Coaching is a peer relationship

Profession

Although the dynamics of a good coaching session resemble a casual conversation, it is important to make it clear for everybody that the Coach is there as a professional and not a friend or confidant for the Client.

Accompanying

This is probably the most important aspect of this definition. Although the Coach is trained to employ coaching skills, he has no expertise in the Client’s issue. So, the nature of the relationship is peer to peer with one partner being an expert on the content of the issue and another focused on accompanying him in a professional way. The two are co-creating the relationship, there is no top-down approach whatsoever and most importantly they learn together.

Client’s Dialogue

Communicating effectively through powerful questions and direct communication are expected competencies for a good coach. And that is why when people hear “dialogue” they interpret it as being a conversation between 2 people (dia-two?; logos-word) But the Greek “dia” is etymologically more akin to the Latin “via” which means “through”. So dialogue is a way of creating reality through language(words). Thoughts are transformed from quantic state- where they can be at the same time both true and false- into a “material” state as they take the “static” form of words. You can make a parallel with the thought-speech-action axis present in almost all spiritual teachings and psychological theories.

His desired results

I underlined the possessive pronoun to emphasize the importance of client’s ownership over the desired outcomes. Both beginning coaches and experienced ones, for different reasons, have a strong temptation to offer solutions or define the Client’s goal for him. It is essential to the coaching process that the Coach be aware of his own intentions, and subsequently let them go in order to make space for the Client to unravel his own frame of reference.

Using the word results instead of goals is a way of demonstrating the importance of linguistics in coaching: when we think of a goal, we automatically position it at a distance-it is in the future, there is time to be passed before we get there, there are resources to be employed and so on. When we think of results, we think of something we have already achieved. So less resource-related issues that can get in the way of us actually achieving those results.

Why coaching is a unique peer to peer experience?

One of the things people find it hard to accept is this idea that the coach is learning as much or maybe more than the client. I observed that if you listen carefully to your client’s dialogue you will realize that he has come to work on your issue, even though he is working on his. Of course, the actors might be different, the words used to describe the issue might be different, but the patterns are the same.

This is why I believe that the systemic approach to coaching that Alain Cardon proposes is an extremely efficient way of working.