About Life Coaching

Next Friday I am officially embarking on the life coaching path. I will take my first course on Coaching at The Coaches Training Institute in London. The program is an in-depth six-month program and includes hands-on coaching, ongoing group work and one-on-one supervision of actual coaching sessions. After successful completion of the program, students are eligible to take the written and oral certification exam, with the goal of becoming a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC).

Just before going to London, I wanted to familiarize myself with the coaching industry, the origins of it and the latest trends.

What is coaching?

There are so many definitions out there on what coaching is and isn't. Life coaches are not therapists nor consultants; psychological intervention and business analysis are outside the scope of their work. Life coaching draws inspiration from disciplines including sociology, psychology, positive adult development, career counseling, mentoring and other types of counseling.

The definition I liked the most is the following:

“Coaching is the process of defining a problem, achieving clarity on the desired future state and gaining commitment to a well formed set of actions and measurements to get there. As a result the individual or organisation improves and is able to demonstrate it."

Where does coaching originate from?

The term coach originated in the sports field somewhere in the late 1880s, and has been a well-known sports profession with many different forms for years. Even today, the term coaching often produces a mental image of a football or basketball coach, and depending on what the coach actually does, this analogy may or may not be adequate because the head coach is usually a general manager or chief executive officer responsible for running an entire program.

W. T. Gallwey wrote his book in 1974 entitled "The Inner Game of Tennis." According to many people this was the first major transition from the sports coaching model of control and teaching to what Werner Erhard and eventually Thomas Leonard developed and fine-tuned into personal coaching.

Who is the founder of life coaching?

Thomas Leonard is considered to be the founder of life coaching, which he, at that time, called personal coaching. He came on the scene from the financial world in about 1988, where he had a life-planning course entitled "Life Creates Your Life". Leonard is credited with codifying coaching into a curriculum to teach people how to be a coach. He was a financial planner and realized that his clients, though emotionally stable and hardly candidates for therapy, nonetheless needed more from him than just the usual tips on how to invest and safeguard their incomes.

Leonard’s career gradually shifted from financial planning to full-time developing his coaching methodology which at the time he called “life-planning”.

In the early 1990's Leonard founded the first formal coach-training program he called Coach University. Coach U as it came to be known, offered courses in coaching that were conducted live or via a series of conference calls called “teleclasses”.

A later development was Coachville, a community for the Coach U students and graduates. He was also instrumental in founding the International Coach Federation (IFC). This worldwide body was the first to set and publish industry standards and ethics and provide independent credentialing of coaches and accreditation of coaching schools.

How does coaching work?

Through a properly delivered and understood process, coaching takes the clients from where they are to where they want to be.

The coaching process is about holding the clients accountable to do what they need to do to have life as they want it. Coaches don't tell their clients what to do. Rather they lead clients to their own solutions by asking questions and then making careful suggestions; identifying appropriate resources and offering choices.

Coaching is about facilitating the client to learn to make good choices than about giving specific advice as in consulting.

What are the latest trends in the coaching industry?

1. Increased supply of coaches
2. Increased demand for coaching
3. Increasing maturity in the coaching market
4. Increased need for niches and differentiation
5. Growth in coaching products
6. Growth in coaching programs
7. Growth in availability of web-based technologies

What is the scale of life coaching?

Recent estimates indicate that there are now between 30,000 to 50,000 active coaches worldwide.

What does it take on a personal level to be a coach?

In the training material, I found the sentence that describes it perfectly: "One must be fascinated by human potential, inspired by individual creativity, and unwaveringly committed to holding others as grand and capable."

This is only a short overview of coaching as a profession. I will write about certain aspects in greater detail as I progress in the trainings and practice.