Coaching begins with the premise that you – the client – have all of the answers. It may not seem like you have any answers, which is fine. If you had all the answers and knew how to reach them, you wouldn’t need a coach. Reaching the inner answers is the perennial challenge. The coach, not being an expert on you or your needs, is not there to direct or educate you about yourself. Rather, the coach helps you draw out of yourself the answers and insights that you need.
Naturally, then, if you bring answers, the coach brings questions. The client spends a lot of time answering questions. Sometimes the questions will seem profound, insightful, and incisive. Often, however, the questions will seem downright silly, or irreverent, or even irritating. Whatever evidence to the contrary, though, the coach is not there to irritate you. Rather, the coach is there to help you be very clear about how you answer your questions.
How we define and use terms is vitally important. Coaching questions are meant to be specific, often to an uncomfortable degree. For example, clients very often begin coaching with a goal something like, “I want to be more successful.” That is a perfectly valid desire, but it leaves a lot unsaid: What does success mean for you? How will you measure success? What is it about success that makes you want more? These kinds of questions are often the most difficult in coaching, because they simultaneously seem ridiculously obvious but in practice are almost impossible to answer, at least at first.
All of us use terms every day that, when pressed, we cannot clearly define. Going through the process of defining the terms we use for our goals, however difficult and frustrating the process may be, serves two critical purposes. First, specific goals are much easier to address than vague goals. Second, in the effort to put desires into words, people often find that their true desires are not quite what they expected. For example, a common desire is “to have more money.” The benefits of having more money are left unexamined and taken for granted. On examination through coaching, however, money is rarely if ever the real goal. What money provides, like a sense of control over one’s circumstances, or a measurement of one’s “success” (another tricky term), is far more important than the actual dollars at hand. Money is (almost) invariably the means rather than the end. What people want is security, self-confidence, comfort, and peace. Money by itself is certainly not the only way, or even the best way, to gain those things. In examining the desire for money, the real desires emerge, and money ceases to be the focus.
The preceding example does not apply to everyone. Nevertheless, most people have vague goals that overlook underlying needs. People come to coaching looking for things like “happiness,” “success,” or “influence” for themselves, or for “sustainability,” “growth,” or “cooperation” for their businesses and teams. People come to coaching for any number of things that sound grand but ultimately mean vastly different things from person to person. The usefulness of coaching depends on precision, and it is the coach’s role to help and push the client to find precision. Real work, and real growth, depends on the client knowing exactly why the goal is important, what success really means, and the coach is there to ensure that the client finds that clarity.
