The Focal Points of the
360° Achievement Coaching Compass
Lead to Achievement
How Coaching Works
Using...
...Achievement Coaching helps clients create, assert, affirm and sustain:
Additionally, clients are empowered by greater personal integrity and bolstered confidence.
- the power of collaboration,
- creativity,
- practical best-practices for workflow engineering and performance improvement,
- cognitive-behavioral interventions, and
- project management mastery...
...Achievement Coaching helps clients create, assert, affirm and sustain:
- Clarity, Focus, and Purpose;
- Commitment and Accountability;
- Momentum toward Goals and Objectives; and
- Achievement of Milestones and Rewards.
Additionally, clients are empowered by greater personal integrity and bolstered confidence.
Effects of Coached Collaboration
It is human nature for an individual to become comfortable with discomfort and to procrastinate—even when s/he knows better. It is the habit of the mind to be preoccupied with the past and fearful of the future. Your willingness to strive for achievement beyond the foibles of the mind and to exceed your basic human nature improves greatly when a trusted partner engages with you to create and support your goals. "Coached collaboration" differs from mere collaboration in that a client's investment of trust with a coach creates a uniquely powerful and productive synergy. Several effects of coached collaboration that create and sustain change for individuals are...
The Partnership/Commitment Effect: It is a phenomenon of the human condition that commitment to intentions and goals intensifies and partnership is generated when one individual (the coaching client) invests his/her trust with another individual (the coach) and chooses to engage in collaboration.
The Awareness Effect: Peaked awareness, clarity, reflection, and heightened creativity are achieved for the coaching client through coached collaboration.
The Focus Effect: Collaborating with a trusted partner to give attention to the present moment and real-time circumstances produces focus on what is really going on and what has greatest priority.
The Discovery Effect: Coached collaboration allows for the realization of questions and the discovery of answers that cannot otherwise be realized if an individual attempts to explore alone.
The Revelation Effect: Engaging in collaboration with a coach reveals to the client that which the client did not know that s/he did not know. In other words: You can't have a breakthrough about what there is to do to succeed if you don't become aware of what you didn't know that you didn't know.
The Accountability Effect: Responsibility, confidence, keeping one's word to others, and follow-through increases and the client does not settle for that which does not work when engaged in coached collaboration.
The Momentum Effect: Coached collaboration fosters rapid turnover of methods and action-plans resulting in fast and efficient discovery of the best methods, processes, and action-plans to achieve the most desirable results.
The Breakthrough Effect: Each of us manifest beliefs and behaviors that seem second-nature, automatic, and sometimes even unconscious to us. When coached collaboration is at play, we have the unique opportunity to expose and become aware of judgements and attachments hiding-out in our "blind spots." Amazing breakthroughs happen when we become aware of and take responsibility for what's been going-on in our blind spots!
The Partnership/Commitment Effect: It is a phenomenon of the human condition that commitment to intentions and goals intensifies and partnership is generated when one individual (the coaching client) invests his/her trust with another individual (the coach) and chooses to engage in collaboration.
The Awareness Effect: Peaked awareness, clarity, reflection, and heightened creativity are achieved for the coaching client through coached collaboration.
The Focus Effect: Collaborating with a trusted partner to give attention to the present moment and real-time circumstances produces focus on what is really going on and what has greatest priority.
The Discovery Effect: Coached collaboration allows for the realization of questions and the discovery of answers that cannot otherwise be realized if an individual attempts to explore alone.
The Revelation Effect: Engaging in collaboration with a coach reveals to the client that which the client did not know that s/he did not know. In other words: You can't have a breakthrough about what there is to do to succeed if you don't become aware of what you didn't know that you didn't know.
The Accountability Effect: Responsibility, confidence, keeping one's word to others, and follow-through increases and the client does not settle for that which does not work when engaged in coached collaboration.
The Momentum Effect: Coached collaboration fosters rapid turnover of methods and action-plans resulting in fast and efficient discovery of the best methods, processes, and action-plans to achieve the most desirable results.
The Breakthrough Effect: Each of us manifest beliefs and behaviors that seem second-nature, automatic, and sometimes even unconscious to us. When coached collaboration is at play, we have the unique opportunity to expose and become aware of judgements and attachments hiding-out in our "blind spots." Amazing breakthroughs happen when we become aware of and take responsibility for what's been going-on in our blind spots!
Standard Format for Coaching
For standard one-to-one Achievement Coaching, a client meets with an Achievement Coach confidentially for 90-minute meetings at least as often as every three weeks. During meetings, client and coach create continuous improvement by consistently re-evaluating and evolving an on-going Achievement Agenda. Typically, for coaching of workgroups and project teams, meetings are also required for on-going evaluation and coordination of a Master Strategic Plan. Meeting locations are arranged as appropriate.
The Case for Using an Achievement Coach
We all have our weak suits. And some of them may be moving into the area of mission-critical or values-critical. And there are things we all need to learn to give us the edge we want or to unlock the potential we strive to fulfill. One of the two greatest values of a coach has always been the consultant's role to give us new and useful points of view. Perspective is the slipperiest and most valuable commodity on this planet. No matter where you are, no matter how low you go, your viewing point about where you are and where you want to go and how you could get there will be a priceless commodity. We need to see "outside the box." We need to hear non-invested opinions about what we're doing and how we're doing it. This is, and always will be, the value of consultants.
