COACHING - Hype or Hope

By Anand S Narayan

If you ask a few select CEOs of global Fortune 500 companies, they will tell you about how Coaching was the best thing that happened to them.

As if on cue, thousands of wannabe coaches have emerged from the woodwork and are offering life altering programs guaranteed to make you a superstar.

Is Coaching just a hype or is there more to it than meets the eye.

Let’s take a closer look.

To start with, let’s see what Coaching is not. A coach does not teach you anything. A coach does not actually tell you how to fix anything. A coach may not know anything about your area of activity. If you have a personality kink or were traumatised in your childhood and are shackled by it, the coach will not give you any therapy.

So then, what does a coach do? What are so many corporates spending large portions of their training budget on coaching alone? It must be adding some value.

The coach helps you achieve your potential. She helps you take the blinkers off and see things in a different light. The coach helps you gain clarity on what you really desire and then helps you find ways to get there.

Wow, just like that, with the wave of the magic wand.?

No, it’s not that simple. Coaching is never a one session miracle. It takes time and requires that you are committed, patient and courageous. Courage? What does that have to do with it?

During the coaching sessions, the coach will encourage you to look at yourself in ways that you have never done before. You might see facets of yourself that you are unfamiliar with, and it may take courage to face the reality.

That can get embarrassing, does it not?. No, the coach first creates a safe space where you and your coach can have open conversations. Everything that you talk about stays in the room between you and your coach.

Most importantly the coach will not judge you for who you are and the way you think or behave. For a good coach, it is all about you and what works for you. That’s what is foremost in a coach’s mind.

So how does a Coach help us bring out the best in us?

For a start, the coach will help you focus and be fully present in the session. It is only with total involvement by you, that any change can come about.

Next, the coach goes about helping you identify what it is that you wish to achieve. This is the outcome that you desire. Often, we are not able to reach our destination, because we are not sure about where we want to go. The coach helps us identify what we really desire.

The coach has one very powerful tool with which she helps us gain clarity. That is asking us questions in a creative way and by encouraging us to look at any issue from a 360-degree view.

Once you have decided on the objective or the outcome you desire from coaching, the coach will begin the process of helping us delve deep into our mind.

With the help of the coach, we will be able to identify what we have tried in the past, what works, what does not and then gain some insights. The coach will help us see what is holding us back and preventing us from getting to where we wish to go. These obstacles may be internal to us, that is our own beliefs, habits, prejudices, behaviours etc. Or they may be external factors like other people, time, distance, the weather, etc.

The coach does not stop with helping us identify our obstacles, she will also help us look at what our strengths are. These may be our capabilities, skills, our habits, behaviours and beliefs. Or they may be our family, our friends, our team members. Our resources may be time, money or other infrastructure we have or can use.

By now, we have begun to get a clearer picture or where we are and what is keeping us stuck and also some inkling of how we could get u struck.

Now comes the interesting part. The coach asks us whether we are prepared to go on a journey into the deeper recesses of our mind. There is no voodoo here. It has been scientifically proven that 95% of the time we are operating from the subconscious mind and have no conscious awareness of what we are doing. As a result, there may be several scripts or programs that are written in our subconscious mind that are taking us to places where our conscious mind may not want to go. Yet since these programs are so deeply rooted in our mind, we are not able to consciously do anything to alter their course or even to stop them from running. That’s why many of us have been unable to lose weight or stop smoking even though we have resolved multiple times to do so.

The coach does not cast a spell or hypnotise us to do this. What she does instead is to help us achieve a state of calm by taking a few deep breaths. Once our breath is calm and rhythmic, our brain also changes the kind of electromagnetic waves that it emits. In a low frequency state often called Theta, we are able to enter the subconscious mind. With a variety of visualisation tools that coach helps us look deeply into some of the factors that are controlling the outcome for us and also gain the insight on what we could do to change the course.

Once we have cleared the cobwebs and seen our life with clarity, we often come up with solutions on our own. These solutions were always there within us. It is just that we were unable to see them. That’s the power of Coaching.

The coaching process does not stope there. Having come up with a set of solutions, the coach helps us make them SMART, that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.

This is how far the coach will walk with us. Hereafter we are on our own. The coach will impress upon us that unless we are committed and take responsibility for our growth and transformation, history will repeat itself and we will add to the many resolutions we have made in our lives which just didn’t materialise.

So does every engagement with a coach result in a clear action plan? No, often the result of the coaching engagement may be an awareness or sometimes may lead to an acceptance of a fact or a situation.

Any which way, coaching will make a difference to our life.

That having been said, one needs to exercise some degree of cation before going in for coaching.

With the profusion of coaches, skill and capability are sometimes lacking. It pays to check the credentials of a coach. Make sure he or she is accredited by an international body before signing up. Also beware of promises of quick fixes. No coach can deliver instant results. Also you need to have the commitment, patience and courage before embarking on the journey.

Given that, there is great hope and promise in coaching.