Fed up with bad advice?
Life Coaching, Executive Coaching, Leadership Coaching, ADHD Coaching, Business Coaching. It’s all a booming industry right now and people and you might be hearing about it constantly but wondering what it actually is. I’m here to break that down for you and tell you what to look out for in a good coach and what to avoid.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
I’ve mentioned leadership coaching all over this site but I wanted to dedicate a bigger bit of content to defining what it is, so this blog is going to be an overview of what coaching is and importantly what it’s not so that you can make more informed choices in the services you choose to engage.
The first frustrating thing about coaching is that it’s such a generic term. The coaching profession is undefined and people can style themselves as coaching but offer vastly different services. There are a lot of “coaches” out there who I would define better as instructors, mentors or educators but the term is so generic that it gets used for these people too.
Part of that comes from the way that coaching as a profession evolved. Originally coaching was a term used in sports to describe the people who instruct us in how to be better and give us tips to improve our performance both mentally and physically.
Coaching as I refer to it in this video was partially formalised by Timothy Gallwey in The Inner Game of Tennis in 1974 in which he brought together his realisations that standing at the side-lines telling his charges what to do wasn’t anywhere near as effective as growing their self awareness which enabled them to make their own adjustments and be mentally in a better place, increasing their performance.
The ways we think about leadership coaching originates from techniques from high performance in Tennis
While the coaching profession is built around that latter approach, the former is still more ingrained in the psyche of the general population.
On a personal level, I tend to borrow a term from my martial arts days and think of those kind of sports coaches who tell you what to do as instructors, rather than coaches but I think it’s too late for a general change of language about that.
It’s also important to note that coaching is a completely unregulated industry. Anyone can call themselves a coach. There’s no exam they need to pass or qualification they need to obtain. If you’re sitting here watching this thinking that you want to call yourself a coach then you literally can, no one needs to give you permission for it. I’m not saying you should, but I’m emphasizing how unregulated this industry is.
As a result two people can both call themselves coaches and offer coaching services online but be offering two vastly different forms of services. Many of the times these coaching services are just telling people what to do. If we use Timothy Gallwey’s experience then this suggests that telling us what to do is far less effective than empowering us to do it ourselves, but it’s actually worse than that because it can be damaging.
Empowering us to find our own knowledge and solve our own problems is more effective than telling us what to do
I’ll get into the reasons why it can be damaging a bit later on but I just wanted to bring this up because I do work in training other coaches and as part of that training they make mistakes, which is okay, it’s all part of learning, but I know there have been times when I’ve left feeling bad about myself because a coach has accidentally slipped into telling me what to do and made me feel bad about the fact that I couldn’t make their suggestion work.
So with that in mind, the best way I like to describe coaching is describing two things it’s not. The first thing that it’s not is that it’s not mentoring. Mentoring is when someone who has direct experience of the path you’re trying to walk gives you advice on how to progress on that journey based on their own experience.
Mentoring is really great for targeted things. I have mentors who are very useful and there are people I pay to give me advice on specific things that I find difficult. But the person giving you advice is not you.
They may be on the same career path as you and be five years ahead but they are different from you. Maybe they are a different gender, have a different educational background, be a different neurotype to you. Or they just did this five years earlier which was before a pandemic and so in a very different economic environment.
While a mentor can be useful in some circumstances, it’s important to recognise that they are different from you and not all of their advice will work for you
So while mentoring can be super powerful when things go well and the person can have good intentions and give good advice, that good advice might not be good for you. And when we can’t follow through on this “good” advice, that’s when the self-doubt starts to seep in and our mindset takes a hit.
So coaching is not mentoring, it’s not giving advice and it’s not telling you what to do. And if you want mentoring in something specific go and get it, mentoring in itself is not bad, but it has its limitations that coaching is better equipped to deal with.
The other thing it’s not is it’s not therapy. I am very clear with my clients where that line sits. There are a number of things I can help with in terms of mindset and feeling bad about ourselves but if you have trauma or are really struggling with your mental health, please go to someone who is explicitly qualified to help you with that. I have paused coaching relationships in the past because the person needed mental health support that I was not qualified to give and we resumed when they were in a better place.
And therapy and coaching get confused a lot because they both make use of reflective enquiry. They both ask questions to probe into the person’s thoughts and feelings. The difference is that while therapy looks backwards to help you heal, coaching takes a look at where you are today and works out how you can grow forward into your future.
So with that in mind, coaching is not mentoring and it’s not therapy let’s talk about what it is. I want to start with the definition from the International Coaching Federation which says:
“ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.”
The thing I want to pick out from here is the word “partnering”, we are working with you, not telling you what to do. When we coach we ask questions that challenge our status quo of thinking, that cause us to open up our perspectives and reflect on our perceptions.
And this can be really powerful. I remember a client who wasn’t sure if she wanted to go for a promotion because people had told her, directly or indirectly, that she was doing great but she should be happy where she was. People had made her feel that wanting that promotion was greedy and she had internalised that to a certain extent.
We spent a lot of time exploring that subject, figuring out what was actually important to her and how she actually felt about it. I remember the turning point where after a moment of reflective silence she turned to me and said: “You know what Leigh, I do want this promotion and I’ve had enough of trying to convince myself that I don’t. I want to go for this promotion.”. That was the first time I realised I’d changed someone’s life.
I distinctly remember the first coaching session where I changed someone’s life
Since then, I’ve coached on a wide variety of topics and not all of them are work related. When someone comes into our coaching room we don’t just focus on their careers because that person is a whole person in front of us, not a machine that switches into career mode and forgets about their lives.
I coach for leadership but sometimes to be able to unlock that leadership we need to make a detour. I’ve coached people through divorces, I’ve coached people through reconciling with estranged family members and other really tough situations that they find themselves needing to work through before they can move forward with their careers and their leadership.
This form of coaching where we respond to the whole person is even more important if the person you are coaching is neurodivergent. Whether they have ADHD, autism, dyslexia, Tourette’s Syndrome, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia or any other condition they have all had bad experiences with people telling them what to do.
Because a mentor might tell someone with autism who struggles with eye contact to make sure they always maintain it when they speak so they can be more assertive. This can make them really uncomfortable, meaning that they don’t get to come across in the way that they want to because they are actively fighting their autism to have that conversation.
They might tell someone with Tourette’s Syndrome that they understand that their ticks are something that they can’t help but they should try extra hard to suppress them during a job interview because they’re unprofessional. Ooft.
On a personal level, I’ve had times where I’ve been pushed to do something that my ADHD couldn’t do because the executive function cost and the emotional cost of doing it was just too high and I have wallowed in feeling like a failure because I had to fight for the decision that I had made because it wasn’t the decision they thought I should have made. That one was really painful.
A good coach works in a way that works best for you
But a good coach doesn’t do that. A good coach might ask you for accountability but if you don’t have the mental capacity for it that week then they say okay. A good coach challenges you to think of what you need, or offers strategies for you to try on but lets them go if those strategies don’t fit. A good coach helps you find the solutions that work for you because you are the expert in you. They don’t tell, they don’t guide, they partner with you. Because we can work it out together.
After that quite emotional note, I’m actually going to bring this topic to a close. Next week I’m going to continue this topic by diving into what to look for in a coach, how to know whether a coach is a coach or really an instructor or a mentor and what questions to ask when talking to a potential coach.
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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