A person who gives private instruction (as in singing or acting)To my amazement, my group of senior financial advisors came up with quite a different list from what I expected, i.e they suggested an ideal coach is someone uk coach holidays who:
Provides the coachee with a “comfort zone” where the person is free to say what he/she thinks and feelsCould I come up with a better list? Probably not. They then proceeded to develop a mission for a coach which they suggested should be:
“Asks questions to help the person find answers”By this stage as the facilitator of the session, I was feeling quite redundant, but tremendously elated about the views this group had on what can sometimes be seen as a mundane chore of coaching. Their enlightened view of a coach made it very easy for me to introduce them to the GROW model of coaching (first developed by John Whitmore).
The GROW model, embodies all the attributes that my financial advisors used to describe a coach. The aim of the model is to help the coachee arrive at some resolution to their issue, problem, knowledge or skill deficit, not give them advice or direction on what they should do. GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options, Wrap-up (or Will). It is a sequential model, ideally working from Goal through to Wrap-up. However in practise, it is often found that coach and coachee will vacillate between the first three stages as they work through the issue.
Stage 1: Goal. The coach and coachee identify and agree on clear and achievable goals for the discussion. This goal is not the longer-term objective that the coachee might have regarding his or her issue. Rather it is the definition of what can be achieved within the time set for this discussion session. For example, the coach might ask “What would you like to achieve from this session?” or “What would you like to walk away with from our discussion today?”