FAQ about Coaching

It’s a coaching model we use that provides a truly holistic approach serving the whole person and not just one specific aspect of a person or one specific challenge he or she may be facing. Goal Imagery® coaching maintains that masterful coaching includes a very personal and intimate conversation about the client’s values, ideals, and beliefs. As every true leader must lead from the perspective of his/her own sense of values, a Goal Imagery® coach addresses leadership, relationships, and communication skills, assisting clients to relate their values and ideals in an authentic way.

To determine whether you or your company could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you would expect to accomplish in coaching. When an individual or business 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 with greater ease.

Since coaching is a partnership, ask yourself whether collaboration, other viewpoints, and new perspectives are valued. Also, ask yourself whether you or your business is ready to devote the time and the energy to making real changes. If the answer is yes, then coaching may be a beneficial way to grow and develop. 

Professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes, and managing personal change. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand coaching by distinguishing it from other personal or organizational support professions.

Therapy: Therapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction, and conflict within an individual or in relationships. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past that hamper an individual’s emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with the present in more emotionally healthy ways. Coaching, on the other hand, supports personal and professional growth based on self-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is future-focused. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one’s work or personal life. The emphases in a coaching relationship are on action, accountability, and follow-through.

Consulting: Individuals or organizations retain consultants for their expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, the assumption is the consultant will diagnose problems and prescribe and, sometimes, implement solutions. With coaching, the assumption is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.

Mentoring: A mentor is an expert who provides wisdom and guidance based on his or her own experience. Mentoring may include advising, counseling and coaching. The coaching process does not include advising or counseling and focuses instead on individuals or groups setting and reaching their own objectives.

Training: Training programs are based on objectives 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 that coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum.

The coach:

• Provides objective assessment and observations that foster the individual’s or team’s self-awareness and awareness of others
• Listens closely to fully understand the individual’s or team’s circumstances
• Aids in gaining clarity and offers effective decision-making strategies
• Acts as a sounding board in exploring possibilities and implementing thoughtful planning
• Champions opportunities and potential, encouraging stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations
• Fosters shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives
• Broadens perspective above and beyond an issue at hand
• Engages big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills
• Offers energy of collaboration and partnership, viewing the client as a whole, creative and resourceful
• Challenges blind spots to illuminate new possibilities and supports the creation of alternative scenarios
• Maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics (https://coachfederation.org/icf-ethics).

The client:

• Focuses on one’s self, the tough questions, the hard truths, and one’s success

• Challenges existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, and develops new ones

• Leverages personal strengths and overcomes limitations to develop a winning style

• Maintains composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity

• Creates the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful goals

• Assumes full responsibility for personal decisions and actions

• Takes the tools, concepts, models, and principles provided by the coach and engages in effective forward actions

An individual or team might choose to work with a coach for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:

• Something urgent, compelling or exciting is at stake (a challenge, stretch goal, or opportunity)
• A gap exists in knowledge, skills, confidence, or resources
• A desire to accelerate results
• A lack of clarity with choices to be made
• Success has started to become problematic
• Work and life are out of balance, creating unwanted consequences
• Core strengths need to be identified, along with how best to leverage them

Coaching typically begins with discussing current opportunities and challenges, defining the scope of the relationship, identifying priorities, and establishing specific desired outcomes. Subsequent coaching sessions may be conducted in person or over the telephone (upon mutual agreement), with each session lasting a previously established length of time. Between scheduled coaching sessions, the client takes 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. The duration of the coaching relationship varies depending on needs and preferences.

Appreciative approach: Coaching incorporates an appreciative approach, 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 to enhance personal communication effectiveness. He or she incorporates discovery-based inquiry, proactive (as opposed to reactive) ways of managing personal opportunities and challenges, constructive framing of observations and feedback to elicit the most positive responses from others, and visions of success as contrasted with focusing on problems. The appreciative approach is simple to understand and employ, and its reach can be profound, opening up new possibilities and spurring action.

According to ICF, “…coaching inspires people to maximize potential, learning… It is the client’s responsibility to get results, not the coach’s.” As coach and client partner on creating a solid strategy for the client to achieve his/her goals, it is solely the client’s responsibility to implement that strategy and take action steps in-between coaching meetings.

Measurement may be thought of in two distinct ways: external indicators of performance and internal indicators of success. Ideally, both are incorporated.

Examples of external measures include achievement of coaching goals established at the outset of the coaching relationship, increased income/revenue, obtaining a promotion, performance feedback that 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 be things the individual is already measuring and has some ability to directly influence.