What is coaching to me?

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.