Coaching Principles

Coaching is a method for helping others to improve, develop, learn new skills, find personal success, achieve aims and manage life change and personal challenges. Coaching can be effective in personal life, career, sales, and in corporate and business life. Coaching is non-directive, non-judgemental, flexible and enabling, not prescriptive or instructional. Coaching can help people to develop and grow in a variety of areas, including: personal and life coaching, coaching for life-change, parenting; self-fulfillment and self-discovery; career coaching for advancement and job choices; leadership and management coaching; coaching for sales and business success; executive coaching for corporate performance, and to help with talent development.

Effective coaching requires much more than a set of techniques or a list of questions. Coaching works because:

• Performance improvement comes about by a focus on goals, flexibility in achieving them, and a willingness to learn from the results.
• A small change in a person's thinking or behaviour may be all that is needed to produce a significant improvement in results.
• Versatility, creativity and diversity of approach are best nurtured by non-directive coaching, although a directive approach may sometimes be useful.
• Effective coaching can be brief; a single session may achieve the necessary change.
• Coaching is a co-operative venture in which the coachee is responsible for results. The coach assists in defining goals, checking present reality and generating options.
• The person being coached does most of the talking, the coach does most of the listening and asks most of the questions.
• Coaches do not need to be subject-matter experts; they do need excellent coaching skills and the ability to empathise with coachees' experience.
• All feedback about the coaching process is confidential.