So just what IS coaching, anyway?
by Ken Winston Caine

Nearly anybody who was in coaching in the ‘90s will recall how puzzled people used to be when you told them you were a personal, life or business coach.

"What’s that?” they’d ask.

You don’t hear that so much any more, do you?

That’s not because the coaching profession has come up with a perfect sound-bite response that everyone has grasped instantly.

Rather, thanks to Oprah’s relentless positive promotion of coaches, other (often distorted) television exposure, and widespread adoption (and co-option) of the term “coach” by big-name consultants and self-help authors, most people these days seem to think they know what coaching is about. And they think it’s kind of cool. Or New Age weird. Or something for the elite and wealthy. Or they think it’s another name for consulting or counseling. Or they have some other concept of what coaching is that, for them at least, settles the question.

Does the public have a good grasp of what coaching is? Do coaches? Are opportunistic and untrained newcomers to the field redefining how the public sees coaching? And if so, what does this mean for coaching and how does it change the coaching landscape? And, really, just what is coaching, anyway?

Who we talked with
In this series, Coaching Insider took questions like this to leaders and long-time veterans of the personal and business coaching field.

Among those we talked with are:

• Sandy Vilas, CEO of Coach Inc.com, parent company of Coach U and Corporate Coach U.
• John Lazar, master certified coach and co-executive editor of International Journal of Coaching in Organizations.
• Ramon Williamson, who started his Personal Success Coach business for financial planners in 1986 and who was one of the late Thomas Leonard’s first students a few years later when Leonard formed Coach University (now Coach U).
• John Agno, a “recovering consultant” who is now a certified business and executive coach and founder of the Coach2Coach Network—an international virtual community of more than 1,000 business and executive coaches.
• Terri Levine, founder of Comprehensive Coaching U and The Coaching Institute.  

The big question
We asked a lot of questions. In Part 2 of this series, we’re looking primarily at the responses to this question in particular:

How, in one, two or three sentences, do you clearly describe what coaching is—without using any industry jargon and in such a way that the uninitiated immediately grasp it and distinguish it from teaching, mentoring, consulting, therapy, and all the other personal development offerings in the greater marketplace?

Nearly all the respondents saw huge overlaps between coaching and the other offerings.

Lazar said: “There is a gray area between therapy and coaching, between mentoring and coaching, between instructing and coaching.”

Vilas said: “Coaching plays a role in all these things—mentoring, consulting, therapy.”

"There’s a fuzzy line between all these things,” said Agno.

Williamson said that when Thomas Leonard first started teaching coaching, it wasn’t presented as a completely unique and distinct modality but rather as “a synthesis of the best personal and professional development tools and strategies and models that would accelerate personal growth and achievement.”

Why define it at all?
Williamson objects to the idea that coaching needs to be defined or distinguished.

The coaching profession, he says, “has misinvested a tremendous amount of time and attention in trying to describe what coaching is.”   Clients don’t care about how we define coaching, Williamson says. They care about results.

Coaches, though, do seem to be preoccupied with defining and distinguishing coaching.

So many coaches are refugees from counseling and similar therapeutic professions, Williamson says. They’ve been bound by laws, narrowly interpreted educational standards, rules, licenses and tightly defined limits to what is or is not an appropriate intervention. And they just aren’t comfortable being lumped in with the menagerie of free-form practitioners in the less-defined, more free-wheeling environment of coaching, he believes.

For their own sense of identity, many coaches want to create a certain exclusivity in the coaching field, Williamson says. They can’t stand the idea that just anyone can be a coach. They have a need to define and regulate who is doing real coaching and who is not.

"They long for something sacred in the context of their work with people,” he says.

And in that quest, they risk doing to coaching “the very same thing that drove them out of [practicing] therapy,” he adds.

A controversial position for sure. And one not expressed as vehemently by any of the other respondents.

In their own words
How did the others define coaching and distinguish it from therapy, mentoring, teaching, consulting, etc.?   The responses converged in some places and diverged in others.

Following are excerpts from the interviews:

Sandy Vilas:

“Coaching is about being a partner, champion, cheerleader, advocate and sounding board for the client. It means telling the truth at all times. Giving advice and supporting the client in achieving results. That’s what the client wants: Results.”

On mentoring:
“Typically, this is someone in a corporation being mentored by an older, more senior individual. By its very nature, the level of trust is not as present as in coaching. And the mentor typically has an agenda for the mentee.

“[As a coach] I don’t particularly care whether my clients achieve the results they want to achieve or not. It’s nice when they do. But it’s up to them.”

