"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover what is inside them »Galileo Galilei.
In our personal life or in our work activity, we often encounter invisible obstacles, impediments that make it impossible for us to move forward, situations that become conflictive and we do not understand why. Activities that are relatively simple for others are presented as impossible to perform, actions that do not show greater complexity become unattainable. It is as if we were climbing a ladder and suddenly we ran into something that hinders our ascent. We can't see what it is, but we know it is blocking our way. We make efforts to evade it, but everything is in vain. We want to do something different, but we don't know what. It is like a “glass ceiling”, something that is impossible for us to see but that every time we want to continue advancing we crash our head against it.
This is not something that eventually happens to someone, but it happens to all of us and repeatedly throughout our lives. Echeverría calls this phenomenon, which expresses the limits that humans have in our capacity for action and learning, "the principle of the non-linear character of human behavior." It maintains that: “human beings cannot increase linearly and indefinitely their capacity for action. They cannot linearly learn whatever they set their mind to. Both in their capacity for action and in their specific capacity for learning, they find limits, they face obstacles that prevent them from achieving certain results. The capacity for action and learning is neither continuous nor homogeneous ”.
It is worth clarifying that we are not referring to circumstances where the limit of our capacity for action or learning is determined by biological characteristics or innate qualities in people. It is clear to most of us that no matter how much we train and train the rest of our lives, we will never get to compose music like Mozart, paint like Michelangelo or play soccer like Maradona. We refer to actions that are within our possibilities and that for different reasons we are unable to carry out effectively.
Right now, the alternative to move forward on our development path may involve asking for help. The figure that emerges as the most suitable and indicated to assist these learning and change processes is that of the coach.
The coach is a person trained to detect these areas of difficulty, these "invisible barriers" that hinder our growth or hinder our performance. Its role is to accompany and facilitate the development of people's potential, helping to overcome the obstacles and resistance that limit their actions and make it difficult to achieve their objectives. We can define the coach as a facilitator of personal development.
Coaching is a systematic process that facilitates learning and promotes cognitive, emotional and behavioral changes that expand the capacity for action based on the achievement of the proposed goals. It is an emerging discipline that works to facilitate the development processes of people: in professional evolution, in the transits of the working career, in the achievement of objectives, in the dissolution of obstacles to personal growth and in the search for improvement in performance levels. In organizational spheres, coaching is consolidated as a powerful tool that enhances leadership, facilitates performance, and accompanies training and coaching processes in order to guarantee the effective acquisition of competencies.
Coaching can be exercised from different conceptions and from different conceptual frameworks. For example, the trend of greater validity in the US. Coaching is similar to personal training. Beyond the pros and cons of each of the different approaches, it is worth clarifying that the model that we assume in our performance and that we are going to expose below, is the one that guides its intervention in enabling Transformational Learning. In our opinion it is the most effective and the one with the widest scope of application.
Coaching is focused on «helping to learn», which is a different process when teaching. The coach is not someone who tells the client what to do. Your task is not to judge, nor to give advice. The coach does not indicate solutions, does not indicate the “correct” path, nor does she impose her particular way of thinking, but intervenes so that the client can analyze and review the interpretations she has about the situation that she declares as problematic.
The role of the coach is to ask questions that stimulate reflection, to critically reconsider the undoubted assumptions, to question beliefs, to move certainties and to make questionable what is considered unquestionable. The coach's work is based more on question marks than admiration. Its mission is to make each person reach their own understandings, live with more awareness and authenticity, and succeed in displaying their potentiality in achieving their goals.
In this sense, coaching bears a great resemblance to the concept of Mayeutics coined by Socrates, who stated that "I cannot teach anything to anyone, I can only make them think" and therefore he, as a great teacher, led the way of learning through the questions, leaving his disciples or interlocutors to find their own answers and solutions to the problems posed.
Socrates called this method of inquiry Mayeutic, which means “art of midwives”. He used this metaphor to point out the depth of this inquiry practice, as he conceived it. She maintained that he exercised an art similar to that of his mother, Fenáreta, who was a midwife. She said that midwives were midwives of bodies, who helped to give birth, but did not give birth, while she was a midwife of souls, who helped to find the answers, but did not give answers.
This method of inquiry through which he guided people to seek new senses and to reflect on different situations looking for other points of view, is the closest thing to our conception of coaching. A phrase by Socrates clearly defines this process: "I know nothing and I am sterile, but I can serve you as a midwife and that is why I enchant you to give birth to your idea."
Coaching is based on the principle of the autonomy of the person and is aimed at the client taking full responsibility for their actions and for the results obtained. The coach accompanies and facilitates the learning and change process that enables the individual to carry out the necessary actions to achieve the objectives with which he is committed to achieving and is not achieving.
The coach can show possibilities that are not being considered, suggest interpretations or propose courses of action, but he never indicates what "should" be done, but leaves the power of choice and action in the hands of the person. As Virginia Satir said: «No one can convince another to change. Each of us guards a door of change that can only be opened from within. We cannot open another's door, neither with arguments nor with emotional appeals. ”
From the perspective of Transformational Learning, there are no problems to be solved "out there", independent of how we think and feel. The way we see the problem is part of the problem. This is why the interpretation that we sustain about a situation and the emotionality that it generates for us, are the central aspects that we must address in order to be able to act effectively. So much so, that there are circumstances in which it is not a matter of “solving” the problem, but of “dissolving” the problem. These are the cases in which by transforming our perspective of observation, by modifying our interpretation of the facts, the situation no longer presents itself as problematic. Many times this change allows us to "see" possibilities or opportunities that until now were non-existent. As Albert Einstein says: "The world has problems that cannot be solved by thinking the same way we did when we created them."
Coaching conversations are aimed at achieving a displacement in the observations and explanations that we have about ourselves and about others, about the environment and circumstances, about what we judge as possible or impossible, about what we value as a threat or opportunity.
The coach leads the client to separate the phenomenon from its interpretation, that is, the experience from its explanation. The experiences refer to the things that happen to us in life and on them we make interpretations and tell each other stories. These narratives give meaning to what happens and it is this assigned meaning that opens or closes possibilities for us. The problem is not that the stories we tell are true or false, what is significant is that the interpretive load we introduce into them enables or restricts our actions.
The coaching process tries that the client can discriminate between the verifiable facts and the opinion that he has formed about them. That you can review the foundations and validity of the judgments made and that you recognize what are the beliefs, values and implicit assumptions that give rise to your interpretive structure.
Accessing a different observation or re-framing your own interpretations makes it possible to observe events from another perspective. This opening of new horizons of meaning is what allows expanding the capacity for action and achieving a significant change in the results.
Coaching also works with emotionality as a predisposition for action. The coach accompanies transiting emotional tension, overcoming the anxiety and uncertainty of change and generating the necessary state of mind to face the new challenge and carry out the learning process. It underpins people's confidence in their own abilities and reaffirms the sense of self-confidence to carry out the actions that lead to the required results.
