better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

Does Coaching Work?

17 September 2018

No.

And…

Yes.

Always good to have a balanced debate!

And anyway, it would be suspiciously neat to just answer ‘yes’ because that’s too simplistic and the client owns the results of the work. It’s up to them to decide if the work has worked, not me.

Coaching is an organised and structured form of human interaction. However, it doesn’t work very well when there is no rapport between coach and client, or when the coach is running their own agenda, or when the client is being dishonest with their answers.

Coaching can be a very intense experience for the client and in some cases this is too much for people. They avoid answering an awkwardly useful question, or agree to undertake an action simply to bring the coaching session to a close.

People don’t mean to be dishonest, but let’s be honest here …everyone operates within their own tolerated level of dishonesty. We know coffee is bad for us and that sugar is worse and yet we still tend to guzzle both.

Which means that coaching can’t work, is doomed to failure and is all a facade, because successful coaching requires honesty and that’s something we just struggle to do.

But wait! Hang on!

There’s something we are forgetting here.

People are, by and large, fundamentally well intentioned. I’ve never met anyone who has gone to work with the specific intent of making their colleague’s day a misery. They may be stressed and end up causing them a problem, but they really didn’t mean to, deep down.

We want to do well at work and at home. We are nice people at heart.

And we cannot help thinking. About whatever is spinning through our head. About hopes and dreams and problems and niggles. We are all excellent thinkers and we cannot stop thinking.

Coaching is an excellent tool to sharpen our thinking. To refine our options. To enable us to see ourselves more clearly.

Coaching works because it cannot not work. If I asked you what you would buy if you won £1m you will think about it. Your subconscious will chew on the question in the way an app on your smartphone draws power and runs in the background.

Humans are excellent thinkers and coaching is excellent at inviting thinking.

What we think about is another matter, but the process of coaching will have an impact at some level within us. The questions asked, the general client-coach interaction and the physical environment we work in all combine to create new thoughts.

This is what I love about being a coach. I know something will spring out of our conversations, but what that is and when it will appear is unknown. It will appear though and progress will be made.

Coaching works and it’s okay for us to enjoy the ambiguity of not knowing exactly how or what this means for our client all the time. We don’t have to explain everything in this world. We can just know that coaching is a force for good and that good things flow from it.

So this week let’s celebrate the fact that we can all enjoy realising that we can’t not think!

Life is so simple sometimes!

And coaching is great. Get some!

Next week: Gut Instinct