What's coaching?

For me, coaching is a personalized support between a coach and a person who is coached, the coachee. The support needs to focus on the vision, the goals (personal or professional) and the desires of the person being coached. Indeed, the principal goal of the coaching is to help the coachee to reach concrete results on what she or he wants to achieve. It’s for that reason the three dimensions (that the vision, the goals and the desired) of the coachee are so important; because they help the coach to better know the person and can to adjust and manage the support. Without it, the coach can’t realy help. But, it’s not necessarily that the coachee knows with exactitude his or her vision and goals. Indeed, in the coaching, one of the roles of the coach is to help the coachee to define what it’s important for her or him. Without the coach, it could take longer and be more difficult for the coachee to do it. Also, in the first sentence, the adjective “personalized” is very important, because each coaching is different and need to be adapted to the person who is coached. The coach can’t have exactly the same approach with every person and the approach may be different for the same coachee in at different time as well. This difference can be explained by the fact that every person is different and don’t necessarily have the same vision, goals and desires.

So, with the previous explication, we can say that the coaching helps the coachee to deepen her/his knowledge about herself/himself. Indeed, it’s that knowledge that helps the person to achieve her or his goals. There is a lot of benefit in having a better knowledge about oneself. For example, it will be easier to improve the self-awareness and to have a better perception of oneself as well as the world around. It could also help the person to be more confident in her or his capacities and to decrease the fear about the responsibilities and the changes.  

In short, the coach supports the coachee in her or his path, but the coach is not there to directly show the direction or to do all the work. The coach is there to support the coachee, to “light” her or his road and to help to build a strategy. With the process of coaching, the coach will tool up the coachee and the new tools will help her or him to develop skills. But, the relationship and the communication between the coach and the coachee are really important if they want to have all the benefits mentioned above. Indeed, the coachee needs to feel confident in the professional support and to have the feeling that she or he could trust the coach. Honest feedbacks are very important in the communication and the coach needs to take a constructive approach. To finish, certain key processes need to be respected in a coaching conversation to obtain a better coaching. The key processes are listening, mirroring, summering, questioning and catalyzing. All the key processes are important, because they help to establish an effective communication and lead to better results.

Patrick St-Pierre