Put simply, coaching is a process that aims to improve performance and focuses on the ‘here and now’ rather than on the distant past or future.
While there are many different models of coaching, here we are not considering the ‘coach as expert’ but, instead, the coach as a facilitator of learning.
There is a huge difference between teaching someone and helping them to learn. In coaching, fundamentally, the coach is helping the individual to improve their own performance: in other words, helping them to learn.
Good coaches believe that the individual always has the answer to their own problems but understands that they may need help to find the answer.
Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
John Whitmore, in Coaching for Performance.
The ‘Inner Game’
No discussion of coaching would be complete without mention of Timothy Gallwey and his insights into the ‘inner game’.
Gallwey’s book, The Inner Game of Tennis, revolutionised thinking about coaching. He suggested that the biggest obstacles to success and achieving potential were internal, not external. His insight was that coaches could help individuals to improve their game by distracting them from their inner dialogue and, in particular, the critical voice that said “Not like that! Concentrate on your hands! Angle it differently!”.
By distracting that inner voice, the body could take over. It turns out that often the body has a very clear idea of what to do when internal dialogues are suppressed. Gallwey used the example of asking people to focus on the height at which they hit the tennis ball. This activity has no relevance in itself, but the simple act of focusing on it distracted the inner voice and enabled the capable body to take over. The individual relaxed and their tennis improved immediately.
Gallwey’s real insight was that this didn’t just apply to tennis, but that individuals generally did have the answers to their own problems within themselves.
The essential part of coaching, then, is to help people to learn to silence that inner voice and allow their instincts, or their subconscious, to take over. Sometimes that means distracting it, and sometimes it’s about exploring the ‘worst case scenario’ and removing the fear.
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