What Is Coaching?

What is coaching?

Coaching is a relatively new profession.

It started out in the United States around the mid 1980s and gradually spread to Europe, South America and Japan. Today it is the most effective method to develop individual potential and to reach specific objectives.

A coach helps people to change themselves and to remould their way of being, thinking and acting. The coach challenges and supports clients to achieve high levels of performance and at the same time to bring out the best in themselves.

Coaching is a partnership between a coach and a client (coachee) and based on a series of conversations at pre-set times. During these conversations, the coach:

•helps the coachee to focus on his real goals, to explore new opportunities or options, to remove any barriers and to create a plan of action to reach those goals successfully;

•stimulates the coachee to make the commitment to do more than he would have managed alone;

•asks the coachee to work on his natural talents and strong points and helps him to develop his potential for more long-lasting and satisfying results;

•helps the coachee to keep focused to reach what he really desires more quickly;

•provides the tools, support and structure to achieve more. The coachee chooses the topics to tackle in the conversation and during the coaching relationship and it is the coach's job to follow the coachee's objectives.

The focus on action is central to the coaching process. The coachee and coach agree on how to reach the goals and the coach makes requests so that the coachee makes the commitment to progress to achieve the results expected. This assumption of responsibility is what makes coaching so effective.

The most common coaching specialisations are:

•Personal Coaching

•Business Coaching

•Corporate & Executive Coaching

Personal Coaching

The literal meaning of “coaching” is “transporting” someone from one place to another.

The element common to all areas of coaching is represented by the use that individuals make of it to move forward and achieve what they desire or to generate change.

Personal Coaching has now become a tool used by anyone who wants to tackle changes in a specific area of their life, or to raise their quality of life in general.

The Personal Coach usually works with individuals in the areas of personal self-realisation and development, relations with others, life planning, and financial independence, but also on work and career questions.

In practice, the coach intervenes through weekly sessions one-to-one or by telephone, helps the coachee to keep focused on his objectives, provides instruments and methodologies to reach more demanding goals than those that would have been set alone.

The coach helps to bring out the best in the coachee, making him aware of his own potential and enabling him to draw the most from an opportunity or to accelerate his growth.

The coach will provoke and stimulate the coachee to bring out his real ambitions, his needs and will try to make the coachee responsible for the quality of his own personal and professional life.

Business Coaching

The term Business Coaching is used to describe coaching with entrepreneurs of small and medium-sized companies,