People often question what coaching does?
People get confused with the function or method between mentoring and counseling. Coaching is different than Mentoring or Counseling. Sometimes people come to a coach, hoping for advice or a way out of their solution. A good coach will be firm at the beginning telling the client that the coaching session will be a reflective thinking method; a coach will not be given any advice but to provide questions that will lead to finding solutions on their own.
Counseling has existed long before coaching and has its establishment in human studies. The idea of counseling is to find the underlying issue from a person, for a person to be able to go back to the
past to find out the traumatic event of life (any other problems in the past) and be able to move on once they found out what it needs to be solved. A process to recovery, once they recover, then they can move forward with their lives. The goal of counseling often to promote self- understanding or self-acceptance. Counseling also typically has diagnoses and the possibility of refereeing for medication consumption.
Throughout the years, all these self-development methods are growing; people are starting to seek the help they needed to develop themselves to be better and achieve specific goals in life.
Mentoring is also one of them, where it has a broader spectrum than coaching. Mentoring is a relationship where someone can use for personal development or professional development. A Mentoring relationship is where two people share experience, knowledge, advice with the other person who has less command or as a mentee. This supportive relationship will enrich their professional or personal journey; it doesn’t have an expiration date or particular written milestone on the record but can be measure with the progress along the way.
Coaching, on the other hand, can be a little bit of both but with a different approach. Like the counselor giving probing questions to dig the past, the coach will provide powerful questions to open their perspective in finding out the solution as their goal. Coaching will also record the action to make sure they are progressing and arrived at their destination that they assigned before. Coaching is unlocking someone’s potential with their thinking, without being told or any given any advice. The coach has to open up their mind broader with powerful questions until they find a moment where they can understand that light bulb moment and what to do next.
If you are ready for a journey, to move forward with your life and needed clarity, seeking coaching will be ideal as it will help you to see your blind-spot of thinking. The powerful questions will help you unlocking the doubt and confusion. The self-awareness that come up within will be more powerful to be use as a drive in reaching the goal in life.
“ A coach has some great questions for your answers; a mentor has some great answers for your questions” – Unknown