But if we want it to happen now, and we want it to stick, we need to put ourselves in the hands of a coach who coaxes and coaches us through the new behaviors in real time in the real world. We often need professional help in real time to install new behaviors and to get and keep us at the enhanced levels we want to function. It's about consistently applied high-leverage responses and activities that happen on cruise control. It's about what we can be trusted to be doing, by others and (most importantly) by ourselves, when the pressure of the real world is at hand. To rapidly make those kinds of permanent changes and enhancements to our life-styles and work-styles, we need models, mentors, and most importantly, personal coaches, whom we spend real time with, getting us to do the real things we really need to be doing, from now on.
We need to groove new grooves in our patterns. The fastest way is to commit to a coach whose job and contract is to hold a focus and a format that helps us retread. It could be a new way to think, a new way to feel, and/or a new way to act and respond. But if it's a "new way" at all, it's unfamiliar territory to the unconscious part of us, and it needs to be made much more friendly to our basic nervous system. We want to become "unconsciously competent." We know that ultimately we need to be just doing it ourselves as a way of life and work. But we have to acknowledge that the path to that freedom is not free.
This conventional behavioral model identifies four stages of moving to permanently changed conduct:
(1) Unconscious incompetence
"I don't even know that I don't know what I don't know."
(2) Conscious incompetence
"I now know where I ought to be and what I ought to be doing, but I don't know how to get myself there, or get myself to do it."
(3) Conscious competence
"I know now how to make it happen, and I know I can do it, but I have to keep reminding myself to do it, and I fall off the wagon regularly."
(4) Unconscious competence
"I just do it. I only think about it when I don't do it, and I then just go do it."
Coaching is a high-leveraged way to get from stage (2) or stage (3) to stage (4).
Professionals must master critical personal behaviors that are required in the new world of knowledge work: how to collect, process and organize all the inputs, ideas, information and commitments that are potentially relevant to their life and work.
The challenge is to frame and address the more subtle behaviors, the ones that limit or expand our effectiveness in the world. We need to do this in the same way many of us have identified physical exercise as a strategic behavior to install in our lives, for which we have found the coach we needed and wanted to have, to make it happen at a new cruising level. To commit to a hands-on, real time coach is not a sign of weakness. It is rather the indication of a sophisticated awareness of the effectiveness of leveraging the best tools to restructure our automatic response systems in ways that create ever greater opportunities.
Adapted from The David Allen Company 2002. All rights reserved.
But if we want it to happen now, and we want it to stick, we need to put ourselves in the hands of a coach who coaxes and coaches us through the new behaviors in real time in the real world. We often need professional help in real time to install new behaviors and to get and keep us at the enhanced levels we want to function. It's about consistently applied high-leverage responses and activities that happen on cruise control. It's about what we can be trusted to be doing, by others and (most importantly) by ourselves, when the pressure of the real world is at hand. To rapidly make those kinds of permanent changes and enhancements to our life-styles and work-styles, we need models, mentors, and most importantly, personal coaches, whom we spend real time with, getting us to do the real things we really need to be doing, from now on.
We need to groove new grooves in our patterns. The fastest way is to commit to a coach whose job and contract is to hold a focus and a format that helps us retread. It could be a new way to think, a new way to feel, and/or a new way to act and respond. But if it's a "new way" at all, it's unfamiliar territory to the unconscious part of us, and it needs to be made much more friendly to our basic nervous system. We want to become "unconsciously competent." We know that ultimately we need to be just doing it ourselves as a way of life and work. But we have to acknowledge that the path to that freedom is not free.
This conventional behavioral model identifies four stages of moving to permanently changed conduct:
(1) Unconscious incompetence
"I don't even know that I don't know what I don't know."
(2) Conscious incompetence
"I now know where I ought to be and what I ought to be doing, but I don't know how to get myself there, or get myself to do it."
(3) Conscious competence
"I know now how to make it happen, and I know I can do it, but I have to keep reminding myself to do it, and I fall off the wagon regularly."
(4) Unconscious competence
"I just do it. I only think about it when I don't do it, and I then just go do it."
Coaching is a high-leveraged way to get from stage (2) or stage (3) to stage (4).
Professionals must master critical personal behaviors that are required in the new world of knowledge work: how to collect, process and organize all the inputs, ideas, information and commitments that are potentially relevant to their life and work.
The challenge is to frame and address the more subtle behaviors, the ones that limit or expand our effectiveness in the world. We need to do this in the same way many of us have identified physical exercise as a strategic behavior to install in our lives, for which we have found the coach we needed and wanted to have, to make it happen at a new cruising level. To commit to a hands-on, real time coach is not a sign of weakness. It is rather the indication of a sophisticated awareness of the effectiveness of leveraging the best tools to restructure our automatic response systems in ways that create ever greater opportunities.
Adapted from The David Allen Company 2002. All rights reserved.
Return to top of the page.
