A Quick Primer on Coaching
How to Know If Coaching is Appropriate
If you can be curious about and reflect on what you’re experiencing, you’ve got what the Buddhists call ‘observer mind’ and are a good candidate for coaching. If you feel like you’re being swallowed up by whatever’s happening, you need psychotherapy, not coaching.
A coach is a catalyst who enables transformation to take place. The task of bringing that transformation about falls to the client. Coaching is for people who are genuinely open to learning and sufficiently motivated to follow through.
Yes, But Does Coaching Work?
- In 2009, the International Coaching Federation found that 80% of people who coach report increased self-confidence; more than 70% benefit from improved work performance, relationships, and communication skills; and 86% of companies report that they recouped their investment in coaching and then some.
- In 2018, a study of coaching outcomes published in the International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring found that 75% of coaching clients say that the value they derive from executive and leadership coaching is “considerably greater” or “far greater” than the money and time they invest.
- A 2017 study of the impact of coaching on female leaders published in the International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring found that coaching enables female leaders to increase their confidence and sense of self-worth, become better learners, build their relational skills, and progress in their careers.
Why Coach When I Could Just Take a Course?
Suppose, for example, that a lack of confidence prevents you from responding appropriately when someone oversteps your bounds. Taking a course on assertiveness will provide you with new communication strategies. But if the way you see yourself keeps you from deploying these strategies successfully, that won’t resolve the problem. Developing a more accurate sense of who you are and what you’re capable of—the sort of thing people do in coaching—will.
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