Whereas professional coaching used to be reserved for top executives and elite athletes and performers, more people are seeing the value of coaching in order to reach their personal and professional goals. As the professional coaching industry grows, it’s no wonder that there are many misconceptions about the true nature of working with a trained coach.
The International Coach Federation (ICF), the world’s largest community of professionally trained coaches, “defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential, which is particularly important in today’s uncertain and complex environment. Coaches honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole. Standing on this foundation, the coach’s responsibility is to:
- Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
- Encourage client self-discovery
- Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
- Hold the client responsible and accountable
This process helps clients dramatically improve their outlook on work and life, while improving their leadership skills and unlocking their potential.”
As a professionally trained coach and lead trainer at an ICF-accredited coach training school, here are the top 5 pervasive myths I’ve heard about working with a coach:
Something needs to be wrong in order to work with a coach.
In reality, many who benefit the most from coaching are not those whose lives are in disarray, but those who want their lives to go from good to great, from ordinary to extraordinary. Coaching is not about right or wrong, or good or bad. It’s about getting clear on where you are now, where it is that you want to go, why you want to go there, and creating action steps on how to get there. Instead of good or bad, coaching helps people understand what actions and thought patterns that they currently have that are useful or not useful to achieving their goals. If something is not useful, a coach helps you redesign it so that it makes achieving what you want easier and less stressful.
We all have a default future if we don’t change things up in how we think and how we act. Most of us will be okay in our default future, and coaching is for people who want to break away from the status quo of their default future and want to put time, energy, and courage into creating the bigger and brighter future that they truly want.
Only a coach who is an expert in my field (or the field that I want to get into) will be able to help me.
Trained coaches are focused on coaching the person, not the problem. A coach rarely gives advice or tells the client directly what to do. At the bedrock of coaching is that the coach knows that the client already has all the resources inside of him or herself in order to be successful. Coaching is for people who are committed to personal learning and growth because professional growth is not possible without personal growth. Coaching is about helping the client generate learning, increase self-awareness and to identify and achieve meaningful goals. Effective coaches are not trained to be experts in your field, they are trained to elicit the best out of you by helping you tap into your unlimited potential.
With that said, many successful coaches also happen to be entrepreneurs and may be quite business savvy and usually have industry-specific contacts that they can refer to. So, gaining information from your coach is definitely possible and encouraged, but the foundation of the relationship is not based on information, it’s based on exploration and transformation. It’s not just about what you need to do, it’s about who you need to be in order to have the life that you want.
Working with a coach will take up a lot of time, and I already have too much on my plate.
The reality is that a coach can help you prioritize and plan your time better by creating systems that better serve you and your goals. So, when you make time to plan your time, you actually have more time to do what you want.
When working with a coach, you get out what you put in. A coach doesn’t make you do things that don’t align with what you’re working toward. In fact, a coach can help you streamline your daily activities by helping you distinguish the difference between being busy and being productive. Most people feel overwhelmed not just because there is a lot to do, but because it feels like they’re losing control of what needs to be done. Coaches help clients take a step back to think, plan, and execute, which ends up saving the client time.
A coach is just going to try make me act and think like him or her.
Actually, an effective coach wants to empower you to think and act like YOU…the real you. The real you who isn’t afraid to put yourself out there and to start actualizing your dreams. You are unique and your individuality is important to you, it’s important to your coach too. You set the agenda. Your coach helps you stay on track and will consistently support you and remind you of what it is that you want.
Your coach can help you gain clarity of your unique values and empower you to create action steps that align with your values. Every day we have decisions to make when we either choose to honor or values or ignore them. Effective coaches help clients identify these decision points so that they can consciously be more authentic. Sometimes it takes courage to authentically be yourself and to go after what you truly want in your heart; a coach’s goal is to help you truly be yourself.
Coaches are like therapists with less training.
The reality is that coaches with formal training make it very clear to their potential clients that they are not therapists. Therapy is primarily focused on the past and often involves overcoming a past trauma or understanding an element of the past that may be causing an emotional obstacle that is preventing the client from fully moving forward. Coaching is future focused and offers a more proactive approach to create desired outcomes in the future. While both are important fields, in short, therapy tends to focus on what has happened in the past while coaching focuses on what you want to happen in the future and involves action steps and accountability to make it happen.
That’s not to say that the past can’t come up in a coaching session since the past contributes to who we are in the present, but the focus is not on the past. A strong coach helps his or her clients identify actions and thought patterns that make it harder to accomplish their goals and reframe them into more useful habits and perspectives.
So, how many of these myths were you guilty of believing to be true?
The word “coach” comes from the British use of the word “bus”. So, a coach is like a bus, it literally helps get you to where you want to go. So while the coach may be the vehicle, you are the one in the driver’s seat. You set the destination, and the coach helps you stay on course all the while calling you out on how you’re making the journey harder for yourself as well as celebrating milestones along the way.
When you fully understand the scope of your relationship with your coach and communicate clearly with each other how you two will work together, then it can be one of the most rewarding investments that you’ll ever make in yourself.
So buckle up, trust the process, and enjoy the ride!
Leave a Reply