Coaching is one of the most valuable developments of the last century. It has grown in popularity the last twenty-five years. Coaching provides an exceptional tool to raise our levels of awareness, attunement, improves our relationships, and assists us in discovering our personal potential. It helps us cultivate a hospitable environment for growth in our professional lives to achieve greater results.

Psychology, and it’s focus on an individual’s potential for growth and maturity lays the groundwork for coaching. Because coaching borrows heavily from psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and other related fields, questions inevitably arise: What is the difference between coaching and therapy? What is coaching really?

Coaching has distinct boundaries with psychotherapy practices. Because of this it is deeply misunderstood, mischaracterized, and practiced by a very wide spectrum of talent, creating doubt in the marketplace. Coaching is rarely described well, and its voice seldom heard with enough clarity.

This little book attempts to explain how I interpret and practice coaching and how it leverages basic principles from psychology, in particular, the difference between dipping and dwelling in the past; what the needs are in all of us to which it serves; the methods by which it addresses these needs; and what outcome of a coaching intervention could ideally be. It is meant to help people who have never had a coach, understand what coaching is and what is not, and how they might utilize coaching toward their own performance goals.

This is NOT a book teaching how to do coaching. It is not meant to be substituted for advanced learning.

The book suggests my central belief that coaching, with someone well-trained, is one of the single greatest steps any of us can take towards greater awareness and fulfillment. Investing in coaching can reduce anger and frustration, defeatism, poor confidence, and general feelings of being lost or stuck while helping you achieve results.

This is a guide to the purpose and meaning of coaching.

This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.

Now that we’ve reviewed some of the fundamentals of psychology—specifically how family systems work, our lopsided natures, and the impact of denial—it’s important to underscore the stance of the practitioner you want to engage, and why you want to engage them. Chemistry and philosophical alignment matters when it comes to making progress.

A therapist will diagnose your lopsidedness, and dwell with you in reviewing past experiences to heal or help reduce your emotional pain. They do this by reversing the suppression of memories and emotions; by talking with you and getting you to talk.

Coaching dips into the past and attempts to help you frame your experiences in a way that provides insights about your present and future. Specifically, coaching helps you gain awareness of yourself as an individual, how you influence and interact with teams, and how well you negotiate shifts in market forces.

It is here we come to a fork in the road and will focus exclusively on the practice and value of coaching.

Coaching is a tool; like all tools, it has been designed to help us overcome an innate weakness we came by naturally and to help us learn to nurture, augment and extend our capacities. A bucket is stronger and more secure than holding water in our hands. A knife is more helpful to us than tearing meat with our teeth. Both tools make up for innate deficits in our natural abilities and help us do more with our resources.

What is distinctive about coaching is what it is a tool for: at its core coaching is an invention us interweave results and relationships. It sounds like a simple concept, but it is not easy to pull off.

Coaches claim a wide spectrum of specialties—from coaching skills for management, to building block skills from scientific literature, to a billion dollar self-help industry helping you figure out “what to do when you grow up”—and this book doesn’t claim to cover such a broad range of topics.

Here, we take a flyover view of view of how executive coaches leverage principles from psychology and effectively model them with clients as the navigate their environment and finding those educatable moments when they will be able to link being, doing, and learning with attaining actionable results. In this way, clients leverage coaches as a true business partner helping them face distinct challenges in achieving results and gain clarity on what is hindering their progress.

Coaches find educatable moments by linking being, doing, and learning with attaining actionable results.

While coaching can initially be focused on a single individual, coaches take a bi-focal view of client within the context of their larger system. They look at the forces that shape and influence the client. Clients subconsciously react to the field in which they operate with their own emotional responses, which propel them forward or hold them back. Clients react within that field and this sets off a chain of reactivity around them. Coaches need to be able to see the how the system impacts their clients in order to see how their interventions succeed or fail. Without the systems perspective, coaches have limited impact.

Coaching has been devised to correct the otherwise substantial difficulties we face in understanding how we operate as individuals, our impact and influence on others, our ability to participate and lead high-performance teams. Done well, under pressure, in front of an audience—are all demonstrations of fully integrated skills such as self-love; radical candor; awareness of what motivates us and others; and, self-management. To perform well under stress requires us to trust ourselves first, then others, and communicate successfully, honor our potential, while feeling adequately calm, confident, authentic, direct and unashamed.

For many of us, that is a tall order.

For such an important invention, coaching is still low on overt signs of innovation. Much of the training and information on the market has been updated and repackaged.

However, there is new emphasis on neuroscience, brain development, creativity, and consciousness. There is increasing interest in making coaching more readily available to all members of the organization. Technically speaking, it requires only a quiet room free of interruptions, fifty minutes, possibly twice a month, and some thoughtful conversation where both people are fully present. The level of training a coach grounded in psychology needs to undertake requires a period of extensive education in the workings of the mind, which – in more responsible institutions – has a similar cost, rigor, intellectual ambition and periods of hands-on experience as getting a pilot’s license.

To deliver on its promises, coaching relies on distinct components. Here are four.

1. Results Driven

The outcomes a client is there to achieve should be the sole focus of a client engagement. To lose site of that is to waste the client’s time, money, and energy. The organization needs the client to be as effective as possible on the goods or services that contribute to the organization’s success. Coaching support that drive for results.

2. Partners on the journey

The coach stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the client in gaining personal and professional mastery. Together, they detangle and assess the issues, pressures, and problems they face. The coach observes, inquires, motivates and challenges the client to perform optimally.

3. Engaged in the challenge

This process helps the client gain awareness and insights about what forces they might be succumbing to that take them off course, and what they avoid. In the confines of the coaching dynamic, the coach confronts and challenges the client on how they might be getting in their own way.

4. Connects key concepts to gain insights

The coach makes the connection between behaviors to outcomes, keeping the leaders focused on outcomes but widening their lens on how to get there. This is an essential aspect of coaching where coaches help clients to understand which behaviors are linked to which business goals. It’s important for the client to understand that they are not an island, and that the responsibility remains central to the leader achieving results through their behaviors with the team.

This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.