Saturday, September 30, 2006

Coaching: Definition of Coaching

Hi,

With the rising popularity of Coaching in both Hong Kong and China, there seem to be more confusions about this term.

There are 2 major confusions about Coaching:

1. People uses the term "coaching" interchangely with other terms like, "counselling", "training", "personal training", "mentoring", "personal instructing", "guiding", etc.

If they are the same thing, why a new term and a new form of skill?

2. People adds knowledge and skills from other areas to coaching, like active listening, NLP, enneagram, leadership, persoanl development etc. If coaching is a different skill from all others, it should have its own skillset.


If only one definition is allowed, I will define coaching as:

"Facilitating others to identify blindspots in thinking through dialogue"


To clarify:

1. Coaching is NOT "counselling", "training", "personal training", "mentoring", "personal instructing", "guiding", etc. Coaching is NOT better than the above. They are just different.

2. Active Listening, NLP, enneagram, etc can help a coach to coach, but they are not Coaching itself. You do not need to know any of the above to coach effectively. Knowing the above does not make you knowing how to coach.

3. Coaching can result in better leadership and personal development due to the discovery of blindspots. But Coaching is not Leadership or Personal Development.

4. If one wants to learn coaching, the only 2 things need to learn is "Dialogue" and the "Mechanism of Blindspots".

Keith