Over the past ten years I’ve noticed a growing enthusiasm for coaching as a concept, as a thing to do for people on future leadership development courses, as a skillset for managers. Things tend to get hazy when you start to ask people what they want from it or what they think it’s going to be.

I think that the banner ‘coaching’ is probably a bit unhelpful too, as it has numerous everyday associations and most people, when they think about being coached probably imagine themselves in some kind of sports montage, pumping weights, running up steps all to the Rocky theme tune, while being bellowed at by their ‘coach’ who is explicitly telling them what they need to do to win.

This is absolutely not what we mean by coaching in a business context.

When we’re training we’re often told Sir John Whitmore’s nifty explanation:

“Coaching is maximising a person’s potential to maximise their own performance.”

Which is great in an inspiring, high-level, kind of a way, but still leaves many of the people I talk to with the lingering question : What actually is it?

As coaches, I think we’ve got to have to hand a bunch of day to day explanations of what coaching is, how it differs from mentoring or training (or counselling). We need to be able to quickly explain how much time it will take (often not much) and what tangible benefits people have got from being coached.

Here’s my go-to elevator pitch:

I tend to think of coaching in terms of how people approach New Year’s resolutions.

January 1st – “This year I will be Better.”

January 31st (or sooner) – *downcast* – “I’m not better…”

Coaching is a guided conversation which helps to pick apart what ‘better’ means to you. Then look at breaking that into manageable, achievable chunks that you can try over a 6 month period to help move you towards what you wanted to do. If your resolution was to write a novel, a coach would help you work out what things have been standing in your way, and the manageable things you could try in the short and medium term to get things moving.

A coaching relationship is usually 4-6 sessions, each of about an hour, with 4-6 weeks in between sessions to try out what you’ve decided in each one.

It differs from mentoring, in which you pick out a person who has achieved what you’re aiming to do, and they tell you how they did it. So, to use our example, if you talked to a novelist, you could find out all their real world practical tips for how they wrote their first book. It can be less handy if they did that by selling everything and moving abroad for two years, if your lifestyle or circumstances aren’t similar to theirs. Or if the book, or your inspiration is not the same. Mentoring is about learning from others.

Coaching is working out with a neutral sounding board how you can make those steps yourself, in your life.

Sometimes we genuinely have no idea how to do something. Maybe you need training. Maybe a creative writing course will give you the tools you need. If you don’t know how to do something, the you need training, not coaching. Coaching can often be an important step a month or so after you’ve done some training. Okay, I learnt all this great stuff, but I’m not doing it. How can I start to apply it? How can I find the time?

For the people who like to look under the bonnet, this is normally when I start to talk a little about how coaching is a focussed practical application of concepts that come up in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and neurolinguistic programming (NLP). It is essentially a way to look at existing habits, break ones that no longer work for you and build ones that do.

It gives you license to play. To try things out. It also comes with a coach who isn’t going to judge you for whether things have worked or not, but is there entirely to help you try (and to focus those attempts on what will hopefully work best for you).

The spiel I’ve oulined above is the start of the coversation I generally have with people about what coaching *is* and it spooled out of many conversations in which I was having to explain what it *isn’t*. I think it’s really important for us to frame expectations about what people can get from coaching and the ways in which it can be useful (and the expectations of what the coachee can get from us and what we expect from them in return). – the biggest frustrations always coming from people not quite knowing what they’re signing up for.

Coaching has the power to help people transform their lives very much for the better, in ways that make sense for them. I just wish we’d started with a better word for it.