Most people have a vague picture of coaching, some mixture of sports team coaches from TV sitcoms and 90s-era Tony Robbins infomercials, but I’ve noticed that it’s often different to the reality of modern coaching.

Coaching is a powerful tool to help people thrive and make the impact they seek in the world. This article provides a brief introduction to coaching and why it’s valuable.

Let us begin with the following definition: Coaching is a structured, collaborative conversation that helps people explore new thinking, to find what they seek within themselves and take action. Or the delightfully succinct: Coaching helps people to wake up to themselves and do something about it.

Coaching helps you achieve your potential and live your best self. It helps to uncover hidden potential, support growth and behaviour change, especially in situations where change is hard. Whenever there’s a need for change or growth, coaching can help to find the next level of performance or leadership.

Coaches work with open-ended questions that help people to find what they need within themselves, to see things from different perspectives and to discover things that may have been hidden from their view. Coaches support and encourage people to live their highest self and find new levels of growth. But the coach can’t do it for you — it’s the one being coached who’s responsible for doing the work and making the change. Think of a coach like a personal trainer: they’ll support you with structure and help you to grow, but you’ve got to lift your own weights.

Coaching can also be illuminated in terms of what it’s not. Teaching, training, consulting and mentoring are all important and useful skills but they are distinct from coaching. Coaches may employ these methods, but coaching isn’t about telling people what to do or giving them instruction. Although domain knowledge and experience can be hugely valuable, a good coach can actually be immensely valuable without them. Another common misconception is that coaches need to be senior, but there is no superiority or seniority on the part of the coach that is necessary or implied in a coaching relationship.

Types of Coaching

There are a plethora of different types of coaching, and it’s still a fairly young and evolving profession so there is no definitive taxonomy, but the following is an overview of some major areas of coaching.

• Organisational coaching focuses on improving performance in an organisational context, and includes executive coaching, leadership coaching and sales coaching.
• Performance coaching is another broad category that can be applied in both organisational and personal contexts.
• Life coaching is focused on helping people to improve their mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health, and to find meaning and satisfaction in their lives.
• Team coaching seeks to improve team performance through facilitation, practices and methodologies (for example, it’s common for software teams to use agile coaching)

There also exist a rich variety of other novel and emerging coaching approaches, many of which are rooted in psychology and developmental modalities, such as career and career transition coaching, relationship coaching, wellness coaching, business coaching, health behaviour change coaching and many, many more.

What Does Coaching Involve?

A good coach will begin a coaching engagement by establishing a foundation of confidentiality, trust and connection for the coaching conversation, and establishing a timeframe and clear objectives for the overall coaching engagement.

Within a given coaching session, the coach is working within the available time to:

• help the counterpart to explore the problem space and understand the reality in which they’re operating;
• to explore their options for action, considering things from different points of view and encouraging them to find new ways of thinking and seeing;
• and finally moving to consider possible courses of action and identify concrete next steps that can be taken.

Coaches create a space where the counterpart can discover new things about themselves, uncover powers and new perspectives, and in which their own unique talents and intelligences can be utilised. When someone is struggling to find new growth and development this container of trust and open enquiry can be a space in which they’re able to loosen up and find their way forward.

Learning is most effective when it is experiential, and the content of the coaching conversation is founded in the counterpart’s own experience of the world. The coaching conversation builds on a collaborative, interactive engagement of dialogue that includes action, reflection, experience and sense making, and this experiential approach is well suited to allow real learning and behaviour change to take place.

Coaches may also have a wealth of experience that can be immensely valuable. A great coach will be able to share their own wisdom, insight and experience in a way that is powerful, but supports the counterpart to make their own decisions and take responsibility for their own growth.

Coaching for Development

Coaches use deep listening and their intuition to listen for what is most alive and potent in the conversation, to move towards an emerging horizon of growth and development for the coaching counterpart.

Great coaching conversations are brave and encourage radical self enquiry. Finding ways to bring challenge into the conversation is a central tool in the coaching toolkit. Once trust and connection has been established, the coach may offer reflections that seek to reveal new insights. These are often unreservedly honest and challenging, and may be difficult to hear, but this element of challenge is instrumental in the process of personal and professional development.

This is particularly important for high performers and others who are looking for ways to improve, and for people in positions of power who may find themselves starved of this essential ingredient for ongoing development. People who are already operating at a high level are often hungry for raw, honest feedback that helps them to achieve their highest standard and greatest contribution, and the coaching conversation is a space where this kind of feedback can be found.

Coaching is a powerful way to support development because it helps the motivation for change and grow to come from within. Extrinsic motivation (i.e. carrot and stick, incentives and rewards) works just fine when all that’s required is to continue motion in the current direction, but growth and transformative change can only be achieved when the motivation for change is coming from within.

