What is coaching
and how can it help you?
The Impact of Coaching
Personal Leadership is about how you lead yourself to achieve your aims, intentions and desired goals. They could be personal or professional goals and they could be big or small. So whether you are looking for high performance coaching courses or a mental performance coach that can help you remove self-doubt and gain the confidence to lead a happier life, we can help!
Over recent years, we have offered ‘self-managed’ (i.e. non-coached) courses and coached programmes. It has been noticeable that, even with the practice frameworks we can build in, our clients have achieved far more significant shifts in impact through our coached programmes when compared with the self-managed, online version of the same course.
Although the self-managed programmes resulted in a very positive impact for learners, those who then took the coached programme said it had a more profound impact on their development. It has created greater insights and influenced and effected deeper behaviour change.
People have found that the addition of coaching has helped them to remove deep-seated limitations in their perceptions and thinking, enabling them to achieve things they were simply unable to do by themselves. They have reported much greater confidence and now feel far more in control of themselves, their plans and their actions.
​
What Exactly is Coaching?
Coaching can support us in many aspects of our personal and professional lives; for example, through executive, accountability, performance, team, life, sport, career or one-to-one leadership coaching.
The International Coaching Community states that the essence of coaching is:
-
To help a person change in the way they wish and helping them go in the direction they want to go
-
Supporting a person at every level in becoming who they want to be
-
Building awareness, empowering choice and leading to change.
It asserts that coaching ‘unlocks a person’s potential to maximise their performance’.
​
Typically, training involves an expert teaching a student something they do not already know, or currently know at a low level of competence. In this case, the teacher/trainer holds the knowledge and is required to pass it on to the trainee.
However, in coaching, the client is the expert in their specific field, with the coach drawing on their coaching prowess to help the client gain clarity and often plan a way to achieve their goal. This can be achieved by helping the coachee draw out the most relevant elements of their expertise, and in helping them determine how they can remove the barriers that get in their way and create the mindset to tackle the challenge.
Coaching usually has longer-term goals and is a more transformational process than the transactional nature of training. The ownership in coaching is more on a joint discovery between coach and coachee, with the coachee committing to putting their learning into action in order for the coach to continue to support them.​
​How can coaching help you achieve your goals?
All personal and collective growth is an outcome of some change supported by learning. Therefore, learning lies at the very heart of progress. However, how we learn and what we learn is influenced by our experiences and how our brains work.
When we process or explore information by ourselves, our internal conversation is often masked by many factors that limit our ability to make the most of what might be truly possible.
To cope with the billions of data that we are bombarded with on a daily basis, our brains develop filters which block out the vast majority of what is going on. This enables the brain to work more effectively without crashing. As we move through life, our brain creates memories of key experiences and often develops shortcuts and reactions which, when triggered, fire a habitual response. Hence, our brains often distort, re-imagine or even block things out. This can limit who we are and what we can become.
On the flip side, our brains can also be guided to ‘experience’ events that have not yet occurred in reality, e.g. through visualisation. Once alerted to a particular idea or outcome, our brains will look out for all the data that will help this imagined reality become more real. Our imagination can indeed help advance our progress.
Coaching provides us with a capable ‘exploration partner’ to help us catch, recognise and better manage our filters and reactions, as well as imagining what bigger, better, more attractive outcomes might be for us. In this process, the coach enables us to access more data, make more connections, consider more possibilities and determine far more powerful solutions than we could achieve by ourselves.
So, whether it is freeing yourself from experiential limits, seeing new possibilities or broadening and deepening your learning experiences, coaching acts as both a catalyst and an accelerator to help you advance your insights, thoughts and actions more powerfully.
​
Ultimately, coaching helps you remove limiting beliefs, gain confidence and provides the motivation and accountability support that moves you from procrastination to clear, focused action. It enables you to achieve things you wouldn't achieve on your own.