What does coaching mean to you?
Answers from conversations with coaches and the coached
You can’t swing a cat without hitting 12 coaches. As a friend put it, “I go on LinkedIn and half my network is some sort of coach now”. To understand this phenomena I’ve been asking people who offer coaching and/or have been coached the question, “What does coaching mean to you?” and the answers have been intriguing and insightful.
I’m looking to do more of these conversations and am eager to speak with coaches and people who’ve worked with a coach. If that’s you, let’s connect!
This week I talked to a serial entrepreneur, a VP of Design, and an entrepreneurial teacher about their experience with coaching. Here’s what I learned…
Coaching as Teaching
The concept of coaching as a style of participatory teaching showed up in two of the conversations. The first, serial entrepreneur — let’s call her M — mentioned working with a mentor in an accelerator program who was through and through a teacher. His style was “teaching you how to fish” and he provided “tons of real world experience in the form of examples and ways to implement them”.
The second, Silas Path, offered a perspective of coaching as a style of teaching which doesn’t insist on rote memorization but rather a relationship based on guidance and feedback in contextualized container with a client. More on his perspective here: Personal Growth in Coaching vs Teaching
There’s a Stigma
In each of the conversations, there was a strong sense that coaching is carrying a stink about it. There is a noticeable lack of trust, “everyone and their sister is a coach and it’s impossible to know who is actually good” and “there are a lot of marketers out there who may or may not be helping people” and “I know people who are life coaches whose lives are catastrophes”. There’s also a stigma about being supported, “I’m not going to outsource my problems to someone else”.
The Problem With the Word
No one I’ve spoken to, so far, has loved the word “coach”. It makes people squirm. When asked what they’d prefer, no single word seems to cover the relationship/role. Substitutes include: mentor, guide, trainer, partner, advisor, teacher, and in the creative fields (where they really dislike the word coach), producer.
Different Styles of Relationship
In my talk with M we bubbled up the notion of coaching relationships having different underlying styles. In her work coaching and being coached M encountered people looking for guidance, for partnership, for therapy or support, for clarity, or to be challenged. It surfaced that matching coaching and client when it comes to these styles is an art of chemistry and clarity.
🤙 Good coaching…
takes place in a container intentionally designed to grow self-understanding
increases awareness and responsibility
reframes your approach and helps you practically apply new perspectives
🙅♂️ Bad coaching…
gives you a framework to study and says, ‘see you next week’
is decontextualized and impersonal
is “a person who talks at you for an hour without any ability to listen”
/// Ponderables
➺ Good Coach = Friend of Virtue - Peter Limberg offers a view of coaching as a friendship “Based on the mutual orientation toward what is good.”
➺ Dense Discovery – Issue 305 - “But life’s most important challenges – finding purpose, nurturing relationships, or simply hosting a good party – are poorly defined problems. They’re messy, contextual, and often don’t have clear right answers.” (h/t Mathilde)
➺ Worshipping Illusions: An Interview with Marion Woodman - a challenging and beautiful read from the perspective of Jungian Analyst Marion Woodman on addiction as an attempt to satiate a starving soul (h/t Tom)
/// Musical Nutrients
This forest set from Yuuf has been on repeat all week. It’s a treat for the nervous system.
/// An Ask
Send this post to anyone you think would be interested in doing a “What does coaching mean to you?” coffee chat. And if that person is you, let’s connect!
With appreciation,
🌞 Dave
About the word "coach" — pioneer John Whitmore writes in Coaching for Performance (1992):
"We may drop the word coaching or add new terms to the crop that already exist: counselling, facilitating, empowering, mentoring, supporting, guiding, psychotherapy. Their applications differ somewhat but they overlap, and though they may be expressed differently, the underlying principles of awareness, responsibility and self-belief are common to all."
The latter sentence complements your good coaching bullet points.
A corollary problem is that of visibility (in the cognitive sense) — sure, you and I and coaches inside may be hesitant to call ourselves coach-practitioners, but how else can we avoid wasting time when the average inquirer ask us "so, what do you do"?
Such a scenario gently pushes me the Dangerous Idea: to totally own the word — at least for the time being. And then, because the word "coach" can be immediately grasped by the Interested Person, I can then add my unique context around the word to demonstrate to them that I genuinely represent the best in this industry.
Further, because of the stigma and mystery, I see opportunity. As I see in life: where there are lowest lows, there too are the highest highs. And this doesn't mean I condone net-negative behavior of mediocre coaches. But I was a software developer — am I going to carry the burden of the hundreds of thousands of devs who failed to ship on time, or inserted buggy code into a product?
This coach-practitioner profession is packed with certification processes. And I understand how that should assist with smoothing out the "highest-lowest" dynamics I just mentioned. But a curious thing I found? All the developmental psychology involved in earning a place inside coaching associations and federations. Which leads me to the question: "What if coaches are simply people interested enough in understanding the human mind (and how it grows) such that this very interests leads to community enrichment, which results in fellow members seeking them for assistance, no matter the area?"