Friday, November 25, 2011

Coaching: Reinventing Coaching!

Hi,

Coaching has been emerged as a distinct discipline for about 30 years by now. There are hundreds of thousands of coaches around the world. And it is ever increasing.

However, it is quite sad to find out that when more people are doing coaching, more people are NOT doing coaching!

As coaching is still a very young discipline and it is emerged rather than created by a single founder, so there does not exists an universally accepted definition. But it is mostly agreed amongst its practitioners that coaching is about promoting non-directive, non-leading self-discovery of the clients.

The problem we coaches facing today is the result of this strict, but most important criteria of coaching. If it is non-directive and non-leading, it is difficult, both for the coaches and the clients. Without directions and leading from the coaches, a client need to discover on his/her own. If coaches provide direction or leading, it is not coaching!

So, most of the coaching models and methodologies using today are some forms of guiding or leading in order to make clients' self-discovery easier. The more guiding and leading, the easier will be the process. As coaching is becoming more popular over the years, there is a demand of "mass producing" of more coaches into the market. In order to make mass production possible, one must adopt an easier system. The result is many new coaches are doing more and more leading in their so-called coaching work.

To face the reality, we should either revise the definition of coaching, or to reinvent coaching methodology in order to make coaching easier without any leading. Or our profession will gradually being impaired as we are not doing what we supposed to do.

If we do believe coaching is something good, we should start our reinventing work. With more easier models of coaching without leading, more people can do real coaching to help others, but without a deep learning curve.

Keith
Explore, Exceed & Excel