The Art of Coaching

If there's one thing that has become more apparent to me than ever lately, it's the importance of the art of coaching. As it relates to training, don't misunderstand me - the hard sciences are absolutely vital to achieving what it is you are striving to do. However, without the ability to communicate, teach, and elicit buy-in to those ideas, they are meaningless. The world is littered with very smart people who don't know how to get their point across. It is also littered with people with a paucity of knowledge as it relates to training, but the ability to motivate people to put forth their best efforts. These people will almost always get better results than the first group, no matter how little they actually know (there is a well-known training philosophy currently sweeping the nation built upon this very principle. But I digress...).

Having worked mostly in the private sector in my coaching career, buy-in is already largely selected for - most people who are going to pay for coaching are doing so because they want to be coached. Now, while my initial inclination to people who resist coaching is to simply show them the door, I think that a better approach is to try harder to reach them and give them what it is they're looking for while opening their minds.

As coaches, we (I?) can get very fixed on the fact that we know what we're doing, and almost assume that anyone coming to us should be able to see that; or, at the very least, after we demonstrate our knowledge, that will persuade them. However, no different than any other arena, there are those for whom evidence and data are not sufficient arguments. It requires a different approach to get people around to seeing things "your" way. You can't just point out the seemingly obvious and say "SEE!!" There is the art of connecting, of, to some extent, persuasion. It is pedagogy, it is psychology, it is the scientific method all rolled into one. It requires patience, it requires persistence, it requires attention, compassion, understanding, and so much more. It's no wonder so many (myself included) struggle to not only attain mastery, but even reach a base competence. 

But regardless, I must press on and try my best.