On consulting:
“Consulting is typically a short-term arrangement. Does not address the ‘who.’ In coaching, we address the who, the what and the how.

“Who are you and who do you want to become?

“What do you want?

“How are you going to get it?

“Consultants don’t deal with who you are and who do you want to become.”

On therapy:
“There are so many modalities of therapy. Anything you say about the differentiation of coaching and therapy, somebody is going to challenge it. Typically, therapy is about issues; coaching is about goals.

“Gets tricky defining the difference between therapy and coaching. In coaching, we don’t particularly care about your childhood issues [but might].

“Five percent or more of the students of Coach U and Corporate Coach U are therapists. They’re tired of managed care. Tired of dysfunctionality.”

How do the uninitiated tell the difference between a trained coach and those who call themselves a coach?
“The distinction between a coach and someone who calls themselves a coach resides in a couple of things:

1. “How and where the person trained.
2. “What kind of designation have they achieved? (Vilas says that if the person has been certified through the International Coaching Federation, for instance), “it means a lot.”

“People hire a coach on a one-on-one basis. Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. Buyers of coaching services need to be aware of what it is they are buying.”

On giving advice:
“I get paid as a coach because I support my clients and they produce results. I’m an ardent believer that giving advice—when appropriate—is one of the keys to coaching.

“Given the experience and knowledge coaches have typically accumulated in their lives, a lot of the time, they know better than the clients what to do next. Why the hell wouldn’t we give advice? It’s what clients want anyway.”

On best-selling authors offering coaching:
“You’ve got Tony Robbins who has a coaching services arm. Tony’s people are trained to coach people around the programs Tony presents. What’s wrong with that? Nothing.

“It supports a graduate of a program of Tony’s to integrate what they’ve learned into their lives.”

What do people want from a coach?
“People want one of two things: more of something or less of something.

“Typically, they want more money and time. Then space, freedom, energy, love, community, opportunity, on and on.

“Typically, they want less frustration, toleration, delay and stress.

“What they really want kind of evolves in the process of coaching…. Most people, in my experience, who come to coaching are not in touch with what they really want. Most people identify with what they do rather than with who they are.”

John Lazar:

(Quotes from a paper published in his journal which was written by Patrick Williams and Deborah C. Davis):

“Coaching may be viewed as a powerful human relationship where trained coaches assist people to design their future rather than get over their past.… Coaches aid clients in creating multiple strategies to support achieving these goals. Coaches recognize the brilliance of each client and their personal power to discover their own solutions when provided with support, accountability and unconditional positive regard.”

On counseling:
Psychotherapy is a talking treatment … for the purpose of relieving symptoms. Therapy is much more oriented around pathology and relief of symptoms.

“Coaching is much more about creating futures and assumes the person is well-functioning.

“Both psychotherapy and coaching are goal-oriented. Psychology is about fixing something. Coaching is about going from good to better. Coaching is much more about enabling the client to draw their own answers, own truth.”

On mentoring:
“Mentoring is typically a hierarchal relationship in which someone of more experience in a particular domain is yoked or connected with someone junior to provide with perspective, educating them about the right way or best way to do things.

"Coaching is not hierarchal.
“In mentoring, there is very clearly a hierarchal relationship.

“In therapy, there is very clearly a hierarchal relationship.

“Even in teaching, the relationship is hierarchal.

“In coaching, the relationship is much more peer to peer.”

On advice giving:
“Coaching is about knowledge, performance and wisdom.… But it isn’t that the coach has the right answer. Coaching has points of view, models, but these are not offered as truth but offered with perspective for consideration.”

John Agno:

“Most of us believe we know how the world works. But really, we only perceive how it works, and that perception is our reality, not anyone else’s. When our perception conflicts with that of others around us, we have a challenge: My perception of the world is not in tune with other people’s. Therefore, I am stuck.

“When a person faces a challenge and becomes stuck, he or she may seek the services of a personal coach. Once this commitment is made, the person begins to experience a different world and probably far more hopeful world. As his or her perceptions evolve in meeting the personal challenge in their world, they get unstuck.”

On the difference between counseling, teaching, mentoring, consulting, etc.:
“Fuzzy line between all these things. The key element is to get to a place of self-awareness where development can happen. If blinded as to what that is, we can’t change.

“Becoming conscious can happen through a number of ways. Coaching happens to be the most effective way to do it.

“Coaching seems to be able to do it because you can say the unsayable to each other. You have no other relationship in that person’s life.”

On consulting:
“I got into coaching because I am now a recovering management consultant.

“I would come in, people would pay me big bucks to solve a problem…. What I discovered was that after six months or a year or whatever, the problem would recur.… Consulting doesn’t work long-term; coaching does. Because coaching works though people to help them solve their own problems ... so they know why it got broke and what to do to fix it.

