The Better Approach Coaching - FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

"Workers at all levels of the corporate ladder are enlisting coaches for guidance on how to improve their performance, boost their profits, and make better decisions about everything from personnel to strategy." -TIME Business News

1. What Is Coaching?

Coaching is a professional partnership between a qualified coach and an individual or team that supports the achievement of extraordinary results, based on goals set by the individual or team. Through the coaching process individuals focus on the skills and actions necessary to produce their personally relevant results.

The individual or team chooses the focus for area of development. Coaching accelerates the individual's or team’s progress by providing greater focus and awareness of possibilities leading to more effective choices. Coaching concentrates on where individuals are now and what they are willing to do to get where they want to. They focus on defining a problem, assessing motivation levels, and providing solutions for business professionals and individuals to overcome obstacles and pursue healthy lifestyle and career dreams. Results are a matter of the individual's or team’s intentions, choices and actions, supported by the coach's efforts and application of coaching skills.

2. What are the benefits of coaching?

Individuals who engage in a coaching relationship can expect to experience fresh perspectives on personal challenges and opportunities, enhanced thinking and decision making skills, enhanced interpersonal effectiveness, and increased confidence in carrying out their chosen work and life roles and life purpose. Consistent with a commitment to enhancing their personal effectiveness, they can also expect to see appreciable results in the areas of productivity, personal fulfillment with life and work, and the achievement of personally relevant goals.

3. How can you determine if coaching is right for you?

To determine if you could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you would expect to accomplish. When someone has a fairly clear idea of the desired outcome, a coaching partnership can be a useful tool for developing a strategy for how to achieve that outcome more easily.

Since coaching is a partnership, also ask yourself if you find it valuable to collaborate, to have another viewpoint and to be asked to consider new perspectives. Also, ask yourself if you are ready to devote the time and the energy to making real changes in your work or lifestyle. If the answer to these questions is yes, then coaching may be a beneficial way for you to grow and develop. Take the free online assessment and contact The Better Approach Coaching Service with your results if you are ready to start on the path to achieving change and begin living your dreams.

4. Why coaching?

There are many reasons that an individual or team might choose to work with a coach, including but not limited to the following:

You have something at stake (a challenge, stretch goal or opportunity), that is urgent, compelling, exciting, stressful, or all of the above.
You have a gap in knowledge, skills, confidence, or resources.
A big stretch is being asked or required, and it is time sensitive.
You want to accelerate results.
You need a course correction in work or life due to a setback.
You have a style of relating that is ineffective or is not supporting the achievement of one’s personally relevant goals.
You lack of clarity, and there are choices to be made.
You are extremely successful, and success has started to become problematic.
Your work and life are out of balance, and this is creating unwanted consequences.
You have not identified your core strengths and how best to leverage them.
You wish work and life to be simpler, less complicated.
You want and need to be better organized and more self-managing.

5. What has caused the tremendous growth in the coaching industry?

People today are more open to the idea of being in charge of their own lives. Coaching helps people focus on what matters most to them in life, both business and personal.

Coaching is a great tool for overcoming the anxiety of today's challenging job market, due to burnout, layoffs, downsizing and career transitions..

There is more job transition, more self-employment and small business. Some of the real life factors include:

Rapid changes in the external business environment
Downsizing, restructuring, mergers and other organizational changes have radically altered the "traditional employment contract"—companies can no longer achieve results using traditional management approaches
There is a growing shortage of talented employees in certain industries—to attract and retain top talent, companies must commit to investing in individuals’ development
There is a widening disparity between what managers were trained to do and what their jobs now require them to do in order to meet increasing demands for results
There is unrest on the part of many employees and leaders—people are wrestling with fears around job insecurity and increased workplace pressures to perform at higher levels than ever before.
Companies must develop inclusive, collaborative work environments, in order to achieve strategic business goals, and to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction

People today are more open to the idea of being in charge of their own lives. Coaching helps people do just that.

6. How is coaching delivered? What does the process look like?

The Coaching Process — Coaching typically begins with a personal interview to assess the individual’s current opportunities and challenges, define the scope of the relationship, identify priorities for action, and establish specific desired outcomes. Subsequent coaching sessions may be conducted in person or over the telephone. Between scheduled coaching sessions, the individual may be asked to complete specific actions that support the achievement of one’s personally prioritized goals. The coach may provide additional resources in the form of relevant articles, checklists, assessments, or models, to support the individual’s thinking and actions. The duration of the coaching relationship varies depending on the individual’s personal needs and preferences.

Assessments — A variety of assessments are available to support the coaching process, depending upon the needs and circumstances of the individual. Assessments provide objective information which can enhance the individual’s self-awareness as well as awareness of others and their circumstances, provide a benchmark for creating coaching goals and actionable strategies, and offer a method for evaluating progress.

Concepts, Models and Principles — A variety of concepts, models and principles drawn from the behavioral sciences, management literature, spiritual traditions and/or the arts and humanities, may be incorporated into the coaching conversation in order to increase the individual’s self-awareness and awareness of others, foster shifts
in perspective, promote fresh insights, provide new frameworks for looking at opportunities and challenges, and energize and inspire the individual’s forward actions.

Appreciative Approach — Coaching incorporates an appreciative approach. The appreciative approach is grounded in what’s right, what’s working, what’s wanted, and what’s needed to get there. Using an appreciative approach, the coach models constructive communication skills and methods the individual or team can utilize to enhance personal communication effectiveness. The appreciative approach incorporates discovery-based inquiry, proactive (as opposed to reactive) ways of managing personal opportunities and challenges, constructive framing of observations and feedback in order to elicit the most positive responses from others, and envisioning success as contrasted with focusing on problems. The appreciative approach is simple to understand and employ, but its effects in harnessing possibility thinking and goal-oriented action can be profound.

