Coaching Questions and Answers

What Is Coaching?

Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their potential. This partnership between a qualified coach and an individual or team supports the achievement of extraordinary results, based on goals set by the individual or team. Through the process of coaching, individuals focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce their personally relevant results.

The individual or team chooses the focus of the conversation, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions as well as concepts and principles which can assist in generating possibilities and identifying actions. Through the coaching process the clarity that is needed to support the most effective actions is achieved. 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 be in the future.


Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach's job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.

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

The Coaching Process 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 are conducted, with each session lasting a previously established length of time, usually 2 hours. 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.

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.

A variety of concepts, models and principles drawn from the behavioral sciences, management literature, 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.

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.

What should someone look for when selecting a coach?

The most important thing to look for in selecting a coach is someone with whom you feel you can easily relate to create a powerful partnership. Here are some questions you may want to ask prospective coaches:

• What is your coaching experience? (number of individuals coached, years of experience, types of situations)
• What is your coach specific training?
• What is your coaching specialty or client areas you most often work in?
• What specialized skills or experience do you bring to your coaching?
• What is your philosophy about coaching?
• What is your specific process for coaching? (How sessions are conducted, frequency, etc.)
• What are some coaching success stories? (specific examples of individuals who have done well and examples of how you have added value)

How long does a coach work with an individual?

The length of a coaching partnership varies depending on the individuals or team's needs and preferences. For certain types of focused coaching, 6 to 8 months of working with a coach may work. For other types of coaching, people may find it beneficial to work with a coach for a longer period. Factors that may impact the length of time include: the types of goals, the ways individuals or teams like to work, the frequency of coaching meetings, and financial resources available to support coaching.

How do you ensure a compatible partnership?

Overall, be prepared to design the coaching partnership with the coach. For example, 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 things into a coaching relationship. Here are a few other tips:

• Have a personal interview with your coach to determine "what feels right" in terms of the chemistry. Coaches are accustomed to being interviewed, and 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 growth as an individual or the growth of your team.
• Discuss your goals for coaching.
• 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 about talking with the coach about anything that is of concern at any time.

Within the partnership, what does the coach do?

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.
  
• Practice astute listening in order to garner a full understanding of the individual's or team's circumstances.
• Be a sounding board in support of possibility thinking and thoughtful planning and decision making.
  
• Champion opportunities and potential.
• Encourage stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations.
• Foster the shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives.
• Challenge blind spots in order to illuminate new possibilities, and support the creation of alternative scenarios.
• Maintain professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality.

Within the partnership what does the individual do?

The role of the individual or team is to:

• Create the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals.
• Utilise assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others.
• Envision personal and/or organizational success.
• Assume full responsibility for personal decisions and actions.
• Utilise the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives.
• Take courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations.
• 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 behaviours 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, 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.
• Humour—committing to not take one's self so seriously, using humour 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.

How can the success of the coaching process be measured?

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

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.

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