Getting a Corner on Excellence

Coaching for Mastery of Life

The coaching profession has rapidly evolved beyond sports and music in recent years mainly to fill voids left by corporate down-sizing that has eliminated traditional in-company mentors. Further, education – at home and in the schools – has not kept up with the ever-increasing challenges of the "real world" with its unprecedented acceleration of time and technology.

Consequently, coaching has become part of corporate value-added strategy to train and retain skilled labor or higher executives in essential non-academic skills such as building rapport, communications and team work. Fortunately, progressive universities and even secondary education are beginning to realize the necessity of preparing their students for a way of being and relating in their future rather than just focusing on the transmission of intellectual information or technical skills.

What is coaching?

Coaching is an interactive goal-oriented process of one-on-one dialogue between the coachee ("the Explorer") and the coach ("the Guide") focused on performance or behavior. It is practiced in the short-term but produces long-term, measurable, sustainable benefits to the individual and the corporation.

The coach's role is to catalyze the Explorer's know-how into action and break through certain information-to-action barriers that we all create in our brains. The coach does not provide expertise in content. He is simply the catalyst – the all-important link between "knowing" (savoir) and "doing" (faire). Symbolically, he is the hyphen in savoir-faire.

What are the benefits of coaching?

Depending on the coachee's or company's specific goals, some of the benefits of coaching are enhanced self-awareness and self-confidence; improved performance and clarity in thought and action; increased productivity, motivation and energy; and more incisive decision-making and analysis of people and situations.  These qualities lead to higher levels of success, improved results and, in general, transformational self-empowerment which in turn makes happier individuals and teams that are more likely to work effectively together.   The few corporate coaching statistics available show that return on investment is usually between 600 and 1000%. Consequently, it is an error to assume that coaching is "too expensive" to use widely in either personal or professional life.

How does coaching work?

Coaching is at its most effective in face-to-face sessions but may also be conducted by telephone or by e-mail in certain instances. Sessions may vary from 45 minutes to 2 hours or more, depending on the availability of the coachee and his breakthrough threshold. It will take a coachee two to three hours to get comfortable with the process, then another three hours for the coachee to work up to speed. Breakthrough can normally be expected only after 8 or 10 hours, so this is considered the minimum time investment recommended for a coaching program. Often it is advisable to renew for another 10 hours in order to insure the sustainability of the effort.

What kind of coaching?

Different adjectives are commonly used to define specialties within coaching: life coaching, executive coaching, professional coaching, career coaching, corporate coaching, team coaching, and even love coaching or relationship coaching and "Relocoaching®" used to coach expatriates through job transfers and relocation.

The truth is that a well-trained professional coach can do all or any of that. A "good" coach is one with specific coaching training, a broad mastery of specific coaching techniques (listening, questioning, mirroring, NLP and Ericsonian hypnosis, for instance), a broad range of personal life experience (therefore often an older person) whose open, positive attitude allows him or her to establish strong rapport with the coachee in an atmosphere of trust and acceptance, and who can convey enthusiasm for personal achievement, thereby obtaining and sustaining the coachee’s momentum toward a specific goal.

Can anyone be coached?

The answer is a stark, resounding no. The old adage that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink is definitely true with coaching. Every self-respecting coach will conduct a careful assessment during the initial alliance-making meeting with his client to determine his level of "coachability". The prerequisites for accepting a coaching mission are that the coachee manifest:

· receptivity to new perspectives
· openness to provocative questioning
· resilience to confrontation
· acceptance to moving down a path toward goals and
· enough confidence in and respect for the coach to reach rapport.

The best way you can find out if you're coachable is to try it.