“Consulting is not coaching. … I had to unlearn consulting. … My solving a problem doesn’t help an individual. I had to stop training and teaching and really coach them so that they could find the solution that they needed.”

Why are so many people co-opting the term “coach”?
“Coach is the in-thing to be—better to be called a coach than a consultant. People would rather work with a coach than with a therapist.”

Terri Levine:

(How does she define and distinguish coaching for the uninitiated in one, two or three sentences?  She says she tells them: )

“I am a professional who has been well trained to work with people to achieve more clients, more income and more profits fast. I do this by partnering with you and not giving you the answers, yet helping you to discover the answers, and for us to co-create and collaborate on what works for you.”

On authors, consultants and others calling themselves coaches:
“ ‘Coach’ is a buzz word, and many gurus [who call themselves coaches] are true consultants, true tellers of what to do, and now, the public isn’t sure what a coach is.

“I don’t think the public has a clue about the difference. We simply aren’t a ‘real profession.’ I mean we don’t have one licensing/accrediting body and no standards we need to perform by, so the public is quite confused.”

What do people want from a coach?
“They want someone to assist them to have more of something in their life. Could be more freedom, more money, more success.”

What qualifications really matter to clients?
“Experience, personality and skill set. They [clients] don’t care if you have initials after your name or belong to XYZ organization. They do care about YOU and what you have done in your life and work.”

On how reality TV shows depict coaches:
“I have only seen one and I was sick to my stomach over this. The show is called The Swan, and they take women who look or feel ‘ugly’ and do all kinds of surgery on them to help them look more beautiful. What a sad concept to start with! Anyway, the ‘Life Coach’ is more like a bootcamp coach, telling, telling, telling and certainly not their advocate nor trying to help them adjust, find answers or learn to BE who they are. Awful experience.”

Thomas Leonard:

Wrote to his R&D Team on July 8, 2001, explaining his new declaration that “Everyone’s a coach”:

“I’ve always said that we’re all coaches, because coaching is really just a set of advanced communication, relating and wisdom skill sets.

“I now see a much bigger game. Imagine if everyone started looking at themselves as a coach [no matter what their profession/occupation]. They’d have more confidence, they’d want to learn how to communicate better, they’d elevate themselves into this ‘higher’ role, and they’d just start looking at themselves and the world through totally different/better eyes.”

On Feb. 25, 2002, he seemed to think he had truly nailed the heart of coaching with the creation of The 15 Proficiencies, which he called his “Number One achievement in my 20 years of coaching and coach training.”

You can sense the excitement in his words.

“Do you know how LONG I’ve been trying to get to these?  Twenty years!  And they all popped out starting last night on a collaboration call with Susan Austin.”

The 15 Proficiencies were later tweaked on a series of calls with about 20 Graduate School of Coaching senior coaches.

About five weeks after announcing their creation, Leonard said he would “affordably license” use of the proficiencies to all coaching schools … and announced that he was setting up a non-profit institution to administer exams and issue certification in the proficiencies. He truly expected that these would become the standard for defining, teaching and evaluating coaching.

The Proficiencies lost their evangelist when Leonard died in early 2003. They remain at the heart of the CoachVille training, but CoachVille now claims them as proprietary. It does not seem to be interested in spreading their use in the profession to other schools and training organizations. That position has undercut the International Association of Coaches—the certifying organization Leonard started—which, as a result, has announced that it will abandon the Proficiencies soon . 

You can see the original iteration of The 15 Proficiencies as they were presented in the
March 27, 2002 issue of Today’s Coach; or a more polished version here.

Dave Buck:

(Buck, CEO of CoachVille, declined an interview for this series but has written often about what coaching is. The following is from an article he published on April 23, 2004.)
“Coaching is helping an individual [or team] accomplish a desired result through sophisticated teaching techniques, expanded awareness and designing an environment that inspires growth.”
Coaching, Buck wrote, offers “teaching that is ‘precisely personalized’ to the needs, experience level and talent of the client.”
And, he advised, “The place to begin a coaching career is to leverage your knowledge and experience and package it into a situational solution to a very specific life problem.”

CoachVille has honed Buck’s basic definition to read:
“Coaching is the process of bringing out the greatness of people. It begins with a desire on the part of the client to accomplish, have or experience something. The coach inspires the client to accomplish the desired result through personalized teaching, expanding awareness and designing environments.”

International Coach Federation

“Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.

“Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.”
-- from http://www.coachfederation.org/aboutcoaching/index.asp

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