7. How long does a coach work with an individual?

The types of goals, the ways individuals or teams like to work, and the frequency of meetings factor into the length of the coaching engagement. For certain types of focused coaching, 3 to 6 months of working with a coach can achieve the desired results. For other types of coaching people may find it beneficial to work with a coach for a longer period.

8. How do you ensure a compatible partnership?

Be prepared to design the coaching partnership with the coach. Think of a strong partnership that you currently have in your work or life. Look at how you built that relationship and what is important to you about partnership. You will want to build those same elements into a coaching relationship. Here are a few other tips:

Have a personal interview with a few coaches to determine "what feels right" in terms of the chemistry. There is generally no charge for an introductory conversation of this type.
Look for stylistic similarities and differences between the coach and you and how these might support your personal growth or the growth of your team.
Discuss your goals for coaching within the context of the coach’s specialty or the coach’s preferred way of working with a individual or team.
Talk with the coach about what to do if you ever feel things are not going well; make some agreements up front on how to handle questions or problems.
Remember that coaching is a partnership, so be assertive in talking with the coach about anything that is of concern at any time.

9. Within the partnership, what does the coach do? The individual?

The role of the coach is to provide objective assessment and observations that foster the individual’s or team members’ enhanced self-awareness and awareness of others; to practice astute listening in order to garner a full understanding of the individual’s or team’s circumstances; to be a sounding board in support of possibility thinking and thoughtful planning and decision making; to champion opportunities and potential; to encourage stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations; to foster the shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives; to challenge blind spots in order to illuminate new possibilities for development; and to support the creation of alternative scenarios. Finally, the coach maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics.

The role of the individual or business team is to create the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals; to utilize assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others; to envision personal and/or organizational success; to assume full responsibility for personal decisions and actions; to utilize the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives; to take courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations; to engage big picture thinking and problem solving skills, and utilize the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach to engage effective forward actions.

What does coaching ask of an individual?
To be successful, coaching asks certain things of the individual, all of which begin with intention….

Focus — on one’s self, the tough questions, the hard truths--and one’s success
Observation — the behaviors and communications of others
Listening — to one’s intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks
Self discipline — to challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and to develop new ones which serve one’s goals in a superior way
Style — leveraging personal strengths and overcoming limitations in order to develop a winning style
Decisive actions — however uncomfortable, and in spite of personal insecurities and anxiety, in order to reach for the extraordinary
Compassion — for one’s self as he or she experiments with new behaviors, experiences setbacks—and for others as they do the same
Humor — committing to not take one’s self so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation
Personal control — maintaining composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity
Courage — to reach for more than before, to shift out of being fear based in to being in abundance as a core strategy for success, to engage in continual self examination, to overcome internal and external obstacles

10. How can the success of the coaching process be measured?

The individual or team and the coach establish the criteria at the onset of the coaching engagement and modify them, as necessary, as the engagement progresses.

Measurement may be thought of in two distinct ways. First, there are the external indicators of performance: measures which can be seen and measured in the individual’s or team’s environment.

Examples of external measures include increased income/revenue, obtaining a promotion, performance feedback which is obtained from a sample of the individual’s constituents (e.g., direct reports, colleagues, customers, boss, the manager him/herself), personal and/or business performance data (e.g., productivity, efficiency measures). The external measures selected should ideally be things the individual is already measuring and are things the individual has some ability to directly influence.

Second, there are internal indicators of success: measures that are inherent within the individual or team members being coached and can be measured by the individual or team with the support of the coach. Ideally, both external and internal metrics are incorporated.

Examples of internal measures include self-scoring/self-validating assessments that can be administered initially and at regular intervals in the coaching process, changes in the individual’s self-awareness and awareness of others, shifts in thinking which inform more effective actions, and shifts in one’s emotional state which inspire confidence.

11. How is coaching distinct from other service professions?

Professional coaching is a distinct service which focuses on an individual’s life as it relates to goal setting, outcome creation and personal change management. In an effort to understand what a coach is, it can be helpful to distinguish coaching from other professions that provide personal or organizational support.

Therapy. Coaching is a profession that supports personal and professional growth and development based on individual-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is forward moving and future focused. Therapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past, the emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability and follow through.

Consulting. Consultants may be retained by individuals or business organizations for the purpose of accessing specialized expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, there is often an assumption that the consultant diagnoses problems and prescribes and sometimes implements solutions. In general, the assumption with coaching is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approach and framework.

Mentoring. Mentoring can be thought of as guiding from one’s own experience or sharing of experience in a specific area of industry or career development. Coaches are not typically mentors to those they coach.

Training. Training programs are based on the acquisition of certain learning objectives as set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached with guidance provided by the coach. Training also assumes a linear learning path which coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum plan.

Athletic Development. Though sports metaphors are often used, professional coaching is different from the traditional sports coach. The athletic coach is often seen as an expert who guides and directs the behavior of individuals or teams based on his or her greater experience and knowledge. Professional coaches possess these qualities, but it is the experience and knowledge of the individual or team that determines the direction. Additionally, professional coaching, unlike athletic development, does not focus on behaviors that are being executed poorly or incorrectly. Instead, the focus is on identifying opportunity for development based on individual strengths and capabilities.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)