Coaching and Mentoring Skills
- Crowe Associates >
- Blog >
- Coaching and Mentoring Skills >
- Coaching Skills
Coaching Skills
The work I have done with various clients in Coaching projects over the last few years, has been the most satisfying and enjoyable part of my work. Its when I feel "in the flow" and doing what I was born to do. The practice has been helped by doing a post Graduate Coaching and Mentoring qualification at Oxford Brookes University.
The work I do with people varies from individuals looking to change career, building confidence, helping people get hold and become comfortable with a new role, and other areas such as helping developing their businesses.
This overview offers a definition of Coaching with a detailed fact sheet, as well as additional pages you can look at which offer an overview of other frameworks of support, such as Transactional Analysis and NLP.
Coaching defined
“One can choose to go back towards safety or forward towards growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again” (Maslow)
Coaching is essentially a non-directive form of development that:
• Focuses on improving performance and developing individuals’ skills.
• Coaching activities have both organisational and individual goals; sometimes this includes personal issues where they impact on people in their work
• It assumes that the individual is psychologically well and does not require a clinical intervention.
• It provides people with feedback on both their strengths and their weaknesses, and often involves using tools such as Psychometric profiling and 360 degree reviews.
6 principles of Coaching
1. The client is resourceful. He or she has not come to be ‘fixed’ but has the ability to resolve his or her own situation.
2. The coach’s role is to spring loose the client’s resourcefulness. It is not to give advice.
3. Coaching addresses the whole person, past, present and future.
4. The client sets the agenda.
5. The coach and the client are equals. It is not a doctor/ patient relationship.
6. Coaching is about change. Its purpose is to help the client become more effective
Coaching Models
There are many models of intervention used by trained Coaches, but many keep coming back to the simplicity and power of the "GROW" model ( "G" are goals for the session and the longer term project, "R" the current reality, "O" the options that the client has, and the "W" forming what the client will do). Supporting this base model are some powerful questions to challenge the client, such as: how much energy do you have for a solution on a scale of 1-10? In an ideal world what would be happening around this issue? How would you know that it had been resolved?
