What Is Coaching?

“The eye cannot see itself.”
– Bill O’Brien

What coaching is and isn’t, and what is right for you.

Good coaching leverages a valuable outside perspective in order to help us become observers of ourselves. By becoming observers of our own behavior, we can then start to identify the ways in which we can be better, or see how we get in our own way.

One way to think about coaching is watching yourself play the game.

Have you ever thought about how even the most elite, world-class athletes still have coaches? Simone Biles. Lebron James. Roger Federer. They’re the best of the best, and yet they still somehow get value from being coached. 

No athlete or performer, however skilled, can watch themselves while they’re playing the game. One of the coach’s jobs is to watch the players and give feedback while the game is unfolding. Often, the coach and player will even go back to the locker room when the game is over and look at the game tape together. In those sessions, you’re likely to hear a coach saying, “Hey, you notice you did that?” or “Are you seeing this pattern?” or “What’s another choice you could’ve made there?” or “Next time, what do you want to try?”

Coaching is designed to get you somewhere – from point A to point B, or from a current way of being to a new way of being. Along the way, you gain self-awareness and tools to build skillful means of developing yourself and moving towards your goals.

How Is Coaching Different From Mentorship and Therapy?

Coaching is different from other forms of helping such as therapy, mentoring, advising, and consulting.

Therapy 

Therapy is focused on relief from present-day suffering by diagnosing and healing the past. While that healing may eventually affect our ability to create the life we want, it is an indirect path to those changes. The gaze of therapy is primarily into the past.

Coaching begins with possibility. By starting with the positive outcomes and ‘future states’ the client would most like to experience, coaching creates a new context for growth. For example, core beliefs which may be limiting current possibilities are explored and revised in service of unlocking more empowering choices in the present moment. Coaching cultivates insight, develops skills, and liberates action in the service of generating desired futures. The gaze of coaching is forward.

Advising & Mentoring 

Advising and Mentoring are similar, with one key difference. A person might advise you on running a company if they’ve run a company before. Or, perhaps if you are a head of sales, you could be advised by someone who has managed salespeople before. In other words, the advisor gives advice based on a similar macro context. 

A mentor is somebody who’s done the exact same job as you. For example, a former CEO may be able to be a useful advisor to a head of sales, but they couldn’t necessarily be a mentor. A mentor would be a Head of Sales who has done it before and can then mentor someone else specifically in the domain.

Consulting 

We hire a consultant to bring a certain skill set or area of expertise to bear on a specific problem or challenge. Often the work of the consultant begins by doing exploration or research and then preparing a set of findings and recommendations. The consultant may or may not be a part of the actual action of solving the problem, but they are definitely involved in diagnosing the problem and sharing recommendations. 

Combining EQ & IQ

Coaching exists on a continuum. Just about anybody can hang a shingle and call themselves a coach. While there are certifying bodies and many high-quality coach training programs, there is incredible diversity out in the wild among those who call themselves “coaches.” One way to begin to make sense of the coaching landscape is to think about a continuum of High EQ and High IQ coaches.

High EQ 

One end of the continuum we’ll call High EQ (emotional quotient). High EQ correlates to high emotional intelligence. On this end, you’ll find folks that have come from a therapeutic background. There are many former psychologists and psychotherapists who have decided to move from working with private individuals to working with leaders and companies, and, as such, have labeled themselves as coaches. They’re a tremendous benefit to the ecosystem. So many founders, for instance, are working with anxiety and depression, and High EQ coaches are quite skilled at tending to those challenges with clients. 

If you had to fire someone, a High EQ would be great at helping you explore the anxiety you’re carrying and how your personal history might be showing up and impacting your behavior. But they’re probably not going to be as helpful with the practicalities involved in letting someone go. 

High IQ 

On the other end of the continuum, are High IQ (intellectual quotient) coaches. These are people who’ve typically come from the business world and bring with them deep experience and business acumen. Oftentimes they have frameworks and checklists and all sorts of best practices to bring to bear. Imagine a former executive from Google or Facebook who has now come into coaching. They’ve managed large teams, interfaced with boards, and managed clients and vendors, so they can help with the practical side of things. 

If you had to fire someone, the High IQ coach would have their checklists and frameworks and best practices to cover all the bases of how to “do it right.” On the other hand, they’re not necessarily going to be equipped to help you delve into, for instance, why you’re anxious about having to fire this person, how your own behavior may have contributed to the core of the challenge, and what repeated patterns might be worth exploring so you don’t end up in the same situation with the next hire. 

What is right for you?

Often what’s needed is a mix of the support persons above. For example, in our practice, we often refer clients to therapists to do that work in parallel to their coaching work. Clients will also often have a network of support, such as advisors and mentors, to reach out to when they have specific roles or business-related questions.