Models and Methods for
Achievement Coaching
Performance Improvement (PI) technology/methodology is a systematic approach to improving productivity and competence. Moreover, PI is the systematic and systemic identification and removal of barriers to individual and organizational performance. It is the application of methods, procedures, and problem-solving strategies to realize opportunities related to the performance of people. More specifically, it is a process of analysis, selection, design, development, implementation and evaluation of programs to most cost-effectively influence human behavior and accomplishment. Ultimately, PI is a systematic combination of three fundamental processes: performance analysis, cause analysis and intervention selection—and can be applied to individuals, small groups and large organizations.
Cognitive-behavioral interventions are based on the Cognitive Model developed by the Beck Institute, which is, simply: The way we perceive situations influences how we feel emotionally. So, situations do not directly affect how a person feels emotionally, but rather, his or her thoughts in that situation result in emotions and feelings. When people are in distress, they often do not think clearly and their thoughts are distorted (or dysphoric) in some way. Cognitive-behavioral interventions help people to identify their distressing thoughts and to evaluate how realistic the thoughts are. Then they learn to change their distorted thinking. When they think more realistically, they feel better. The emphasis is also consistently on solving problems and initiating behavioral change.
Appreciative Inquiry (first developed in the doctoral program in Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University in 1980 and today sponsored in great part by the Weatherhead School of Management at CWRU) involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI is a search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often-involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. AI seeks, fundamentally, to build a constructive union between a whole people and the massive entirety of what people talk about as past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul—and visions of valued and possible futures. Taking all of these together as a gestalt, AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core”—and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized.
Routine, and even one-time, exposure to uplifting, affirmative, supportive, encouraging, and motivational events raises endorphin and serotonin levels in the blood and brain. (Serotonin is powerful vasoconstrictor associated with one’s ability to accept reality and define one’s own identity. Endorphin is any of a group of proteins with potent analgesic properties that occur naturally in the brain associated with a general state of wellness.)
Mindfulness, attention to the value of choices, and rational clarity affirms and supports physical health, mental health, and greater momentum toward achievement.
Businesses can transform how they do business and the effectiveness of performance when business leaders are committed to the excellence of their employees.
Professionals can maintain momentum and achievement in their businesses and careers when they strive for awareness and balance in their professional and personal lives.
When individuals come together in an organization and strive to maintain clarity and remain open to serendipity, then creativity, accelerated action, and better results happen.
Cognitive-behavioral interventions are based on the Cognitive Model developed by the Beck Institute, which is, simply: The way we perceive situations influences how we feel emotionally. So, situations do not directly affect how a person feels emotionally, but rather, his or her thoughts in that situation result in emotions and feelings. When people are in distress, they often do not think clearly and their thoughts are distorted (or dysphoric) in some way. Cognitive-behavioral interventions help people to identify their distressing thoughts and to evaluate how realistic the thoughts are. Then they learn to change their distorted thinking. When they think more realistically, they feel better. The emphasis is also consistently on solving problems and initiating behavioral change.
Appreciative Inquiry (first developed in the doctoral program in Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University in 1980 and today sponsored in great part by the Weatherhead School of Management at CWRU) involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI is a search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often-involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. AI seeks, fundamentally, to build a constructive union between a whole people and the massive entirety of what people talk about as past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul—and visions of valued and possible futures. Taking all of these together as a gestalt, AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core”—and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized.
Routine, and even one-time, exposure to uplifting, affirmative, supportive, encouraging, and motivational events raises endorphin and serotonin levels in the blood and brain. (Serotonin is powerful vasoconstrictor associated with one’s ability to accept reality and define one’s own identity. Endorphin is any of a group of proteins with potent analgesic properties that occur naturally in the brain associated with a general state of wellness.)
Mindfulness, attention to the value of choices, and rational clarity affirms and supports physical health, mental health, and greater momentum toward achievement.
Businesses can transform how they do business and the effectiveness of performance when business leaders are committed to the excellence of their employees.
Professionals can maintain momentum and achievement in their businesses and careers when they strive for awareness and balance in their professional and personal lives.
When individuals come together in an organization and strive to maintain clarity and remain open to serendipity, then creativity, accelerated action, and better results happen.
Return to top of the page.
The Difference Between Coaching, Therapy, and Counseling
The fundamental difference between coaching and therapy/counseling is that coaches collaborate with functioning people to excel to greater function and achievement—whereas therapists/counelors direct dysfunctional patients to treat, manage, and/or overcome dsyfunction and become functional.
Therapy (short for "psychotherapy") by definition is a treatment of an illness or disability. The focus of therapy is cause and effect of the past and “fixing” a person based on a diagnosis. Therapy is a process of healing dysfunction and is traditionally a rigid relationship whereby a doctor or licensed practitioner directs the patient applying a medical approach to resolve diagnosed conditions such as depression, anxiety, addiction, and trauma. The therapist is charged with the responsibilities of diagnosing, prescribing treatment, and healing the client. Counseling is closely related to therapy in format and approach. The fundamental difference between therapy and counseling is that counselors do not prescribe medical remedies. There are psychiatrists (doctors), licensed psychotherapists, licensed counselors and social workers who provide therapy.
