection – it moves from discovery, to decision and then to action. These three aspects mark it out as a particularly solutions-focused process.
Underlying all forms of coaching are certain principles which generate its powerful impact. Drawing upon a number of schools of thinking, they can be summarised as:
Non-advisory: coaching encourages the client/coachee to dig deeper for their own solutions recognising that the coach does not necessarily have the right answers.
Action-oriented: coaching aims to create change and tangible results outside of the coaching environment.
Empowering: coaching should ultimately leave the coachee with greater skills of self-management for future success.
Non-judgemental: once the coach agrees to work with the coachee, then the coach ceases to judge the decisions or actions of the coachee but instead creates a conversation that enables self-scrutiny.
Measurable: coaching needs to be measurable in its impact by focusing on clearly defined goals and outcomes.
Equal: the relationship between coach and coachee is one of mutual respect and trust with a shared ambition to generate the desired results from coaching.
Within that framework of principles, there are many approaches you will learn as a coach to help the client create awareness, decision and change. Your skill will be blending these to support the client to achieve the outcomes they way whether that's in their work, home life, relationships or another area of life.
In short, coaching is a hugely powerful conversational process that succeeds in unlocking a client's true potential.
In their own words
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What types of coaching are there?
Whilst coaching is still a relatively new profession, there has been a wealth or research and development which has led to different styles of coaching emerging.
One of the most well known styles of coaching is solutions-focused coaching which supports the client to work towards a goal and focus on what works. NLP has also had a strong impact on coaching for some time. More recently, however, there has been a movement towards psychotherapy influenced coaching which seeks to explore deeper challenges. And so we see cognitive behavioural coaching, Gestalt coaching and the development of existentialism and transactional analysis amongst others into coaching.
Many of the old schools of coaching remain entrenched in the simplest models whilst in fact coaching has moved on. That’s why the Smart School has developed an integrative approach to coaching.
What is integrative coaching?
Integrative coaching is a powerful blending of the very best of a range of approaches which allow our coaches a flexibility of coaching style unrivalled in others schools. Where many of the old training companies are still stuck in the early days of coaching, we have drawn from the very latest thinking from coaching psychology, change psychology and coaching models to produce a unique approach.
The integrative approach allows for coaches to work across the range of coaching outcomes of performance, development and transformation with a seamless style.
Integrative coaching recognizes the simple truth that no one model or theory is the best but that each offers a particular quality which can add to the overall coaching skill of the individual coach.
How is coaching unique?
Coaching is unique in the helping professions in its role in facilitating self-discovery and learning.
That’s not to say other approaches such as mentoring, counseling, consulting or training don’t do this. They certainly do and there can be a strong crossover in these fields.
But coaching fundamentally works on the basis that it creates self-discovery and empowerment. By remaining largely non-advisory and forward looking it helps the client move towards a change that is found within them. The coach’s role is to draw this out through questions and feedback which challenge, provoke, support, help and encourage the client to look past problems and seek change across the range of thinking, emotions and practical outcomes.
Very simply it can be characterised as forward looking, change oriented and action focused although in practice different styles of coaching achieve different kinds of change.
