Coaching is a partnership that allows you to quickly obtain personal or professional results. It makes changes and transformations that will lead an individual to enhance their talents.

What is the objective of coaching?

The objective of coaching is to maximize the potential of the student, the coachee. We want to encourage change, create new solutions, but above all, highlight the individual's know-how.

A coach is an expert in creative processes. It is also a generator of ideas. That said, this personal development expert is not a counsellor. In fact, he does not give any advice. He is not a psychologist or a mentor.

If he does not give advice, what does he bring to the person?

First, the coach asks questions, lots of questions. By doing so, its mission is to establish proximity with its client. The answers to these questions will then allow him to participate, in the background, in the process of change.

What is a coach?

Unlike the mentor, who acts like an old sage or an inaccessible guide, the coach instead offers a transfer of knowledge. It suggests, but does not impose. He is a strategist who exercises a method and not a science. A coach shines with his student: he does not dazzle him.

The coach offers new possibilities to guide decisions and reflections. His know-how makes perfect sense in the company of a person who is less experienced than him. Whoever uses his services is looking, not for a master or a model, but for a researcher of ideas and concepts in order to put them in order and study them thoroughly.

A coach is like an older brother who will lead his student to discover how to do it. He is a partner who supports and who steps aside when necessary. Skillful with words, the coach clears and sharpens, magnifies, then directs his attention to his interlocutor without imposing a grain of salt on him. Active listening initiates the support process. A bond of trust is created, questions are asked, but it is above all the coachee who does the work.

Different types of coaching

Coaching relating to the management of a company helps senior managers and decision-makers. These people are often alone at the top of the organizational pyramid of their company and sometimes need support and advice.

• Management coaching will be more interested in people who occupy mid-level positions;
• Career coaching, on the other hand, is for people who want to change professions and reorient their career;
• Team coaching, as its name suggests, makes it possible to make a team more effective, to exacerbate its competitiveness;
• Group coaching gives individuals the opportunity to highlight their talent and then put it at the service of collective intelligence;
• Business coaching is mainly aimed at entrepreneurs. It allows the specialist to be redirected and a system to be reorganized from a different angle of view;
• Personal coaching or life coach acts as a mirror. The person focuses on themselves and will (re) learn to progress and (re) discover the taste of challenge by doing introspection work.

Different terms, same definition

Despite the different names, coaching remains the same global process. A coach accompanies, follows up, helps you discover yourself and what you want to highlight in your life.

What are the benefits of coaching?

The benefit of coaching is the increase in a person's productivity. A coach values self-confidence. At the end of the sessions, the student will therefore have restructured positively and will have regained self-confidence. Numerous studies have converging conclusions. Coaching promotes a return on investment.

It's the same as a coach at the gym! He's not there to exercise with you, but he encourages you to go further by pushing your limits. He sets up various exercises with you to help you reach your goals and goals. Like a nutritionist urges you to eat better. It is always the coachee who carries out his own actions and who develops his personal strategies according to specific objectives, and this at each session.

For example, a person might want to improve their time management. The coach will therefore have the mission, with his student, to develop an action plan that will be put in place by the student. Let's not forget! Even if the process is done under the watchful eye of the coach, it is always the coachee who takes the helm.

A mirror game

The coach offers solutions. He is the one who will reconcile the person with himself, direct him, guide him gently, lead him to find different options according to the goals to be achieved. The coach is simply pointing the way.

Before a meeting, the coachee expresses his wish. He expresses his motivations for using coaching as well as his aspirations and what he wants to work on. He also defines goals that he would like to achieve. The coach then does what can be likened to a reversal. He listens and returns to the sender (the coachee) what has just been said in a more mature, more concrete, more tangible form.

A mirror game is accomplished where the coachee undertakes a journey to himself — where all the answers lie — by freeing himself from everything that connects him to the past, in order to glimpse a new perspective and succeed in creating something new.

Who pays for corporate coaching?

More and more modern businesses want to offer coaching to their employees. On the other hand, the organization plays no role in the tripartite boss-manager-coach relationship. She is only the instigator of the approach.

It is not uncommon for a company that employs young managers to use coaching. The aim is to encourage them to make more profits, but that's not all. In addition to improving performance, a coach will promote their integration into the company and allow them to gain self-confidence more quickly. The intervention of a coach can simply be temporary, until the new employee has picked up speed.