There are many types of coaches: business coaches, productivity coaches, achievement coaches, career coaches, performance (such as musical and sports) coaches, and life coaches to name a few. Coaching emphasizes assessing present circumstances and then defining and achieving goals in the future. Coaching is a co-created partnership between a professional and client using a performance model of achievement. Coaching is a balanced, flexible and dynamic relationship of open, two-way communication between the coach and client. Within coached collaboration, the coach is there to support, guide and challenge the client with the setting and reaching of objectives and goals. A coach and client tend to get to know each other fairly well, sometimes even become friends, whereas such a rapport is discouraged in a clinical setting between therapist/doctor and patient.
When coaching explores personal motivations and fosters self-empowerment (as opposed to developing strategies and methods for performance improvement, productivity, business or career), then a coach is there to listen, support, challenge and ask questions to help guide the client toward taking action and to figuring out his/her answers on his/her own. The coaching philosophy is that the client is creative, resourceful and whole and has the answers within to self-discovery. A coach guides and supports the client to bring answers to the surface.
Therapy (short for "psychotherapy") by definition is a treatment of an illness or disability. The focus of therapy is cause and effect of the past and “fixing” a person based on a diagnosis. Therapy is a process of healing dysfunction and is traditionally a rigid relationship whereby a doctor or licensed practitioner directs the patient applying a medical approach to resolve diagnosed conditions such as depression, anxiety, addiction, and trauma. The therapist is charged with the responsibilities of diagnosing, prescribing treatment, and healing the client. Counseling is closely related to therapy in format and approach. The fundamental difference between therapy and counseling is that counselors do not prescribe medical remedies. There are psychiatrists (doctors), licensed psychotherapists, licensed counselors and social workers who provide therapy.
There are many types of coaches: business coaches, productivity coaches, achievement coaches, career coaches, performance (such as musical and sports) coaches, and life coaches to name a few. Coaching emphasizes assessing present circumstances and then defining and achieving goals in the future. Coaching is a co-created partnership between a professional and client using a performance model of achievement. Coaching is a balanced, flexible and dynamic relationship of open, two-way communication between the coach and client. Within coached collaboration, the coach is there to support, guide and challenge the client with the setting and reaching of objectives and goals. A coach and client tend to get to know each other fairly well, sometimes even become friends, whereas such a rapport is discouraged in a clinical setting between therapist/doctor and patient.
When coaching explores personal motivations and fosters self-empowerment (as opposed to developing strategies and methods for performance improvement, productivity, business or career), then a coach is there to listen, support, challenge and ask questions to help guide the client toward taking action and to figuring out his/her answers on his/her own. The coaching philosophy is that the client is creative, resourceful and whole and has the answers within to self-discovery. A coach guides and supports the client to bring answers to the surface.
Return to top of the page.
A Brief History of Coaching
Before coaching was defined as a profession, it was understood as a style of relating, one that has been used in a variety of settings (sports, business, and, of course, therapy) for decades. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, writing in the Harvard Business Review (April 2000), defines the coaching style as consistently positive, constructive, motivational, inspiring, and effective. Coaching is action-oriented. It gets the client moving. Coaches assist their clients to reach further, go faster, expand their vision, think big, and develop their future potential. Coaches use accountability; they want to see evidence of progress. They not only advise and consult, they also engage in ongoing relationships with clients that offer support and collaboration until the goals get implemented. Coaches help clients learn new skills, expand existing strengths, heighten self-awareness, and achieve measurable success in easier, more elegant, and faster ways than a client could alone.
During the early 1980s, due to a sea-change in the business world, this style of relating generated a separate profession. The relentless corporate downsizing saw a disappearance of a corporate culture of in-house mentoring relationships. Gone were the important executive coaching relationships of years past, where senior executives targeted junior executives and groomed them to succeed. Both senior and junior executives found themselves isolated and dealing with chaos, needing more than good advice. They needed guidance in the form of an ongoing relationship that would provide meaningful interaction. But if mentoring were to exist, it would have to be out-sourced. Enter the executive coach in the role of mentor.
Corporations first hired executive coaches to groom senior executives and improve problem managers. Executive coaches helped clients achieve corporate goals: develop better communication with staff, build more productive management teams, do strategic planning for a division, manage rapid change and multiple layoffs happening around them. But as the coaching relationships matured, the coaching became personal.
The executive/personal coach was a confidant—a trusted, independent advisor who counseled his or her executive clients how to create a balanced life and cope with emotional stress while navigating the political labyrinths of the office. Coaches heard about far more than work issues. They listened as clients discussed family problems, fears about retirement, or a search for meaning and purpose. The coach listened nonjudgmentally, asking probing questions, offering advice, solutions, encouragement, and ideas in a way that helped the executive feel supported, yet powerful.
In the 1990s, the concept of coaching found its way into the business media. Now the question being heard at some business roundtables wasn't "What is a coach?" but "Who is your coach?" With articles about coaching appearing in "Time," "Newsweek," and "New Age Magazine," interest in coaching spread beyond the corporate world. Entrepreneurs, students, artists, retirees, and working moms hired a coach to transition from one stage of life to another, to achieve peak performance, or to have a trusted sounding board.
As the millennium approached, the democratization of coaching was helped by several mass-media events, including coach Cheryl Richardson's best-selling Take Time for Your Life, Tony Robbins's motivational late-night coaching infomercials, and Oprah Winfrey's year-long "lifestyle makeovers" on her talk show. A mass audience became more familiar with the language and concepts of coaching.
