The Beauty of Coaching?

WHAT IS A LIFE COACH? 

Nowadays, when I ask to people, "do you know what is a life coach?" Everybody seems to know. Some even assure me that they actually coach people. Then I ask them "what is it exactly you do" and suddenly people say to me "a coach is a person who tells you what to do when you have a problem..."  Yeah right, but wrong answer! For those who pretend that they actually coach people, you realize that what they actually call coaching is more like CONSULTING (which means you are specilized in a particular field and you give advice based on your experience). 

So let me straighten the record once and for all...

A coach is not a Fairy God Mother that can grant you 3 wishes, its not a Psychologue that your going to see regarding 'how your older sister took your doll from you as a kid in order to find out that it has some deep and weird connection with the cheating of your wife or husband'. A coach is neither way a life Guru with super advanced insight about life or a Consultant. His job is not to give you advice, to tell you what to do or how to do it.  In fact, that defination is probably the least accurate.

Life Coaching... Is a variation of sport coaching!!!

Which means that its aim is not to solve a problem but to reach a GOAL. Now I would agree with you, that those two are very close concepts because very often finding a solution IS ACTUALLY to REACH a GOAL, but the formula in our case is crucial. Its a psychological thing, to find the solution to a problem sounds more LIMITING than REACHING A GOAL. Just like sports coaching, life coaching ultimatly is only aiming for excellence. Your excellence into all aspect of your life but also into all aspect of your personal being. 

For instance, What is the Goal of the COACH when it comes down to his "CLIENT"

Throughout his session, the coach has only one aim, its to develop the opening mind and the responsibilty of the athlete in sport and the client in life.

First of all, opening your mind - what does it exactly mean?

Let me give you an example... When you go to work in the morning, you take your car, perhaps stop for a cup of tea, the opening of mind is the AWARENESS of the world that surrounds you. For instance, how is the weather? Is the road icy? The traffic busy? Is your back hurting? Your mind unsettled? Did you notice the guy on the other side of the road that is not walking straight or perhaps intoxicated and who clearly is about to cross over at anytime without even looking? The state of your awareness is what we call in coaching your 'INPUT'. You see, it is through your 5 senses that a human get its INPUT. These information are simply crucial because they are the ones that help you, every second of your life to make decisions, choices, build opinons, create strategies, understand situations, over come life obstacles and of course, reach goals. The quality of your life is very much connected to the quality of your daily awareness (input).

Being successful is being aware, and to become successful demand to train yourself to be aware.

On the other hand, what is actually important to mention, is that your brain is constantly trying to lower the level of your awareness. Annoying when you undersand how important it is to be aware but the human body is very clever on its own way too.

Lets put it this way, imagine that awarness was the lens of camera, being aware means that your lens are much more open. More open, more aware, but also more information (for instance over senstive people are the perfect example) but the brain can't deal with that much information otherwise you will go crazy, so it puts tremendous amounts of filter. Especially because not all information is useful. This is where a coach comes in handy because their job is to train their "client" to develop a high quality of awareness = INPUT = OUTPUT (this is the quality of your response).

Now let me give you an example... Let's imagine that I trained a tennis player on the old school insturction method - the one thing I would probably ask him to do is always keep his eyes on the ball... But then the response I will also probably get from my player is:

"But this is exactly what I do X:( "

All I might achieve is to piss off the athlete.

WHY?

Because I have given him an instruction.

The genious of coaching is that through a very simple question, it will help you to access a wealth you already posses.

A coach will ask the athlete" how high the ball was from the net?"

It may seem a silly question which problaly makes it even harder to believe that within that question, the coach is already training the athlete to higher the quality of his input. How? Because when the coach asks how high he forces the athlete to keep his eyes on the ball as it is the only way for the player to answer the question. Simply amazing!

The same method is applied in life coaching.

Life is the same as a game, how good you play is based on how much your remain focused on the ball regardless of the distraction.

Once you have raised the the quality of one input, there is something that happens straight way after that... you also raise the yability to be in charge of the game of life. Beautiful!

So NO, a coach is not a person that gives you any kind of advice, because if they were, they would not be a COACH but a CONSULTANT.

Coaching is EXTRAORDINARY... Because it has a total respect for the person you are, the way you do and understand things.

You can use it on a child, at work or even on yourself! 

Source : articlesbase.com