How coaching can transform ourselves and help us flourish

[This is the first out of a series of articles on coaching]

At a recent coaching session where I was the client, I talked about struggling with my perfectionist tendencies, and how I needed to feel very prepared and polished before I took action on something (hence why these articles are currently taking a frustratingly long time to write!). This was holding me back in life, and I said I wanted to lower my threshold for taking action, so that I could engage with the world from a more fearless state.

I started talking about the numerous things I could do about this – rejection therapy (deliberately putting myself through small rejections), seeking out uncomfortable situations, reframing thoughts through journaling. When I ran out of things to do, there was a long silence. Eventually, the coach asked simply, “When will the doing ever be enough?”

That was a mini eureka moment. I wanted to lower my threshold for taking action, but ironically, I was giving myself a high threshold of things I had to do before I could achieve that. I realized my life has always been about constantly ‘doing’, and I wasn’t giving myself space for just ‘being’. I have that fearless state within me, and I don’t need to complete certain action items before I can unlock it – I just needed to find a way to access it in the moment.

That’s just one example of the many instances I have seen how coaching has helped me, and other people, evoke deep insights that can help us move forward. Since embarking on my coaching journey earlier this year, I have come to believe that coaching is really a powerful tool to transform ourselves, our workplaces and our societies.

What is coaching?

First, a brief note on what is coaching. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. Essentially, coaching helps you to achieve your potential in life.

?A distinguishing feature of coaching, is that it is based on the belief that individuals have the answers they need within themselves. Coaching is different to mentoring, in that there is no giving of advice or suggestions. Coaches trust that clients are the experts of their own lives and our role is to facilitate their movement forward. As per my story above, coaches simply reflect clients’ thought patterns back to them, and ask simple but powerful questions to trigger realisations on what is not serving them. Coaches are not responsible for helping clients tackle specific problems or goals, instead, they help to expand awareness and perspectives, so that clients can tackle whatever issues they have from a more empowered state.

?The effectiveness of coaching is backed by behavioural research. Telling people what to do is not effective, because this tends to create either resistance or compliance, and does not result in sustained change. On the other hand, the focus of coaching is to draw out the person’s??reflections and ideas, which arouses a positive sense of responsibility and courage.

Coaching helps you get to a state of flourishing

In the mental well-being spectrum, there are established support avenues and resources to help people cope when they are struggling. But how can we help people not just cope and get by, but get into a state of flourishing?

To flourish, we need to understand who we are as a whole person, what we really want in life, and to feel empowered to pursue what we want. And that is the essence of what coaching does for individuals.

Coaching helps us understand who we are as a whole person

Coaching helps people understand and embrace their whole selves, as it is only from a place of wholeness that we can pursue meaningful relationships and goals, and achieve self-actualisation.

A key principle of coaching is “coach the person, not the problem”.?What does it mean to coach someone as a whole person? On the one hand, this means seeing someone as more than their problems, and seeing their hidden potential and strengths even if they can’t see it themselves. On the other hand, it also means helping people accept parts of themselves that they dislike or try to suppress. We all have these ‘no go zones’, but they limit our experience of life. Coaching helps us to surface and process these ‘no go zones’, which releases blocked emotions and energies for the client to move forward.?

Coaching people on their specific issues only scratches things at a surface level, but a “whole-person” approach allows us to make transformations and not incremental changes in our lives. For example, when clients gain insight into a certain problem or pattern in their life, they often realise that the pattern plays out in all other areas of their life (e.g. how perfectionism at work, might also show up as perfectionism as a parent).

?Coaching helps us define what we really want

Defining what we want can be difficult for many of us to do. Our brains are primed to look out for threats, which means our default is to know what we DON’T want. We are also often influenced by the expectations of others. The game-changer in coaching, is when we can help clients articulate what it is they really DO want, that is authentic to them. In many coaching sessions I’ve done so far, clients bring in a surface-level problem statement, and it is throughout the session that we dive deeper into what it is that they truly want. Coaching helps people to connect their specific situations, to deeper yearnings and needs that lie underneath.

Understanding what we want is important, because to flourish, we need to feel like we are living authentic and fulfilling lives. By seeing the whole person, coaches help clients articulate a life vision based on their own unique values, dreams and sense of purpose. In a separate article, I talked about how pursuing our authentic values can be difficult and uncomfortable, but necessary for our well-being and sense of fulfilment. Coaches encourage and challenge clients to pursue their life vision, in spite of contrary voices and self-doubt. This vision is not static and constantly evolves, but it is the presence of a vision that unleashes the passion and energy that one needs to pursue sustained action.

Coaching encourages us to grow

Coaching is powerful because it creates an empathetic and trusting relationship where the person is seen, heard and valued, and empowered to find their own inner resources to pursue their life vision.

Coaching provides individuals the belief that they can grow and change. Coaching is based on the principle of unconditional positive regard: that individuals are naturally creative, resourceful and whole, and have everything they need within them to achieve what they want. Unconditional positive regard takes practice – it requires setting aside our human tendencies to judge and doubt others. It requires the ability to see and believe in a person’s future potential, beyond their current difficulties. It requires trusting the person more than they trust themselves. And when people see your trust in them, they will expand their own worldview of what is possible. They start to believe in their own sense of agency, in making intentional choices to build the lives they want. ?

Coaching creates the space and process for individuals to grow. For many of us, what we need for better well-being isn’t just access to more resources or services – it is fundamentally how we can create sustained changes in our beliefs, thought patterns, habits and behaviours. Coaching facilitates this sustained change, because it helps people through their growth and learning process, rather than prescribing any kind of ‘quick fix’. Coaches understand that clients need to learn from their own decisions and actions, and sometimes, this means letting the clients fail so they can learn valuable lessons from it. The emphasis is on long-term growth, and not short-term success.

A coach is like the unconditionally honest and empathetic friend we always wish we had, who can challenge and encourage us at the same time. The coaches I’ve met in my journey are some of the most amazing people I’ve met, who are so humble and dedicated to improving themselves so that they can better help others. And I’m so grateful to be on this journey.