What is coaching?
What is coaching?
And what's it like to be coached?
If you want results you haven’t gotten yet or you don’t want the results you have been getting, coaching may be able to help.
This article will explain what coaching is, the different types of coaching, what it’s like to be coached, what you can expect in a coaching session, what you can learn, some disadvantages and advantages, and how to know when and if you’re ready for coaching.
Let’s start by looking at the different types of coaching you may hear about.
What are the types of coaching?
There are different types of personal and professional coaching. For general support and all-encompassing guidance there is general life coaching. You can also seek out specialized coaching to help you create targeted results in a particular area of your life such as health and wellness, intimate relationships, executive coaching for leadership, and career coaching like promotion and succession readiness coaching.
Regardless of the specialty, the fundamentals of what happens within coaching are typically the same.
What happens in a coaching session?
The purpose of coaching is for you to get the results that you want.
Have you ever had to brush tangled hair? I have two littles with curls. They are full-on kids and have that gloriously knotted, wild-loving, nature-playing, craft-making, muffin-bowl-licking hair. Their curls are wind-tossed and coated in remnants of their adventures which makes detangling a considerable undertaking.
The process of coaching is detangling thoughts.
In a typical coaching session, you share what’s going on in your life in different arenas.
As you and your coach discuss where you are, where you want to be, and what’s in between here and there, you typically uncover previously unacknowledged or unarticulated emotions, situations, plans, fears, hesitations, hurts, longing, dreams, and needs.
These values, stories, and meanings can get tangled up to the point where they conflict with each other, distract you with emotional trauma, and can prevent you from planning or taking your intentional action - which can feel like overwhelm, anxiety, burnout, disconnection, and stuckness.
As you uncover thought knots, skilled coaching will guide you as you unjumble them. Together you curiously, with kindness and without judgement, will explore the thoughts that are driving your experience.
You’ll be asked to think through the situation from a few different angles, such as: Is this true? What does that mean? What do you really want? Why? How will that help? Or hurt? What would change? In what way? How does that make you feel?
Sometimes, the thought tangle gets tighter as you start to pull. Skilled coaching will help you practice allowing and observing the resistance and discomfort so you can learn whatever there is to understand and move forward from there.
Sometimes, the thought threads are peeled away one by one as the tangle gradually unravels. When you’re being coached this may feel slow and some of the lines of inquiry may seem redundant but skilled coaching will help you see how versions of your thoughts are a common thread that’s woven throughout many of your circumstances.
Sometimes, you find one critical thought and with one swift movement, your knot can come undone. These feel like ah-ha moments that happen when you recognize a faulty story or counterproductive thought and your perspective shifts immediately. This is clarity, not a forced transition. You cannot wish your way into different beliefs. Aspirational thoughts are harmful and magnify the experiences you want to shift. Skilled coaching will help you recognize intentional thought alternatives that are both believable and true for you.
What you learn in coaching
Coaching will guide you as you create a specific result in your life. You learn to look at what’s been working and not working, and then reverse engineer your behaviors, patterns, default actions to help you intentionally create what you do want. All of this boils down to intentionally looking at your thoughts.
Untangling well practiced, old, familiar thoughts requires a type of effort that is new to many of us.
Humans in our present day society aren’t typically taught how to think about our thoughts. Even those who have advanced degrees in neuroscience and psychology are not schooled in how thoughts fuel emotions which drive our actions which create our results.
In coaching you’ll gain a new skill set of thought work. You’ll practice observing your automatic thoughts. You’ll recognize and identify the feelings those thoughts generate. You’ll trace how those feelings drive your actions, and you’ll examine how those actions are creating your current results.
Speaking about it from the neurological and psychological perspective, existing thought patterns are known and familiar thoughts. Every time you have a thought, in your brain, one neuron is sending an electrical signal to another neuron. The first time you learn something new, or think a new thought for the first time, that electrical signal creates a faint pathway in your brain between those neurons. Everytime you think that same thought, see examples or evidence that supports that thought, or have strong emotional responses to those types of situations, that neural pathway becomes deeper and wider each time the electrical signals travel that pathway. This is called neural entrenchment.
Neural entrenchment makes thinking familiar thoughts easier - it’s like your thoughts are taking the interstate or super highway between neurons.
Your brain will always default into taking the path of least resistance. This means that thinking new ideas, creating new thoughts, or considering conflicting ideas requires more effort.
