What is COACHING?
“Coaching is the self-actualization technology for the twenty-first century that enables people to realize their full potential.”
- Dr. L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Coaching is a process that enables people to achieve their full potential. It is about facilitating through questioning, giving feedback and operating as an expert in process or structure about how we run our own brains for more effective performances.
Coaching is all about assisting people to make real and lasting change by facilitating the exploration of needs, motivations, desires, skills, and though processes.
In Coaching we utilize Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and the Neuro-Semantics (NS) Models to facilitate and focus on change. We believe that people have all the resources they need and that an expert in facilitation will enable unleashing of potential.
To be an expert in coaching does not necessitate being an expert in the content, the coach’s expertise is the process. It necessitates becoming an expert at a higher level, at a meta level of awareness.
Coaching is often confused with various other methodologies such as training, mentoring, counselling & consulting. Coaching is a complete methodology with its own unique skill set. To highlight the differences, let’s look at various disciplines:
Training
Training is a skill-based process for teaching, educating, and leading a person through a process where he or she is enabled to perform the new skills.
Mentoring
Mentoring is a process of focusing on a particular skill that a particular individual has. It involves giving advice, guidance, and sharing one is own personal story. In mentoring there is an unequal relationship, senior mentor passing on specific information to a younger and less experienced person.
Counselling / Therapy
Therapy focuses on problems, their sources, the symptoms that result from those problems, how people are broken and dysfunctional, diagnosis of such disorders, and so focuses on healing hurts and bringing resolution to personal pain. It implies that there is something wrong with the person.
Consulting
Consulting involves giving advice and using one’s own expertise in a given field to inform (tell) the client what to do. While consulting can be facilitative, it can also involve procedures, and helping a client do something new.
Hypnosis
Hypnosis involves inducing someone into a hypnotic state by using words, gestures and tones. It is a skill of speaking and communicating to induce trances.