Coaching 101: real or false coach?

There are certifications issued by associations of coaching professionals, including the International Coach Federation (ICF), which lists three levels of certification:

1) Accredited Associate Coach (ACC): 60 hours of training + 250 hours of client coaching

2) Accredited Professional Coach (PCC): 125 hours of training + 750 hours of client coaching

3) Accredited Master Coach (MCC): 200 hours of training + 2500 hours of client coaching

Two hundred and fifty hours of practice are required to reach the first level. Then there is an exam that includes numerous hours of training. Coaching is a popular practice, hence the need to legislate so that charlatanism disappears from this profession.

People who are trained in coaching are often people aged 45 and over. The majority are already working in related fields such as human resources. They are sometimes psychologists or other professionals who have direct experience with the human field.

What is mentoring?

A mentor is a counsellor, a guide, a sage, or someone you consider to be an advisor, guide, sage, or someone you consider to be an advisor. His role is mainly to transmit his knowledge through a specific professional or personal experience.

Mentoring applies to different areas of activity. This may be in the community environment or entrepreneurship, or even in certain sectoral professional associations where, for example, there are mentors for young project managers.

That said, there are also top-level professionals in companies who will also take care of succession management. The term mentor will not necessarily be given to them.

There are two types of mentoring:

• Informal mentoring: spontaneous, natural, advice given;
• Formal mentoring: essentially refers to an organization, program, or coordinators responsible for managing succession.

Coaching or mentoring

Just like in coaching, mentoring emphasizes active listening. This way of doing things allows the mentor to advise and direct the person towards suggested decision making. Unlike the coach, who focuses on the future (what you want to achieve, the goals to be achieved, etc.), the mentor is more inspired by the past. It is the base from which it starts.

Let's take the example of a person who has a conflict with another person. The coach is not going to try to know all the details of this relationship or its context. He is going to focus on the solution to resolve the conflict. For a coach, the approach is not important, only the result counts. The mentor, on the other hand, will prefer to understand the problem, analyze it and decipher it in order to be able to solve it. A mentor usually comes on the scene for a transition period. He's going to take care of the content, not the form. The mentor gives advice and recommends solutions without worrying about the person they are coaching taking action.

Concrete example

Let's imagine a case where a business agent who wants to boost his career calls on a coach and a mentor, even though he is being monitored by a psychologist.

What would happen?

The coach and mentor will take care of the person's career goals and the therapist will try to deal with the person's frustration, which the mentor and coach will certainly avoid. If this person is in distress, they should receive the care of a therapist before using one or the other. The coach and the mentor are not therapists, even if they will often have to use psychology.

An upsurge in coaching and mentoring

Organizations are realizing that there are big gaps within their businesses themselves. Today's employees are not yesterday's employees. The world is changing and people's needs are often different from those they once knew. Professional success is no longer the only motivation. The employee wants to be well, to feel involved and useful in what they do.

It is often when it is necessary to boost the morale of the troops that the coach comes into play. Positivism and active listening are the two pillars of his profession. With serious training — and even if the path is a difficult one — the coach will know how to bring the person to the destination they have chosen for themselves. The basic kit is always the same: experience and practice.

Get the person to find the solution by themselves

Coaching is therefore responding to a growing demand. The loss of bearings undoubtedly has something to do with it. Having an outside perspective makes it easier to see the solution.

The coach shows the direction, the coachee does the rest. The question comes from the head and the answer comes from the heart. Once the two are aligned, it is then possible to go to the indicators.

This also applies to the private sector.

At random: to have the privilege of being a mentor with a teenager, you will have to do a lot of coaching. When the relationship that developed through coaching succeeds, the adolescent will eventually give you the right to be a mentor.

In business, when the solution comes from the customer, it's usually very different than when it comes from the consultant. Especially in terms of commitment and mobilization.

The coach is able to make people aware of what they really need. After supporting the client and allowing him to ask himself the right questions, it is easier for the coachee to break and make up for the past in order to free himself and explore other horizons. Moreover, it is the way of doing things that will allow him to find the solution to his problem.

Are you familiar with the world of coaching and mentoring?

Let's do a bit of introspection about how you are at work. To help you, I invite you to read my colleague's article Pascal Gariépy. He was interested in different types of people at work. What type are you?