Substantial energy and resources from the International Coach Federation (ICF), the professional association of the coaching world, helped build public awareness and create a market of clients for the hundreds of coaches who were graduating from coach training programs. Over a two-year period, from 1998-2000, 1000 mentions and stories were placed in national magazines and newspapers about coaching, aided by a media campaign spearheaded by the ICF and Coach University, a large coach-training organization. These organizations and others helped hundreds of their members get quoted in newspapers, interviewed on TV, and featured on radio and in magazines. As a result, during the past decade coaching developed a buzz and became the "new new thing."
The difference between a trend and a fad is that one lasts and the other doesn't. As the market for coaching grew, therapists, human resource and personnel managers, retired executives, and a wide variety of others signed up for coach training. Industry experts now estimate the total number of personal and business coaches at 10,000 and growing.
Who (Population)
Coaches attract that segment of the population economists call the "worried well"—higher-functioning adults who would rate themselves as "content," but want more or feel blocked in some area of their lives. According to Marisa Domino, Assistant Professor of Health Economics at University of North Carolina, 85% of the worried well don't seek psychotherapy or counseling even when they have personal problems, because they don't identify themselves as psychologically "ill." When the worried well want help with relationship problems, parenting concerns, career changes, boredom, or unhappiness—the same issues that cause others to seek counseling or therapy—they look for other kinds of help. The worried well, underserved by therapy, are considered a target market for coaches.
Coaching clients can be more demanding than therapy clients, bringing high expectations about the outcome of their sessions. Coaching clients don't "see" a therapist for treatment, they "hire" a coach for results, and they want to see evidence of the results. Most like to be challenged and have less patience for the slow tempo, long silences, or vague language of a process-oriented therapist. To satisfy this type of client, therapist-coaches need to be skillful, direct, get their points across clearly, and pick up the pace.
What (Purpose)
Thomas Leonard, author of The Portable Coach and one of the early founders of the coaching movement, defines coaching as a threefold process that helps people set and reach better goals, do more than they would have done on their own, and focus better so as to produce results more quickly. According to Leonard, coaches position themselves not as experts, but as equals with their clients. They see themselves as collaborative partners, ready to work in tandem with a client to solve an interesting challenge. The issues that coach and client address are rarely life-and-death, so the coach uses a less diagnostic, analytical approach. In coaching, emphasis is placed on a person's present state of mind and future potential. Action is the byword of coaching. Most coaches rely on markers for concrete outcomes, since coaching is less about process, and more about doing.
Harriett Simon Salinger, Master Certified Coach, (and a former therapist) sees the distinctions between therapy and coaching as the "therapy-to-coaching continuum." At one end of the continuum is the traditional version of psychotherapy, say psychoanalysis, and at the other end the traditional version of coaching, say sports coaching. Just looking at the ends of the continuum, one can easily discern many differences between the two approaches. In psychoanalysis, there is little expectation for a patient to take action or meet goals; uncovering unconscious material and developing insight is tantamount. The analyst is a neutral presence, non-directive, and wants to help the patient weaken defenses as a way to develop self-awareness and feel repressed emotions.
Contrast this to sports coaching, on the other extreme end of the continuum. The feelings and inner desires of the athlete are not examined; winning is the sole focus. The coach is tenaciously influential, directive, opinionated, and expressive, trying to strengthen—not weaken—defenses.
But as one starts to move toward the middle of the continuum, away from the classic approaches of psychotherapy and coaching toward the middle ground, the differences begin to blur. Helping a client to feel happy, self-actualized, and more productive?
Building a person's confidence, self-awareness, or ability to have better relationships? These goals could fit into the stated purpose of either therapy or coaching. At the very center of the continuum we might see an area of shared common territory simply described as “personal growth.” Although the differences between therapy and coaching tend to overlap in the center of the continuum, many coaches and therapists use methods that place them more toward the ends. The distinctions between therapy and coaching become sharper when we add to the discussion of "who" and "what" the other categories of where, how, and why.
Where (Setting)
Coaching is notable for its flexibility in regard to setting. Coaching sessions can and do take place in the coach's office, the client's office or workplace, a hotel, restaurant, in the field, on the phone, or over the internet. It's not necessary for a coach and his or her client to have ever met face to face for the sessions to be effective. Sessions may be regular, infrequent, or packaged to fit the terms of a specific contract.
The coach may purposefully keep the professional boundaries of the relationship loose, revealing more about self, for example, in order to diffuse transference. Traditional therapeutic guidelines such as confidentiality may or may not apply in coaching, depending on whether the coach is hired by an individual or by that individual's employer. In coaching, dual relationships may exist—the life coach may be a social friend or business associate of a client, the executive coach may play golf with a client after hours, the peak performance coach may open his or her home to house a client during a training season. For this reason, coaches often seek to keep relationships authentic and mutual, to make it possible to work within varied and changing conditions.
How (Skill Set)
Post-modern therapists and coaches both rely, at least in part, on standard cognitive-behavioral methods—asking questions, listening carefully, establishing rapport, reframing, giving advice, making suggestions, proposing assignments—to help clients think and behave differently. Whereas therapists draw on a century of methodology and development, coaches have limited approaches upon which to draw, because the field is still in its infancy. As a result, coaches often borrow from other disciplines. What distinguishes a method as a coaching tool versus a therapy tool is not just the skill set, but how it is applied, in what setting, with what population, for what intention, and with what results.
