A rapidly growing industry
The coaching staff is finally starting to take off in Spain.
In the United States, the boom in this discipline occurred in the 1990s; in our country this phenomenon is taking place today. Since 2000 - the year in which one of the first personal coaching portals was published (1) - until 2003, the growth of this discipline has been moderately slow.
However, in the last year, websites that advertise personalized coaching services have proliferated and different associations, corporations and organizations have emerged that bring together a large part of the existing personal coaching offer in our country.
To this we must add the abundant training offer that is being offered from all kinds of schools, academies, institutions and organizations.
Despite the fact that there are more and more professionals in the sector, outside the business world - where coaching is more deeply rooted and has been endowed with consulting tools - many people still do not know how they can benefit from a personal coaching process.
We are thus faced with a great paradox: there are more and more professionals in a sector that does not stop growing while in the market there are still many niches that do not even know that coaching is a useful resource that can answer many of their problems.
In this article, I briefly review the state of personal coaching in Spain and propose some personal suggestions on what we can do to resolve this paradox.
Personal coaching in Spain
Coaching is a young discipline, in the process of growth, that still has a long way to go.
In the United States, as coaching has acquired the status of a legitimate and authentic profession, it has moved toward greater specialization.
Currently in the USA there are more than a hundred different specialties of personal coaching, as many as possible market segments: coaching for writers, lawyers, consultants, singles, retirees, adolescents, etc.
In Spain the coaching market has not reached a comparable level of maturity. We are still in an initial phase of development in which coaches with a general profile predominate, who work all kinds of casuistry and focus their services on improving the well-being of the person.
In our country it is still common to think that a talent coach can apply this process to any area of coaching - personal, executive, business, etc. - and within these to any subspecialty.
As far as personal coaching is concerned, in recent times there is a certain trend towards specialization.
Some professionals target certain sectors; Thus we can find specialists in personal coaching for professional women, coaching for adolescents, coaching for entrepreneurs, etc. Apart from these examples and a few others, the truth is that we are still in a phase in which the off-road coach predominates.
Accreditations and competences
To the relative youth of coaching in our country it must be added that there are no internationally recognized organizations that accredit professionals in the sector.
The difficulty in establishing credentials is due, in large part, to the fact that this discipline brings together professionals from academic fields as varied as human resources, social sciences, consulting, education, psychology….
Despite the fact that there are more and more “homologated” courses, there are no recognized accreditations that specify what are the basic competences that a personal coach should have.
Not all national or international schools or associations that have worked in this direction are recognized by all coaches. Thus, at the moment, we do not have global standards with which to judge and evaluate professional skills in this sector.
"Weekend" training has become very fashionable in our country; two-day courses in which people are supposedly trained to be coaches. It does not take a star to know that becoming a good professional cannot be achieved in a weekend, or in months.
Nor does it take too much insight to realize that coaching has become a highly lucrative business, much more than personalized processes and that there are more people doing coaching than coaches with their own clientele (2).
Can you do coaching training without having previous experience as a coach? I leave the question open for everyone to build their own answer.
To exercise as a personal coach there are a series of basic requirements that must be met and that, without a doubt, do not go through a weekend title where "the 15 powerful questions" are taught.
The professionals of the sector know that there are no recipes or magic formulas of universal validity and application; they know that each person is different; that it is necessary to know how to adapt to different communication and learning styles; and that the resources and strategies that work in certain cases are ineffective in others.
To respond to the needs of each person it is important to have great versatility and a high adaptability.
As James Flathery (3) says, coaching is like playing jazz: the coach has to know where to start and where to end and what the basic structure is, listening well to the music that others play, merging with it. In coaching you have to know how to improvise, but within a structure, and this level of mastery and creativity can only be acquired through continuous learning, many readings and many hours of flight.
In addition to these skills and dedication, it is necessary to have a broad
command of different problem-solving techniques, creative thinking, mind-mapping, strategic planning…
to give just a few examples. In my opinion, the equation of coaching with mayeutics, or the Socratic art of asking questions, has contributed to trivializing the discipline. Many people think that coaching is as simple as "listening" and "asking questions".
Mayeutics is just one of the tools used in coaching, but not the only one. Also, active listening is a more complex process than it may seem a priori, which is not learned overnight.
I think, however, that beyond the technical domain, a good personal coach must meet the following requirements: he must be a rational person;
it must be a model of congruence; and must be committed to continuous learning.
Why? Because it is quite unlikely that people who lack critical and rational thinking can guide other people to get the results they want in life.
Whoever lives in magical and irrational worlds cannot help someone to change their irrational beliefs.
Nor can it broaden the perspective of a client who believes in determinism and labels people as the trends of the moment dictate.
On the other hand, it is difficult to help someone achieve what you have not yet achieved; That is why it is so important that the personal coach is a reference model.
That the coach's actions are a reflection of his words in a fundamental requirement in coaching. As Romano Guardini would say: the most effective factor to educate is how the educator is; the second, what he does; the third, what it says.
The advice given is important, but above all there is what is done.
If the coach is consistent, he offers a model for the client to be consistent in the effort to orient his actions in a certain direction.
To consistency and rationality must be added a serious commitment to continuous learning and training. You may have received initial training to acquire some working techniques - whatever your basic training - but you need to constantly update and develop them to be effective. In coaching one can never stop training. And it is that you cannot train for success living on income.
Future perspectives
What will be the evolution of coaching in our country in the coming years? If we take as a reference the evolution of the sector in the pioneer countries -
Canada and the United States - it is to be hoped that the first batch of personal coaching, the one that pursues the well-being of the person and promises dream paradises offering very little in return, gives way to much more rigorous coaching - built on the bases of critical thinking and of validated methods-, in which the results that clients can obtain from this service are clearly explained.
On the other hand, the sector is also expected to experience an evolution towards greater specialization, as we have previously pointed out. The higher the degree of specialization, the greater the possibility of acquiring the experience and expertise necessary to ensure successful coaching processes.
Those of us who dedicate ourselves to this profession and carry out personalized coaching processes know that coaching is a vehicle of great value to accelerate the achievement of results and that it will be increasingly necessary to respond to the demands of today's globalized society.
If our objective is to develop the status of coaching as a profession, it takes a serious and determined effort from all professionals in the sector to develop consistent explanatory models and move towards greater transparency in the definition of the services we offer and the problems that we solve.
In 2002 Perry Zeus and S. Skiffington (4) said that unless coaches are recognized as experts instead, coaching risks losing its inertia and being absorbed by other more established and reputable professions, such as training and consulting.
Whether or not this prognosis is valid, as coaches we have the responsibility to provide greater rigor and credibility to our profession to differentiate it from other disciplines and so that the public perceives it as a valuable resource.
If we want to resolve the paradox that we discussed at the beginning of this article, it is our responsibility to do pedagogy and the necessary informative tasks to publicize the epistemological framework in which our professional activity is framed, as well as the method of work we use and the results that we get.
The more specific information published on the different models of personal coaching - and especially on the results achieved in this type of process - the more we will contribute to laying the foundations of one of the industries that is experiencing the greatest growth in recent times.
References
(2) See the article by Vicens Castellano "Magical Thought
(3) J. Flatherty. Coaching. Evoking Excellence in Others. Elsevier, 1999.
Perry Zeus and S. Skiffington. Practical coaching at work. McGrawHill Editorial, Madrid, 2004.
