“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”
Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
Coaching is often confused with mentoring. Both, typically, are development techniques based on 1-to-1 conversations. But to my mind, where mentoring is more about the mentor advising or telling the mentee, coaching is much more about the coach creating a safe space for the coachee, then listening deeply, and responding with the right questions. To put it in greatly oversimplified terms, mentors tell, coaches ask.
Why is the latter approach so much more powerful?
We retain learning far better if we are the instigators of that learning. We retain it less well if we collaborate on the insights, and less well still if we are simply told what to do. The conclusions we reach ourselves are more deeply rooted in who we are, rather than who others think we should be, and so they resonate far more strongly.
The coaching session, then, is a place where a coach provides the coachee with the space and time they need to deeply explore themselves and their situation, with a view to effecting lasting change.
And the more the coach can get out of the coachee’s way in that process, the better.
In her book, Simplifying Coaching, Claire Pedrick uses this wonderful quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to express this concept:
“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”
Put another way, the goal in coaching is simplicity, whilst recognizing that simple isn’t easy.
This, to me, is the core of what a coach does.
But I believe the power of coaching goes a great deal further than the coaching session itself. We’ll explore that power in Part 2…