Some coaches use a set coaching model that has been developed by a coaching organization. Most coach training organizations provide students with a lot of coaching tools (assessments, checklists, exercises, programs). Other coaches design or collect their own tools and approaches. Similar to therapists, some coaches work eclectically while others use a structured approach based on pre-and post-measurements and assessments. An eclectic coach might borrow techniques from organizational development, human resources, psychotherapy, psychology, personal growth, sports, career counseling, movement specialties, or spiritual meditative practices.
Concerned about the need to make coaching a lasting profession, the ICF wisely began a catch-up effort to establish certification guidelines for coaches that would bring all the various coaching institutions into agreement in terms of who could rightly be called a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) or a Master Certified Coach (MCC). A PCC must have logged 125 hours in an accredited coaching program; been coached by a PCC or an MCC for a minimum of 10 hours over a 3-month duration; have 750 hours of direct coaching experience with clients; have letters of sponsorship from a PCC or MCC; and complete a written and oral examination. MCC requirements go further, including experience of 2500 hours of coaching.
While one does not need to be certified to work as a coach, in the future certification may become an important marker for establishing serious coaches from dilettantes. And as more coaches want to meet the ICF guidelines, more PCC's and MCC's will need to be on board to guide them through the requirements.
Training programs for coaches are not standardized at this time, although the ICF has attempted to bring programs under its accreditation. (At the time of this printing, only eight programs have received ICF accreditation.) Coaching programs have different ideas regarding curriculum and duration. Some training programs consider a student to be sufficiently trained after a few weekend workshops; others have a three-month curriculum; still others have classes and requirements that take several years to finish. Since the field is so new, no formal analyses of comparisons of training curriculums exist. Therapists wanting to become coaches have to rely on researching the existing programs themselves and then selecting the training that meets their needs.
How (Practice)
When providing coaching services, a coach pays primary attention to a client's value system and ego strength, noting behavioral patterns that are obstacles to achievement, but not delving into their origins. Instead of listening blankly, a coach silently considers strategies and, then, asks questions designed to help clients expand their vision. A coach helps them focus and stay on track, rather than encouraging free association. A coach makes specific requests for action each session and challenges clients to go beyond their comfort level to achieve more, faster. Coaching avoids an exploration of childhood issues and don't make psychological interpretations. of course, coaching clients have their own set of psychological issues; but coaching doesn’t explore them. Instead coaching aims to diffuse the transference that is a part of psychoanalytical therapy, opting for more mutuality, and directs the focus to the future, saying, "All of us have to deal with negative self-talk from time to time. Your negative self-talk is clearly getting in your way when you sit in meetings. As your coach, I'd like to support you to think more positively about yourself and have a confident demeanor. What's the best way to start?"
Coaching tends to focus on money, achievement, balance, success, the future, and passion. A coach works with clients to strategize their way through sticky business problems, make needed corrections, work smarter instead of harder, or get comfortable with a new level of professional success. Coach and client talk about topics that don't often have a chance to surface in therapy, such as optimizing one's life with grace and ease. Often, humor can be used to help lighten up the coaching sessions.
Why (Intent)
Coaching practice appeals to consultants who are searching for different ways to work with clients, and attracts clients who are searching for untraditional ways to achieve personal growth. Sometimes becoming a coach is way to integrate disparate but complementary aspects of one's professional life.
1 "So You're a Player. Do You Need A Coach?" Fortune Magazine, Feb 21, 2000
2 "Do You Need a Personal Coach?" New England Financial Journal, Jan 2000.
3 "The Good Therapist" by William Doherty and Mary Sykes Wylie, Family Therapy Networker, Nov 1995.
4 Steven Johnson, The Symbiotic Character, W.W. Norton New York, 1991.
5 "For Richer or Poorer" panel, opening presentation entitled "The Economics of Mental Health" by Marisa Domino, the American Association of Family and Marriage Therapy National Conference, Nov 2000.
Adapted from "The New Private Practice" by Lynn Grodzki, 2001. All rights reserved.
During the early 1980s, due to a sea-change in the business world, this style of relating generated a separate profession. The relentless corporate downsizing saw a disappearance of a corporate culture of in-house mentoring relationships. Gone were the important executive coaching relationships of years past, where senior executives targeted junior executives and groomed them to succeed. Both senior and junior executives found themselves isolated and dealing with chaos, needing more than good advice. They needed guidance in the form of an ongoing relationship that would provide meaningful interaction. But if mentoring were to exist, it would have to be out-sourced. Enter the executive coach in the role of mentor.
Corporations first hired executive coaches to groom senior executives and improve problem managers. Executive coaches helped clients achieve corporate goals: develop better communication with staff, build more productive management teams, do strategic planning for a division, manage rapid change and multiple layoffs happening around them. But as the coaching relationships matured, the coaching became personal.
