How can I stop giving advice to my coaching clients?
It has been suggested that coaching is fundamentally about unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance (Whitmore, 1995); it is about helping them to learn, rather than teaching them. Yet one of the biggest struggles for a coach is to resist the temptation to give advice. How do we manage this boundary between supporting people to learn and teaching them from our experience?
The boundary between support and advice
Many coaches come to coaching with a desire to help others. We feel we want to ‘give back’; we feel we have something to offer. Perhaps we have had a successful career and we want our legacy to be supporting the next generation to succeed. Or maybe, in life we have navigated some rough seas and we want to share what we have learnt to prevent others facing those same storms. Left unexamined, this drive to ‘help others’, well-meaning as it may be, can create pitfalls for us as coaches. These can retard our development to become a transformational force in someone else’s life. Elizabeth Gilbert (2016) urges those who write with the motivation of ‘helping someone’ to save themselves the bother – most people don’t want that. This seems sage advice for coaches, not just budding writers.
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References
Austen, J (1992) Mansfield Park. London: Wordsworth Editions. (Originally published 1814)
Gilbert, E (2016) Big Magic, Creative Living Beyond Fear. London: Bloomsbury
Grant, A (2019) Third Generation Workplace Coaching & Evidence-Based Coaching, British Psychological Society Masterclass, London, 4 August 2019
Harris, T A (1995) I’m OK You’re OK. London: Arrow Books. (Originally published 1967)
Heron, J (1989) Six Intervention Categories. Guildford: University of Surrey Keegan, R (2014) Presentation to BT Global Leaders, BT Headquarters, London
Korotov, K, Florent-Treacy, E, Kets De Vries, M F R & Bernhardt, A (2012) Tricky Coaching, Difficult Cases in Leadership Coaching. London: Palgrave McMillan
Marson, N (2018) Leading by Coaching, How to Deliver Impactful Change One Conversation at a Time. London: Palgrave McMillan
Whitmore, J (1995) Coaching for Performance: GROWing human potential and purpose. London: Nicholas Brealey
