When I’m
thinking about Coaching the first thing which comes to my mind is
« help ». Indeed, Coaching is helping someone, and there are
different ways of coaching/helping: individual coaching, company coaching, team
coaching, life coaching, love coaching … To me, it is important to consider all
those different ways of coaching as different aspects of a big whole. They are
complementary. For instance, it is hard to dissociate the personality of an
individual and his behavior as a team member. Both are linked so it involves
team and individual coaching. One of the tricky things with coaching is that it
is easy to get confused between coaching, psychology, psychotherapy … Of
course, these domains are close but, in my understanding so far, coaching is
designed to help voluntary people for a specific problem (new CEO, new job …)
and for a set and usually short period of time.
A good
coach is someone who knows how to listen actively in order to understand on
what the coachee needs help. He doesn’t only listen to what is said explicitly
but implicitly too. That is a hard skill to develop and I think one really
develops it with experience. I like to compare the coach as a mirror for the
coachee. He is here to reflect something unseen by the coachee. In order to do
that a good coach needs to be good enough to place himself as an exterior observer
of the conversation. In other words the coach has to be a neutral observer of
the whole conversation, of the relationship between himself and the coachee, of
his own reactions and attitudes and, of course, of the coachee. I think that
those skills are taught from someone who has experience thanks to a learning
process first. Later on, the coach has to put those skills into practice and
can only become a good coach through experience which will help developing
those skills. The coach has to have sort of a “toolbox” with pre-learnt methods
of reactions for specific event which happened to the coachee (dismissal, mourning…).
Moreover, coaching has to bring concrete and measurable results. Of course,
these results may not come instantaneously but in the medium or long run they
have to be noticeable.
A good
coach has to know himself very well in order to avoid interferences in the
complex analysis process we described in the last paragraph. It could be easy
for a coach to be biased by his own “dark side feelings”. That is why a coach
has to constantly work on his own personal development and to take a new look
at him in order to avoid those bad influences. Finally because of the close
relationship between the coach and the coachee it is very important that the
coach respects a high professional ethics level. Indeed, if the relationship
between the coach and the coachee is not based on trust, a good coaching
process will not happen and no substantial improvement can be noticed.