The executive/personal coach was a confidant—a trusted, independent advisor who counseled his or her executive clients how to create a balanced life and cope with emotional stress while navigating the political labyrinths of the office. Coaches heard about far more than work issues. They listened as clients discussed family problems, fears about retirement, or a search for meaning and purpose. The coach listened nonjudgmentally, asking probing questions, offering advice, solutions, encouragement, and ideas in a way that helped the executive feel supported, yet powerful.
In the 1990s, the concept of coaching found its way into the business media. Now the question being heard at some business roundtables wasn't "What is a coach?" but "Who is your coach?" With articles about coaching appearing in "Time," "Newsweek," and "New Age Magazine," interest in coaching spread beyond the corporate world. Entrepreneurs, students, artists, retirees, and working moms hired a coach to transition from one stage of life to another, to achieve peak performance, or to have a trusted sounding board.
As the millennium approached, the democratization of coaching was helped by several mass-media events, including coach Cheryl Richardson's best-selling Take Time for Your Life, Tony Robbins's motivational late-night coaching infomercials, and Oprah Winfrey's year-long "lifestyle makeovers" on her talk show. A mass audience became more familiar with the language and concepts of coaching.
Substantial energy and resources from the International Coach Federation (ICF), the professional association of the coaching world, helped build public awareness and create a market of clients for the hundreds of coaches who were graduating from coach training programs. Over a two-year period, from 1998-2000, 1000 mentions and stories were placed in national magazines and newspapers about coaching, aided by a media campaign spearheaded by the ICF and Coach University, a large coach-training organization. These organizations and others helped hundreds of their members get quoted in newspapers, interviewed on TV, and featured on radio and in magazines. As a result, during the past decade coaching developed a buzz and became the "new new thing."
The difference between a trend and a fad is that one lasts and the other doesn't. As the market for coaching grew, therapists, human resource and personnel managers, retired executives, and a wide variety of others signed up for coach training. Industry experts now estimate the total number of personal and business coaches at 10,000 and growing.
Who (Population)
Coaches attract that segment of the population economists call the "worried well"—higher-functioning adults who would rate themselves as "content," but want more or feel blocked in some area of their lives. According to Marisa Domino, Assistant Professor of Health Economics at University of North Carolina, 85% of the worried well don't seek psychotherapy or counseling even when they have personal problems, because they don't identify themselves as psychologically "ill." When the worried well want help with relationship problems, parenting concerns, career changes, boredom, or unhappiness—the same issues that cause others to seek counseling or therapy—they look for other kinds of help. The worried well, underserved by therapy, are considered a target market for coaches.
Coaching clients can be more demanding than therapy clients, bringing high expectations about the outcome of their sessions. Coaching clients don't "see" a therapist for treatment, they "hire" a coach for results, and they want to see evidence of the results. Most like to be challenged and have less patience for the slow tempo, long silences, or vague language of a process-oriented therapist. To satisfy this type of client, therapist-coaches need to be skillful, direct, get their points across clearly, and pick up the pace.
What (Purpose)
Thomas Leonard, author of The Portable Coach and one of the early founders of the coaching movement, defines coaching as a threefold process that helps people set and reach better goals, do more than they would have done on their own, and focus better so as to produce results more quickly. According to Leonard, coaches position themselves not as experts, but as equals with their clients. They see themselves as collaborative partners, ready to work in tandem with a client to solve an interesting challenge. The issues that coach and client address are rarely life-and-death, so the coach uses a less diagnostic, analytical approach. In coaching, emphasis is placed on a person's present state of mind and future potential. Action is the byword of coaching. Most coaches rely on markers for concrete outcomes, since coaching is less about process, and more about doing.
Harriett Simon Salinger, Master Certified Coach, (and a former therapist) sees the distinctions between therapy and coaching as the "therapy-to-coaching continuum." At one end of the continuum is the traditional version of psychotherapy, say psychoanalysis, and at the other end the traditional version of coaching, say sports coaching. Just looking at the ends of the continuum, one can easily discern many differences between the two approaches. In psychoanalysis, there is little expectation for a patient to take action or meet goals; uncovering unconscious material and developing insight is tantamount. The analyst is a neutral presence, non-directive, and wants to help the patient weaken defenses as a way to develop self-awareness and feel repressed emotions.
Contrast this to sports coaching, on the other extreme end of the continuum. The feelings and inner desires of the athlete are not examined; winning is the sole focus. The coach is tenaciously influential, directive, opinionated, and expressive, trying to strengthen—not weaken—defenses.
But as one starts to move toward the middle of the continuum, away from the classic approaches of psychotherapy and coaching toward the middle ground, the differences begin to blur. Helping a client to feel happy, self-actualized, and more productive?
Building a person's confidence, self-awareness, or ability to have better relationships? These goals could fit into the stated purpose of either therapy or coaching. At the very center of the continuum we might see an area of shared common territory simply described as “personal growth.” Although the differences between therapy and coaching tend to overlap in the center of the continuum, many coaches and therapists use methods that place them more toward the ends. The distinctions between therapy and coaching become sharper when we add to the discussion of "who" and "what" the other categories of where, how, and why.
Where (Setting)
Coaching is notable for its flexibility in regard to setting. Coaching sessions can and do take place in the coach's office, the client's office or workplace, a hotel, restaurant, in the field, on the phone, or over the internet. It's not necessary for a coach and his or her client to have ever met face to face for the sessions to be effective. Sessions may be regular, infrequent, or packaged to fit the terms of a specific contract.
