Video Transcript

I want to talk to you about what is coaching. There’s lot of question about that. In fact, I’m hired regularly to go into organizations and work with individuals who have misconceptions as to what coaching is and it causes challenges.

Often, people use coaching as a disciplinary session. So, it’s a method by which a manager, leader, supervisor will have kind of like a bat of discipline hidden underneath the desk and they say, “Let’s talk about where you at and where you want to go. Let’s have a coaching session.” Well, they pretend that’s coaching until the person isn’t complying and they bring out the bat. The person says, “I don’t like this coaching thing. It feels a lot like I’m in trouble”. Well, it is that you’re in trouble. It wasn’t coaching in the first place.

So, I like to create some clarity what coaching is, what it isn’t. Let’s take a few moments. I’ll start with a formal definition, then I’ll break it down a little bit. The formal definition, this is mine. There’s lot of great definitions, I just like mine the most because it’s mine. My definition of coaching is this: Coaching is a mutually voluntary, collaborative dialogue, focused on continued performance development in the direction of the client’s goals, dreams, and desires. So, it’s a lot in that little definition there, but I want to break it down.

First of all, it’s mutually voluntary. One of the problems that organizations get into is when they make coaching mandatory. Everyone must have coaching. Every manager must coach and every person was being coached. And they put the little coaching session sign on the door and they have little note papers that say coaching at the top and they believe it’s there for coaching. Well, that doesn’t mean any more coaching than hanging out in the garage makes you a car. So, it’s called coaching but it’s not coaching. Coaching must be voluntary. In coaching, it’s something that happens or doesn’t happen.

So, in that session, either the genius is drawn out of that person, the passion, desire, goals, and dreams are drawn out of that person, that person playing the role of the client, or it’s not. So, for clarity, it must be voluntary on both parts. The coach must believe in this person choose to invest their time and effort in this person to see the greatness come out of them. That person must believe in the coaching process and trust in that coach to engage fully and openly in the discussion. Because the genius, the pressure, everything comes from inside the client. And if it’s not authentic on both parts, coaching is not going to occur.

So, let’s start with mutually voluntary. So, one of the questions people ask me is: “Can you create a voluntary environment inside of the mandatory environment? And the answer is, yes! We can sell ourselves on the process and engage fully openly and genuinely in a voluntary engagement called coaching inside of an organization that makes it mandatory. But both people must choose to invest themselves in the coaching process at that moment for coaching to occur. So, mutually voluntary.

Next, collaborative dialogue. Collaborative. There are three basic positions of relationship, there’s controlling, collaborative, and compliant. This is collaborative. This is two adults, maturely respectfully dialoging to find answers, to uncover solutions to challenges. No one is being parented and no one is being parenting. And rather than a controlling environment or compliant environment, this is a collaborative environment where the genius comes through the dialogue. So it’s collaborative dialogue.
And it’s not just collaborative dialogue on what’s the meaning of life, or where do you get a good deal on choose today, but it’s focused on continued performance development. It’s not just the short term results but performance development to take their game to the next level, to develop new habits, new skills, developed over time so that it’s going to continue and continue and continue.

So, it’s not just short term, it’s performance development. So the person will continue to benefit from one coaching session for many, many years to come. So, it’s performance development and it’s not just performance development in the direction of the manager’s goals or the coach’s dreams for the client, but it’s the client’s dreams, goals, and desires, where they want to go. And you want to be mindful that there’s many time frames for goals, dreams, and desires, right? There’s a short term and long term. You can have a 20-year goal, but you need a 3-month goal, and you need a one-week goal. Without things chunk down into manageable bites, goals don’t have the power that the mind, they don’t take advantage of the full power of the mind. So, you won’t have long range, short range and very short range, very attainable goals that’s almost like a to-do list.

So, all of that hopefully helps in clarifying what is coaching. Coaching is a mutually voluntary collaborative dialogue focused on continued performance development in the direction of the client’s goals, dreams, and desires. Hopefully that helps clarity what coaching is and will probably spend more time on what it isn’t and work through that in some of the other videos. But at least for now, you understand that coaching is drawing the genius, the dreams, the desires, the passion, and the discipline out of the client not forced from the outside coming from the coach, but rather drawing it out of the client. So that they, themselves, can walk away taking all of the credit, and enjoying the safe environment where in the coach help them make these new decisions and hold them accountable. Hopefully that helps for now. I look forward to answering any questions you have on this or anything else. Let me know and we’ll take it to the next level. Thank you so much. Talk soon.