Coaching is a booming industry with hundreds of niches, but the modern definition of what coaching actually is has evolved only recently.
Coaching is ubiquitous is modern life. You can get a coach for almost anything you want; business, health, relationships and even parenting, to name a handful. But what has coaching come to mean in a modern sense and how does this differ from its traditional definition?
The most common definition of coaching is to simply “train or instruct an individual or team”. This includes teaching and providing advice with a view to making said individual or team better or more likely to achieve a certain outcome.
Believe it or not, the term comes from the horse drawn coaches that would help someone get from A to B in 18th century Britain. It was slang for tutors “carrying” their students. So it’s actually a metaphor.
When applied to a sports coach, for example, this definition makes perfect sense, but when applied to business coaching or life coaching as we understand it today, it doesn’t fit.
In the context of life or business coaching, coaching does not generally mean to instruct, teach or even advise. Few people believe they need instruction on how to live or run their business from someone else.
Today, a coach in this sense is there to help guide their client, by helping them find the answers themselves. A trained coach asks questions, holds space, and avoids putting their own opinions forward. This approach is underpinned by two beliefs:
A crucial benefit of this coaching style is that someone who receives coaching is wholly responsible for their actions because they’ve not been offered an opinion or suggestion for what to do. This means they take full ownership of their actions.
In the world of business, there’s plenty of merit in advice and guidance as opposed to asking questions and holding space. This is because there are more areas where an experienced businessperson may be able to help someone avoid a mistake, capitalize on an opportunity, or simply learn a better way to do something. In general, there more objective rights and wrongs in business than in life.
This means there is far more scope for a business coach to give practical advice or instruction instead of asking questions. Without the requisite knowledge and experience, the client might simply not reach the right conclusion on their own. However, because this approach differs from what we’ve come to understand as coaching, a better phrase for this kind of support is “mentoring”.
Mentoring is commonplace in business but can happen across many fields. A good mentor might still ask questions of their mentee, but they’ll be drawing on experience and be able to offer informed opinion and guidance too. Mentoring is simply a style of coaching, more akin to the traditional meaning of the word coaching.
Two common questions about coaching that relate to experience:
Using the modern meaning of the word “coaching”, the answer to these questions is yes. As long as they can ask the right questions, they should be able to guide clients to answers they are empowered to act upon. However, in practice, without real life experience and context, it can be argued that coaches in these positions can be out of their depth. If you’re considering using a coach, it’s important to set parameters; rules by which you choose the right coach for you.
In summary, the meaning of being a coach and providing coaching have changed dramatically in recent years. While business, career and life coaches have existed for decades, the coaching industry has evolved in its prominence, as has the general understanding of the word itself.