The coach may purposefully keep the professional boundaries of the relationship loose, revealing more about self, for example, in order to diffuse transference. Traditional therapeutic guidelines such as confidentiality may or may not apply in coaching, depending on whether the coach is hired by an individual or by that individual's employer. In coaching, dual relationships may exist—the life coach may be a social friend or business associate of a client, the executive coach may play golf with a client after hours, the peak performance coach may open his or her home to house a client during a training season. For this reason, coaches often seek to keep relationships authentic and mutual, to make it possible to work within varied and changing conditions.
How (Skill Set)
Post-modern therapists and coaches both rely, at least in part, on standard cognitive-behavioral methods—asking questions, listening carefully, establishing rapport, reframing, giving advice, making suggestions, proposing assignments—to help clients think and behave differently. Whereas therapists draw on a century of methodology and development, coaches have limited approaches upon which to draw, because the field is still in its infancy. As a result, coaches often borrow from other disciplines. What distinguishes a method as a coaching tool versus a therapy tool is not just the skill set, but how it is applied, in what setting, with what population, for what intention, and with what results.
Some coaches use a set coaching model that has been developed by a coaching organization. Most coach training organizations provide students with a lot of coaching tools (assessments, checklists, exercises, programs). Other coaches design or collect their own tools and approaches. Similar to therapists, some coaches work eclectically while others use a structured approach based on pre-and post-measurements and assessments. An eclectic coach might borrow techniques from organizational development, human resources, psychotherapy, psychology, personal growth, sports, career counseling, movement specialties, or spiritual meditative practices.
Concerned about the need to make coaching a lasting profession, the ICF wisely began a catch-up effort to establish certification guidelines for coaches that would bring all the various coaching institutions into agreement in terms of who could rightly be called a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) or a Master Certified Coach (MCC). A PCC must have logged 125 hours in an accredited coaching program; been coached by a PCC or an MCC for a minimum of 10 hours over a 3-month duration; have 750 hours of direct coaching experience with clients; have letters of sponsorship from a PCC or MCC; and complete a written and oral examination. MCC requirements go further, including experience of 2500 hours of coaching.
While one does not need to be certified to work as a coach, in the future certification may become an important marker for establishing serious coaches from dilettantes. And as more coaches want to meet the ICF guidelines, more PCC's and MCC's will need to be on board to guide them through the requirements.
Training programs for coaches are not standardized at this time, although the ICF has attempted to bring programs under its accreditation. (At the time of this printing, only eight programs have received ICF accreditation.) Coaching programs have different ideas regarding curriculum and duration. Some training programs consider a student to be sufficiently trained after a few weekend workshops; others have a three-month curriculum; still others have classes and requirements that take several years to finish. Since the field is so new, no formal analyses of comparisons of training curriculums exist. Therapists wanting to become coaches have to rely on researching the existing programs themselves and then selecting the training that meets their needs.
How (Practice)
When providing coaching services, a coach pays primary attention to a client's value system and ego strength, noting behavioral patterns that are obstacles to achievement, but not delving into their origins. Instead of listening blankly, a coach silently considers strategies and, then, asks questions designed to help clients expand their vision. A coach helps them focus and stay on track, rather than encouraging free association. A coach makes specific requests for action each session and challenges clients to go beyond their comfort level to achieve more, faster. Coaching avoids an exploration of childhood issues and don't make psychological interpretations. of course, coaching clients have their own set of psychological issues; but coaching doesn’t explore them. Instead coaching aims to diffuse the transference that is a part of psychoanalytical therapy, opting for more mutuality, and directs the focus to the future, saying, "All of us have to deal with negative self-talk from time to time. Your negative self-talk is clearly getting in your way when you sit in meetings. As your coach, I'd like to support you to think more positively about yourself and have a confident demeanor. What's the best way to start?"
Coaching tends to focus on money, achievement, balance, success, the future, and passion. A coach works with clients to strategize their way through sticky business problems, make needed corrections, work smarter instead of harder, or get comfortable with a new level of professional success. Coach and client talk about topics that don't often have a chance to surface in therapy, such as optimizing one's life with grace and ease. Often, humor can be used to help lighten up the coaching sessions.
Why (Intent)
Coaching practice appeals to consultants who are searching for different ways to work with clients, and attracts clients who are searching for untraditional ways to achieve personal growth. Sometimes becoming a coach is way to integrate disparate but complementary aspects of one's professional life.
1 "So You're a Player. Do You Need A Coach?" Fortune Magazine, Feb 21, 2000
2 "Do You Need a Personal Coach?" New England Financial Journal, Jan 2000.
3 "The Good Therapist" by William Doherty and Mary Sykes Wylie, Family Therapy Networker, Nov 1995.
4 Steven Johnson, The Symbiotic Character, W.W. Norton New York, 1991.
5 "For Richer or Poorer" panel, opening presentation entitled "The Economics of Mental Health" by Marisa Domino, the American Association of Family and Marriage Therapy National Conference, Nov 2000.
Adapted from "The New Private Practice" by Lynn Grodzki, 2001. All rights reserved.
Return to top of the page.
