What Exactly Is Coaching? Breaking Down the Process and Its Benefits

What is coaching, anyway? You’ve heard about it, you know people who have a coach, but your concept of it (at least professional coaching) is likely relatively vague. I know mine was.

I believe Andrew Neitlich (the founder of the executive & business coaching certification program I wrapped up recently) phrases it something like this: Bringing powerful conversations to already successful business owners/executives so that they become more focused and grounded in what matters most. Insert yourself there instead of business owners or executives if that doesn’t apply to you.

As I understand and practice it, coaching is essentially a partnership between coach and client to drive towards goals (often helping identifying those goals) with focus, structure, and support through adversity. Coaching sessions are confidential, and the coach tries to stay impartial, following wherever the client needs to go (within ethical boundaries). In its purest form, there’s no advice or teaching, no consulting, just active inquiry. I’ll get into active inquiry a little further down.

As with many things it’s a spectrum and each coach finds their sweet spot on that spectrum. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) certifies and has standards around the coaching end of that spectrum. Similar to other pursuits, you first need to learn the rules and be proficient in using them before you can break them.

My background in product development and strategy has taught me that a little structure and focus goes a long way. While it’s possible to just jump right into helping someone with whatever is pressing at the moment, I find it more prudent, and my training now reinforces that it’s important to stop for a moment and build some structure around our interactions.

What does that mean? Establish ground rules, or “design the alliance” in the words of the Co-Active Training Institute (another program I received training from). Detail regular scheduling and commitments to the process. And then ultimately we work together to identify and define a goal (something SMART) that we can work towards together over the course of our engagement.

The coaching itself? There are toolkits and frameworks, methods to help clients work through the specific challenges they might face, but at the root of it is a coaching process called Active Inquiry. The definition provided by my certification program (Center for Executive Coaching) defines it as: 

• A dialogue largely of powerful questions and active listening/reflecting that includes
• The client’s goal(s) for the session
• The client’s goal(s) for the situation they face
• Exploration as appropriate
• How the client will get where they want to go
• Learnings, next steps, and accountability to move forward

This is coaching.

And while this is all fine and good, the next question I want to answer is this: What is business coaching? That’s my specialty, and that’s coming next.

If you want to explore how coaching might benefit you, feel free to reach out either on LinkedIn or my website and we can find a time to talk. Even if I’m not the perfect person to help you, I’m connected to a number of very talented people (coaches and consultants) who might be able to help you instead.