What is Coaching?
The International Coach Federation defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.
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On a deeper level, coaching is:
-Coaching is Partnership
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In the coaching partnership, the coach supports the client's learning through their conscious choices and subsequent actions. The coach's role here is to ask powerful thought-provoking questions to explore what’s really important for you, what do you want, and how you gone to achieve that. In this partnership, you will have a reliable and safe ground to seek your own answers to your life challenges, rather than the coach giving you instructions or advice. A coach facilitates as well inner reflection creating the conditions to empower your intrinsic resources and potential.
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-Coaching is about self-work, practice and commitment.
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Breaking unconscious limiting beliefs, inner critic voices, undermining behaviors for years long within us, is hard work, and involves practice. Changes require that you are committed to yourself, responsible for your own choices and mindset shift. But, you're definitely not alone! I’m here to hold and support you on this new life journey.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, whilst expecting different results.”-Albert Einstein
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-Coaching is accountability
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When we think to take any action, there’s a growing motivation behind it if we are taken as accountable for it to someone other than ourselves. The coaching partnership will support creating an effective, accountable system to share your experience and its consequences, ensuring that you are constantly in action. I’m here to make it happen.
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-Coaching is not judgmental
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The coaching relationship provides a safe space where you explore the full range of your ideas, dreams, feelings, or worries. As a coach, I practice creating a non-judgmental atmosphere of trust while embracing openness to provide a space where you are comfortable speaking freely and easily about what is crucial for you.
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-Coaching is not counseling
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Consultants are experts in a field; they give to their clients the answers to specific topics. The consultants can ask many questions to gather the information they need to deliver a client's plan of action, targeting a particular goal.
A coach asks as well questions, but with non-judgmental curiosity and with a different objective than a consultant: to catalyze your self-awareness, your inner resources, and potential. A coach doesn’t give the answers to your problems; a coach trusts that you can find them yourself. Coaching is all about you, not just a specific topic or a targeted goal. Sometimes a coach can act like a consultant sharing knowledge, which you are free to accept or let go. In coaching, a plan of action can as well be designed, but it is a co-creation between the coach and you.
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-Coaching is not mentoring
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A Mentor gives guidance and direction to the mentee by sharing its own experience and knowledge.
A Coach, on the other hand, honors your own set of life experiences and with that your uniqueness as a person, assisting you in recognizing the resources you need, how to use and learn with them. In this self-discovery process the answers come from you, rather than from a coach. Sometimes, a Coach can act like a mentor sharing some ideas, life experience, knowledge, or intuition, but as mentioned before, you are always free to choose to accept it or let it go.
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-Coaching is not therapy
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Therapy tends to look more to the past, to the “why,” and to “fix” problems or manage individual past traumas, abuse, or mental illness, helping us heal.
Coaching tends to look to the now and focus on the future, where you want to be next. Occasionally some information about your past may come out to help understanding limiting beliefs or a recent life experience. Here the “how” takes charge, an action can be made to provide growth and learning.
Coach and therapy can be a match in some cases and help the client go to a better place inside her/himself while moving forward in some aspects of their lives. In this situation, the best it’s to inform both professionals to know if it’s positive and feasible to work together towards the client's well-being.