The truth about Coaching and Coach

This article aims to reveal the truth about the terms ”Coaching” and ”Coach”.

Unfortunately, most of the people I talked with on social media space have the wrong meaning of Coaching and Coach. Including people who are saying about themselves that they are Coaches.

I asked a few of them the following questions:

What Coaching school did you graduate?

How many months did you spend with this Coaching school?

Is this Coaching school ICF (or any other international Coaching organization) certified?

Do you have a Coach certificate issued by a company ICF (or any other international Coaching organization) certified?

The single answer I received was ”No” to each of the questions above.

OK, let's dive into our subject and answer the right answers to the following questions:

What Coaching is?

What a Coach is?

What is the truth about Managers and Coaches?

What Coaching is?

If you search on the internet using Google browser about the definition of Coaching you will get 402.000.000 responses. And a lot of definitions.

I am the single Romanian Coach who wrote a best practices guide in Coaching. And in order to do that in a professional manner I researched almost 3 months the history, definitions, and ways of Coaching. And this research helped me to come to my own definition of Coaching. This definition contains everything which is true about Coaching.

Like any other definition, we must specify the subject of the definition at the beginning of the definition: a process, an object, a person, a natural phenomenon, a habit, etc.

Then we must specify what/who are the parts of the subject. In this case, the subject of the definition (Coaching) is a process. And the parts of this process are the Coach and the Client (the Coachee).

Then we must specify how the process goes. What is happening during the process?

So, after detailing all these 3 parts of any definition, we can lay down the right, most simple, and most effective definition of Coaching.

Coaching is the process between a Coach and a Client (Coachee) in which the Coach asks questions to help the Coachee become aware, set his/her goals, and plan the actions of achieving declared goals.

This is it, just as simple as that!

So, for a process to be named as a Coaching process it must meet the following three conditions:

1. The process must be contracted.
This could be done in writing, as an agreement signed by both parties, Coach and Coachee. Or could be done by verbal agreement.
Why is this mandatory?
Because Coachee must be informed that the Coaching session is different from a simple conversation.

2. The Coachee must declare his/her objective at the beginning of the Coaching session.
This means that the Coachee wants to discover the best solution for his/her problem, during the Coaching session.

3. The Coachee must find out by himself/herself the plan of action and the right actions to reach his/her goal declared at the beginning of the Coaching session.
This means that the Coachee agrees to sincerely answer to each question of the Coach.

Let's see now who a Coach is.

Who a Coach is?

A Coach is a person who must be certified. Certification of a Coach is issued by a school/institution or company that prepares individuals to become Coaches. A professional school/institution/ company is certified by ICF (International Coaching Federation) or any other international Coaching association/federation. This school creates a course. The right course lasts minimum of 6 months and about 300 hours of study.

So, in other words, if you want to become a Coach you must graduate from such a course and become certified by an ICF-certified school/institution/company.

Nowadays you must be very careful when talking to marketing agencies who help Coaches sell their Coaching products or with individuals who enroll people in MLM structures!

Why am I writing this?

It becomes a habit for these marketing agencies or MLM networkers to declare that they have in their team Coaches who will assist you in promoting your Coaching business or enrolling your MLM network. When I asked them who are the companies that certified their Coaches the answer was "Our Coaches did not graduate from any Coaching course by any company". In other words, they are lying about the qualification of their employees/partners.

More than that, a lot of people declare on social media that they are Coaches, without being certified by a professional Coaching school/institution/company!!!

The Truth about acting as both Manager and Coach

I heard many Coaches and many managers saying that the best Manager is the one who is doing Coaching with his team members. And I want to tell you this:

It's impossible to act as both Manager and Coach with your team!!!

Why am I writing this?

Click here to read the article that answers this question.

Click here to find the 13 differences between Coaching and all other mindset processes.