The 5 Benefits of Coaching
Coaching is a powerful tool that helps people maximize their potential and live their lives to the fullest. More specifically, in my practice as a coach and as a coaching client myself, I have witnessed these 5 main benefits of coaching interactions:
1. Effectively Navigate Life and Career Changes
Change is the nature of life. Change requires adaptability and the ability to clearly evaluate what serves us and what needs to go. Coaching, especially non-directive methods, allows to get a bird view on the present situation, assess all aspects affected by changes, and find ways to effectively embrace them. This means shifting from a resistance mindset to an adaptable mindset and using opportunities for our own benefits. This change of perspective helps develop resilience and considerably reduces stress in front of an unknown situation. Moreover, such openness to changes may bring unexpected benefits, like starting a new "dream" career or relocating to a “dream” place.
2. Find More Joy, Motivation, and Meaning in Life
Our life is full of commitments: commitments to ourselves, our loved ones, our bosses, or our community. Commitments are an important way to support our personal growth and connections with the world around us. Yet, commitments may be draining on our motivation and positive emotions if we do not align them with our fundamental values, aspirations, and with what brings us joy. Living an excessively-committed life may result in a feeling of emptiness, lack of joy, and motivation. Coaching helps you access your values and motives, and, ultimately, find ways to ‘map’ them into your daily actions. The result is a successful and meaningful life that you want to live, each day.
3. Improve Quality of Relationships
Any effective relationship, personal or professional, requires three fundamental skills: to acknowledge own needs, articulate them, and listen to the needs of others. A coaching session is a playground to train all of them. First, you are constantly practicing being aware of your thoughts, feelings, hesitations, etc. You also practice articulating them clearly. And throughout the session, you are training yourself to be fine tuned to your coach. Furthermore, coaching topics often include developing specific skills, like being able to express affection, set boundaries, etc. All of this ultimately helps you fundamentally improve the quality of relationships with family, friends, or co-workers.
4. Speed up Your Career Growth and Development
To ensure that your career growth meets your deep-down values and aspirations, it is important to periodically step out of a daily routine and take a bird-view on your career path. This high-level perspective helps align career development goals with daily actions and helps see and use opportunities smarter and more effectively. Furthermore, working with a coach on a specific career goal allows one to unleash unused potential and succeed faster.
5. Define and Effectively Reach Objectives
Sometimes I hear from people: “If I knew what I wanted, I would have already done it.” While working with objectives, both need to be taken into consideration: goal setting and goal-reaching. Sometimes we have this vague desire for something or have a feeling that something is off but we are not sure what exactly. In this case, coaching helps better see the unmet needs and formulate them into a clear and tangible objective. Once we know where we are heading, coaching helps develop an action plan that is practical, flexible, and engaging for each specific client.
What's Next?
These 5 key points summarize fundamental transformations experienced by clients as a result of coaching interactions. Now, that you are aware of the main coaching benefits, let's look into what makes coaching such an effective technique? If you haven't checked the article What is Coaching? that goes into the details of the directive and non-directive approaches, I strongly encourage you to do so.