Thought Leadership

Coaching can feel a bit like a dark art if you’ve never experienced it before.  Listen to some of the rhetoric around coaching on social media and it can start to sound a bit like snake oil.  A cure-all for the multitude of problems and challenges that you might face in your professional and personal life.

So let’s start by busting the myth.  Coaching will not cure all your ills.  Other interventions are available like training, mentoring, or even advice from your best friend and … doing nothing at all.

But, coaching DOES offer something that these other interventions do not – a truly individualised approach and self-curated solution.

Let’s consider the other options.

Training is great if the solution is something that will definitely work for everyone.  But we all know that a sheep dip approach doesn’t work for everything in life.  That’s why a lot of self-help books are disappointing – often promising much and delivering little.

Mentoring is a really powerful way of learning from the experience of others who have gone before us.  But how do we know that the mentor’s solution is going to work for us in the same way it worked for them?  We are different people with different life experiences in different situations.

Advice from your best friend (or anyone else you know) is normally offered with gloriously positive intent and will probably feel helpful and supportive as well as make us feel seen and heard.  But our friends’ advice is coloured by their affection for us.  They’re not going to really challenge us, push us out of our comfort zone or give us a piece of advice that might be difficult to hear.

And doing nothing.  Well, if what you want is more of the same, then doing nothing is absolutely fine.

So why coaching?

What coaching offers, that none of the other interventions do, is a uniquely individual solution to every challenge.  A solution that fits you because it’s created by you.  And the coaching empowers you to come up with that solution.

Let’s take a topic that frequently comes up in coaching:

“I’d like to be better at speaking up in meetings”

Now, you could invest in some presentation skills training or some confidence training.  Your mentor could give you some sage advice about how they learned to speak up more.  Your friend might advise you to stop worrying about it as she’s sure you speak up just the right amount.  And you could, of course, choose to do nothing (if you decide that’s not career limiting).

One of the above options might actually work for you.  But whether it works or doesn’t work, it feels a bit like pot luck.

So what would coaching offer that’s better, more individualised, more targeted and more likely to work?

In order to unlock a solution that’s going to work for you to start speaking up more, coaching would help you explore what’s behind why you’re not speaking up in meetings.

There are a myriad of reasons.  Here are some reasons that I may or may not have heard in coaching sessions over the years (one of which is my own reason, full disclosure):

“I feel like an imposter and think I’ll be found out if I speak up.”
“I’m new in my role and don’t have all the answers”
“I lack confidence”
“I’m an introvert and feel awkward speaking up when I’m in a large group”
“I’m a reflective thinker and need time to process what I want to say”
“Everyone else is jostling to get their voice in the room and I can’t be bothered to compete”
“I don’t want to be a show off”

The thing about training, mentoring and advice is that they deal with the ‘problem’: you can’t speak up in meetings so I’ll give you some skills that will help you.  But, if the reason you don’t speak up in meetings is that you don’t want to be perceived as a show off (yes, that’s my one), THAT is what needs to be addressed.

And that’s the work I did with a coach. Looking at where that limiting belief comes from, whether it's true, whether it serves me, what alternative perspectives I could entertain, how I could overcome it to get my voice heard, etc, etc.

And that’s why I can now speak up for myself!  And that, as you can see, is a very individual problem with a very individual solution.

And all of the other ‘reasons’ listed above were approached in the same way: with some good quality coaching that empowered the individual to identify what was holding them back and to find their own solutions to overcome their blockers and get to where they wanted to be.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas for how coaching can support individuals to come up with new solutions to old problems.  It’s not always the right approach but, in the right circumstances, it’s a powerful agent of change and transformation.