It seems that coaching is beginning to be all the rage on the peninsular scene.
After having opened a market in the USA and in some European countries, around us there are more and more occasions when we hear that word. But what is behind this label? What is meant by coaching? What problems does it solve?
Let's agree on some meanings and then explore the possibilities of this service.
Coaching is a process, it is not a thing. When we think of it as if it were a thing, we tend to make mistakes and not understand very well what it is about.
Coaching is a certain type of relationship that is established between two (or more) people in which one of them (we will call her a coach) facilitates the success of the other (we will call her a coachee).
Well, we therefore have a coach and one (or several) coachee with whom this person interacts within the framework of a relationship that we will call coaching.
What do we mean by success and what do we mean by facilitating success?
Let's keep agreeing on some meanings: Success is defined by the coachee. In the coaching relationship, it is the coachee who defines what success is and is not; Thus, the coach helps the coachee to achieve something (success) that the coachee himself has defined (with or without the help of the coach).
Facilitating means that the coach is going to help his coachee to have a better chance of achieving success, as defined by the coachee himself. On the other hand, the person responsible for this success will be the coachee himself, who will be the one who will make the decisions, not the coach who acts as a facilitator.
So we have a relationship in which two or more people interact, in such a way that one of them helps the other to achieve their goals.
If we keep this as a criterion, we will see that there are a series of key points, which will allow us to evaluate whether or not a relationship is coaching.
Firstly, we have said that this relationship that we call coaching pursues objectives (success) that are defined by one of the parties to this relationship (which we have called coachee). It is very important to establish this starting point. The coach does not mark the goal of the coaching relationship. This goal is defined by the coachee. The coach enables her coachee to achieve the objectives that the coachee herself has defined.
In this type of relational framework there are many different possibilities of action: the coach has many ways of facilitating the success of his coachee, thus, depending on the type of objectives he has defined, the most appropriate strategy will be one or the other.
This is the principle of flexibility: the coach will cut the suit to fit his coachee. The same recipe may not be applicable in all situations, so the more flexible the coach is in facilitating his coachee's success, the more successful he will be as a coach.
If one variable is the nature of the objectives (of success as defined by the coachee), and this variable influences the flexibility that the coach must have to be effective, another variable is the very nature of the coachee who, as a person The only one that she is, with unique desires, concerns and desires, with a unique way of thinking and making decisions, with beliefs about the limits of her world and her unique abilities, she calls for a tailor-made relational strategy. The effective coach starts from the full acceptance of the uniqueness of her coachees to elaborate her approaches.
How is the thing? We have a relationship between two (or more) people in which one of them (coach) plays the role of facilitator of the success of the other (coachee). Since the definition of what "success" is established by the coachee, and taking into account that the coachee is a unique person, the coach will find that it is more effective if he remains flexible in his approaches and starts from the full acceptance of said uniqueness.
Under this framework, it does not matter what the coach uses to facilitate the success of the coachee. The means are therefore subject to the ends. This allows the coaching service to take many different forms: coaching without transfer of experience, executive coaching, telephone coaching, group coaching, coaching in strategic marketing of personal services… It does not matter if the coach transfers her experience or not if with it does not matter if the coach is a person hired by an organization or is internal to the company; if she is formally and institutionally a coach or acts as a coach without wearing this label; It does not matter how this coaching relationship occurs; it does not matter the number of people involved or the area of application of the service… What matters is that, within the framework of this relationship,the coachee achieve success as he defines it.
With these concepts as a frame of reference, we can now establish some applications of this service.
To identify the best areas of application, then, let's start by identifying potential "successes."
For me a very simple way to do this is to identify desired situations, for example, areas of our lives that we think could be better than they are at the moment. The possibilities are many:
-A person without a partner may want to share a future project with a special partner.
-A student struggling in physics tests may want to improve on this skill.
-A businessperson with no time for family may wish to find a more ecological balance between work and private life.
-A new writer may wish to see his first work published.
-An independent professional (read architect, lawyer, psychologist, gardener, electrician, or lecturer…) may want to gain a loyal clientele.
-A person dissatisfied with his way of making a living may want to make a change.
-A person who does not find meaning in his life may want to find it.
-A lost family may want to harmonize their relationships.
-An entrepreneurial entrepreneur may want to launch a new business
-A university student may want to improve his ability to present his thesis in public.
The possibilities are great. What do we have now? A set of situations in which some people want a change to take place. This change, in turn, is a criterion that we can use to define success: for a specific person, success will be to move from their current situation to their desired situation. For example, for the first person on the list, without a partner and with a desire to have one, success will be finding someone special with whom to share a future project. If this person establishes a coaching process, her coach will act to facilitate her success and she would do the same in the case of the entrepreneur who wants to launch a new business or of any other person.
Of course, by now, some questions that the discerning reader may ask may be: How does coaching work? What is your framework of action? How does the coach do it to facilitate the success of her coachee?
This will be the subject of a future article.
