Coaching is not mentoring. Mentors provide advice and solutions. Coaches ask great questions which prompt the coachee to find their own answers and solutions. Answers and solutions that fit their unique circumstances. 

A mentor uses their own experience, knowledge and insight to guide a less experienced person. Mentoring relationships continue for as long as the mentor and mentee are benefitting from the relationship. Mentors provide advice and guidance as needed over time. 

A coaching assignment is time-bound and objective-driven. A coach is a listening ear and a mirror. A coach provides support and challenge – asking probing questions, provoking sometimes profound ‘lightbulb’ moments.

Coaching isn’t counselling. While counselling tends to look at past events to help understand current stresses and underlying concerns, coaching is forward-looking and action-oriented. Coaching provides space and time to reflect and gain clarity so you can move forward. A coach will help you understand root causes, rather than try to ’fix’ you. 

A coach seeks to see you as you really are and appreciate all your potential. Having the time, space and safe environment to talk to someone utterly unbiased about your life and work issues can be a source of genuine stress relief. A place to get perspective and give honest reflection without fear of judgement can provide the opportunity to process your emotions constructively and honestly.

Your coach will provide you with strategies, tools and techniques that work for you to help you healthily release stress and build your resilience.

Coaching helps develop self-awareness in leaders – with a greater sense of personal leadership identity leaders better understand their impact on others.

Coaches help leaders express and achieve goals through uncovering and unblocking self-limiting beliefs supporting a build in confidence, clarity and courage.

This more profound and more intuitive self-knowledge has a far-reaching impact which increases self-mastery. Coachees begin a new process of self-leadership developing more compassion and respect for who they are and what matters to them, which impacts on the standards, demands and expectations they have of others.

This new level of awareness precipitates more substantial relationship building with others and a stronger sense of personal brand which assists in more robust communication, a greater understanding of personal power in the round and a more purposeful ability to create a life balance that works for the individual.

Coaching is not mentoring. Mentors provide advice and solutions. Coaches ask great questions which prompt the coachee to find their own answers and solutions. Answers and solutions that fit their individually unique circumstances.

Coaching is not counselling. Counsellors seek to understand the present through past events. Coaching is forward focussed and goal orientated. The past may provide some useful data to explore issues provided it is in the context of building strategies for the future.

Coaching is not training. Trainers share information and provide skills according to a set of pre-considered objectives and intended outcomes. Coaching is not one size fits all. Each coaching experience is tailor-made to the unique individual and their own particular set of circumstances and situation.

Coaching is not advisory. Coaching is predicated on the knowledge that every person has the answers to their dilemmas within them. The role of the coach is to facilitate the individual to find those answers and deliver on them.

Coaching is an irreplaceable space for self-development. Research shows time and again that the vast majority of people who receive coaching develop in self-confidence, in self-efficacy, and are much more effective communicators. 

Coaching can create an essential shift in approach to leadership and results in a more resilient, more authentic, and more empowered and empowering leader. Coachees typically feel more fulfilled, more confident and more productive. 

Performance improvements usually include:

• Increasing autonomy.
• Higher levels of accountability.
• Greater collaborative efforts.
• More powerful communication.