WHAT IS NOT COACHING?
The easiest way to define coaching is to understand what it is not.
A coach is not a friend. The coach encourages the client to bring out his best self, holds him responsible for his own development, pushes and presses the client a little when necessary. But it does all this with the permission and request of the client. The coach ensures that the agenda and output determined by the client are focused throughout the session, and that the interview is not a friendly conversation, and that the agenda is not the client himself but the actual determined topic. For these reasons, the coach is not a friend, and the interview should not be expected to be a friendly conversation.
A coach is not a therapist. Psychological Guidance and therapy try to bring the person to the zero point (neutral) by correcting the past, while coaching is there to take the person from scratch to the positive. As we understand from this, therapy works by focusing on the past and coaching is completely focused on the future; focuses on the client's meaningful development in business life, personal life, and relationships. For this reason, psychological problems such as depression, which fall within the field of therapy, are not included in the coaching work. However, in special cases, the therapist and coach can work together with a client.
A coach is not a consultant. Consultants make analyzes in the fields they are experts in, offer suggestions and share their experiences. This is a completely opposite approach to coaching. The coach believes that the solution lies with the client. The unique power of coaching comes from helping the client to use his or her own resources, which he or she has not realized until that moment. For this reason, a master executive coach can coach in all areas, but a consultant can only share his knowledge in the field he is an expert in.
A coach is not a mentor. Just like in counseling, mentoring, and coaching are often confused. In fact, mentoring is the sharing of someone’s knowledge who is more experienced in a field with someone who is relatively less experienced in that field. Instead of sharing past experiences, the coach helps trigger the client's research, self-discovery, and learning processes. By encouraging the client to think more, it enables him to enter a creative process.
The focus of coaching is on the client's agenda and his hidden potential. The whole purpose of the coach is to help the client to unleash his hidden potential to maximize his performance. Most of the time, the coach determines the blind spots that the client cannot see and directs the client with questions to notice them. With each question, he tries to clarify the client a little more. For this reason, perhaps the clearest definition of coaching is "making the invisible visible" for the client.