When you’re being coached, you’ll be guided as you consider some of your existing thoughts and beliefs objectively.
Your brain automatically endorses those thoughts and beliefs as if they were fact so this is your real work as you’re being coached - observing your thoughts, deciding which thoughts to endorse in order to fuel your emotions and actions to get what you want, and then following through with intentional thoughts and actions as those neural pathways are established.
In coaching, you gain the perspective of being able to see what’s going on within your current circumstances more clearly. It helps you remove the drama and find relief from some of those old stories that continue to haunt you and keep you feeling stuck, not getting the results you do want and getting results you don’t want.
Coaching Disadvantages
It is easy to avoid this thought work. Avoiding tangles is easier than brushing them too, just ask my 3 year old… Until you realize you want a life, results, feelings, relationships, and experiences that are different from what you currently have.
Coaching disadvantages are signs that it’s not the right time:
It requires effort to learn and change. Learning any new skill takes practice, repetition, and reinforcement. Changing patterns is hard and can feel like a risk. Coaching will ask you to learn, apply, and continue to dive into this thought work as you take intentional actions that are different from your status quo.
It can be hard to look at what’s not working. Defensiveness is a natural psychological protection mechanism. Overcoming defensiveness and being open to learning from the painful aspects of your past can make the process of coaching emotionally and mentally intense.
Investment readiness. Depending on the skill, background, specialty, and value of your coach, and the mode, frequency, and intensity of the coaching you’re evaluating, the investment can range can vary greatly from a couple hundred dollar course or group program, to private coaching that can run from single session a la carte rates of $100-$1,000, or a six-month to year-long package that can be over $50,000.
Coaching Advantages
These are the real reasons why and how coaching can help:
You don’t have to do it alone. In coaching, you gain accountability, support, and guidance in learning and applying new ways of thinking.
Unbiased guidance. Mentors, friends, and loved ones are wonderful assets but they too have biases and pre-existing thought patterns about where you are, why you’re there, and their own set of opinions and motivations for the advice they give. Depending on your coach’s area of expertise, they will be able to offer guidance and additional insight on points for your reflection but skilled coaching won’t tell you the right answer. Coaching will help you clear out the overwhelm and obligations so that you make decisions and take action for reasons you love that are in alignment with the goals and future you want to create.
Self-care. We get told regularly to invest in self-care and take care of ourselves with all sorts of external products and programs. But the one constant throughout our lives and what determines the entirety of our experience is our minds. Learning to use your mind and your innate psychology in order to make decisions and create results on purpose is a form of self-care that will literally apply to every area of your life, for the rest of your life, from your professional career, to your relationships, to your children, parents, neighbors, community, and yes, even your physical wellbeing.
Do I need a coach?
If you are in a situation where you want results you haven’t gotten yet or you don’t want the results you have been getting, coaching may help.
A coach can help you:
Explore your goals and wants
Observe, honor, and learn from your past in order to inform your present, and
Intentionally curate your thoughts
All so that you can create the emotions, actions, and results you want.
Recap
Although areas of focus and specialties vary, here are the most common aspects of what it’s like to be coached:
The work you do during a coaching session is thought work. Thought work means thinking on purpose, for a purpose such as achieving or creating a result you want in your life.
Coaching helps you see what’s going on, objectively reflect on your current vs. desired situation, and guide you as you untangle the stories, meaning, and thoughts that are driving your feelings, actions, and results.
Coaching guides you through intentionally discovering what you want and ensuring it’s for reasons you like.
Coaching gives you the personal support, accountability, and strategy for you to follow-through. Sometimes this means helping you show up for yourself consistently in new ways. Sometimes, this means new skills or resources. And sometimes, this means helping you to work through new tangled circumstances and thoughts that would otherwise distract and detract from your effort.
You’re ready to be coached when you’re ready to be intentionally uncomfortable in pursuit of what you want.
Tarah Keech is a Master Life Coach, a burnout prevention and recovery expert, and has a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and a resume of Fortune 100 consulting.
No, she can’t read your mind but she knows how your thoughts work and can help you see them and then use them so you can level up your life personally and professionally.
Basically, she’s a combination of strategist, mentor, and bestie. Except she gives you better advice than your friends do and she teaches you how your brain works so you can take informed action that creates real change.
She helps smart leaders level up their businesses and lives in the Level Up Membership.
And to connect with Tarah directly, complete this form.
