What is Coaching?

What is coaching?

Being a Courage Coach is no different than being a music teacher or workshop presenter; it merely focuses in a more complete way. Coaching is life planning; it is a journey driven by passion. The coach is someone who partners with the client to be a vision builder and value shaper. A coach is someone who holds you accountable for the design of your life, helping you make sure you really do live up to your potential. A coach does not tell you what to do. The coach asks questions to help you find your own unlocked solutions. A coach:

• Empowers you to transform who you are and reinvent yourself by how your frames of reference, thinking and behavior produce unintended consequences.
• Encourages you to surface and question the way you have framed points of view about yourself, others or your circumstances, with the idea of creating a fundamental shift, such as how you view conflict or being assertive.
• Guides you to take effective action (Peter Drucker calls it “making strengths productive”).
• Helps you determine what you really want to do—your personal “calling.”

 A Coach asks: “What kind of work/life represents your passion?”

Then the coach:

• Leads people to live in “breakthrough thinking”—visible changes in human behavior.
• Designs goals to get you out of the intent that keeps you in there existing skill-set (instead of being able to think, plan and act from what will produce a breakthrough).
• Creates a vision based on a new future. Breakthrough goals are the key to the coaching relationship.
• Understands the process of dialogue, where dialogue is a conversation in which there is a free flow of meaning in a group and diverse views and perspectives are encouraged.
• Understands distinctions in communication styles.
• Incorporates the five linguistic speech acts.
• Integrates assessment tools to appreciate “what makes you tick,” how to “manage-up” in the workplace, how to listen better, or to move through change.
• Accentuates the strengths to “operate at the next level” (a coach does not focus or deal with psychological therapy or emotional pathologies like a therapist).