The master coach Jerry Collona has come to be known as “the CEO whisperer” for his work with Silicon Valley founders and executives. He writes of struggling to explain coaching, that “to help people lead well, I was pushing to help them know themselves better”. Colonna speaks about the need for leaders to engage in radical self-enquiry and asks:

“How has who I am shaped the ways I lead others and myself? What are the unconscious patterns of my character structure that are showing up in my organisations?”

Coaching conversations help people to discover these unconscious patterns and structures that may be limiting their ability to perform at their best, and to find what they need to bring their highest contribution to their work and to the world in which they live.

Coaching for Change, Growth and Transformation

Behaviour change is always hard, and our human neurophysiology makes this even harder, and this may be particularly so in organisational contexts. The modern workplace is an environment of constant change and uncertainty in which people find themselves working with heavy demands on their mental, emotional and physical resources.

The familiar patterns that once worked may no longer produce the desired results and new ways are required. But this presents a difficult challenge because there are neurological responses to these pressures that can prevent us from seeing clearly and responding in skilful ways. In high pressure situations, particularly during extended periods of stress, there may be a tightening and defensiveness in which our instincts for self-preservation cause us to close down, becoming fixated on hanging on to our current mode of operation rather than being open to the possibility of change.

Change is hard even at the best of times, but when you’re hanging on for dear life the pressure can shut down all capacity for growth.

Modern studies of the human nervous system have shown that someone’s physiological state dictates the range of behaviour and psychological experience that is available to them. Stephen Porges is professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University. He is best known for developing “polyvagal theory” that describes how visceral experiences affect the nervous system and our resulting behaviour. His research has shown that when people are in a defensive state the likelihood of belief revision plummets: people only change their views and beliefs when they’re in a state of psychological safety.

As described by Bessel van der Kolk, professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine, “The Polyvagal Theory provided us with a more sophisticated understanding of the biology of safety and danger […] It explains why a kind face or a soothing tone of voice can dramatically alter the way we feel. It clarifies why knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and why being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reactions or mental collapse. It helped us understand why attuning with another person can shift us out of disorganised and fearful states. In short, Porges’ theory makes us look beyond the effects of fight or flight and put social relationships front and centre.”

The coaching conversation provides precisely this environment: a kind face and a conversation in which we are seen and heard, and in which we become attuned with another person and are supported to shift out of a disorganised or fearful state. External pressure to change will rarely produce the desired result, but a coaching engagement may help to give someone the space and support that they need to shift their behaviour in positive ways.

When is Coaching the Right Approach?

Coaching can be useful in many situations, but will deliver the best results and return on investment in situations such as the following.

• During times of rapid growth, or when there are extreme demands placed on people’s ability to grow and manage rapid change;
• When someone needs to grow and develop as a leader — e.g. founders are often great at product or tech, but find themselves needing to be exceptional leaders as well;
• When there’s a need for growth and development to a new level of contribution or performance (e.g. moving into people management, or moving into being a leader of leaders);
• When there’s a need for an individual or a team to achieve and sustain peak performance;
• When someone, particularly a leader, is finding it difficult to navigate a time of change or uncertainty;
• At the beginning of new ventures or initiatives, and other times of uncertainty and change.

In an organisational context coaching is often most valuable for leaders and high performers, but there is also great value in providing coaching for high potential individuals and for teams.

The Future

We live in a world where the rate of change presses against our ability to keep up, and it’s only getting faster. Coaching is an important tool to help us to meet this challenge, and in the future we’ll see coaching continue to grow and become more of a formal profession, with the development of more professional standards and requirements for accreditation and supervision.

A growing number of businesses will engage coaches to support their leaders, and we’ll continue to see growth in the coaching and facilitation of teams. I also believe that it will become increasingly common for startups and growth-stage businesses to have a coach working at the board and C-level to help the leaders and the business to grow in healthy ways as they navigate the challenges of rapid growth. In these areas it’s common for someone with great ideas and skills in technology, innovation or product design to find themselves in a leadership position that suddenly requires skills in many different areas — all while hanging on to a rocket of rapid growth, and coaching can be invaluable to support them in developing the many skills that this requires.

People spend so much time at work, and many of us spend more time with our work colleagues than we do with our own families and loved ones. The relationships that we have at work are such a large part of how we experience the world, how we find a sense of value and belonging in our lives. Work can be a source of meaning and purpose, a wellspring of growth and connection and a place to find a meet challenges with the support of people who care and want to see you succeed, or it can be a source of frustration and disaffection, a place where people are made to feel like cogs in an indifferent machine.

I believe that coaching helps people to discover and connect with what is meaningful for them in their work, and to live with more courage, openness and vulnerability.

I see the proliferation of coaching as a profoundly positive development in society. I imagine a thriving network of people engaged in deep listening, compassionate conversation, connection and support, all working to help us grow towards our fullest potential, to rise up and meet the massive challenges of this modern world and embrace the incredible opportunity we have to build a better future for all.