Today’s top professions, including CEOs, attorneys, politicians, doctors, entrepreneurs, and business owners, use personal coaches. We’re hearing more and more about celebrities, politicians, and corporate executives who want to be “on top form” and “at their best” and who do so through the use of a personal coach.
In such “coaching,” what does a personal coach do?
What is Coaching
#1. Coaching is change and growth that makes things better.
From one perspective, “coaching” is the positive side of therapy. It is change and growth that make things better. That is, it focuses on how to think better, feel better, and improve health, well-being, focus, alertness, relaxation, skill, etc. Coaching starts with the question, “How can I make things even better?” instead of trying to solve problems or deal with problems. “How can I become even smarter and more useful?”
This is the generative use of psychology, which means to create new levels of competence, success, and happiness. This is different from the remedial use of psychology, which means fixing problems. A qualified and well-trained personal coach needs to know a lot about psychology and how people work, especially the self-actualizing processes that help people reach their best experiences and performances. Coaching is different from counselling because counselling is mostly about “problems,” while coaching is about improving and honing the best skills. The goal of coaching is to help people play to their strengths and get rid of anything that gets in the way or gets in the way of excellence. Because of this, coaching is a discipline that focuses on coming up with solutions.
#2. Coaching focuses on the people instead of the business’s tasks.
From another perspective, coaching is when the business consultant focuses on the manager, leader, or executive instead of the business’s tasks. A coach needs to know a lot about business, management, leadership, groups, social psychology, and marketing. However, these are not the coach’s areas of expertise. The personal coach mostly uses his or her business consulting skills as background knowledge to focus on coaching an executive on how to do his or her job well so that the business does well. This helps the executive put his or her knowledge into action. To do this, a coach will need to know a lot about business, as well as social psychology, group dynamics, and how change works in institutions.
#3. Coaching is a systemic way to get our brains and bodies to work at their best.
From the third point of view, “coaching” is a systemic way to get our brains and bodies to work at their best in all the situations we recognize as important in our lives and that affect our success. For this, the personal coach needs to know a lot about systemic thinking, processes, and ways to work together.
Catching a Coach at Work
So, what does a personal coach or executive coach actually do?
A few things. One of the most important things is to work with a client in a way that helps the manager understand his or her role, performance, and challenges in the best way possible. Often, this means learning more about people’s motivations, intentions, goals, skills, strategies, etc. To do this, a coach needs a beautiful model for clear communication. He or she needs a list of questions that will help the leader make sure everyone is on the same page.
Coaches, like good consultants, don’t give advice or counsel. Instead, they coach performance, whether it’s mental performance (clarity, precision, understanding), emotional performance (emotional intelligence in working with people, teams, empathy, etc.), verbal performance (skills at linguistic framing and reframing of meaning), or behavioral performance (competency skills at leading, influencing, persuading, organizing, etc.).
Because coaching focuses on performance, on empowering people to produce higher quality behaviors, the coach will focus on resources.
- What resources do you need in order to enhance your performance?
- What do you need to know or learn?
- What do you need to implement?
To do this, a good coach has a set of practices (patterns, processes, and interventions) that help the executive learn and use these skills. And for the coach to know which pattern to use, he or she will need a model of how people work that lets him or her make a skill profile of the executive. Both the Meta-Model and the Meta-Programs are used by the NLP and Neuro-Semantic coach to do this. In addition to the questioning model, the Meta-Programs model gives us access to a person’s mental and emotional filters. These filters control how we sort information, what we pay attention to, and how we respond. These models help us see that every experience has a structure that we can use. The coach can now figure out how both the executive and the task are put together and then use the Strategies Model, which is another NLP model, to help.
Strategies are the steps that go into doing a task or activity. Through strategy work, we can figure out how a good strategy works and make an even better one for a specific person in a specific situation. The next step, “installing the strategy,” involves practicing the basic skills that make up a certain level of excellence in a structured way.
Coaching for Specific Expertise
Coaching not only uses these human technologies for running a brain in many different ways, but it can also be used in many different areas. We can help people reach a higher level of performance in sports, leadership, conflict resolution, highly resourceful states like resilience and invulnerability, managing people, calming down hotheads and other grumpy people, selling and marketing, product development, and creativity.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
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