Coaching & Mentoring
What are Coaching & Mentoring?
What is Coaching?
Columbia University’s Coaching Certification Programme (3CP) and the International Coach Federation (ICF) define coaching as: “Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process to maximize their potential.”
Coaches’ are trained to listen, observe and customize their approach to individual needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has. They ask powerful questions to elicit solutions and strategies from the client that take into account their own best interests. Coaching is driven by the science of human behaviour and learning, the inclusion of data from multiple perspectives, and is built on a solid foundation of mutual trust and respect. Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.
Dr CC Tan builds on the best practices of coaching to create his unique and transformative integrative coaching approach, combining an understanding of the whole person and all of life’s experiences with an evidence-based and scientific coaching framework that together make cognitive and emotional connections with values, thinking styles, motivations, responses and performance, to drive strategies for future success in every endeavor.
What is Executive and Organisational Coaching?
Columbia University’s Coaching Certification Programme (3CP) and the Graduate School Alliance for Education in Coaching (GSAEC) define Executive & Organizational Coaching as: “A development process that builds a leader’s capabilities to achieve professional and organizational goals.”
The focus is on leaders who are in a position to make a significant contribution to the mission and purpose of their organization. This form of coaching is conducted through one-on-one and group interactions; is driven by evidence, the inclusion of data from multiple perspectives, and is built on a solid foundation of mutual trust and respect. The coach, the clients, and their organizations work in partnership to help achieve the agreed upon goals of the coaching engagement.
What is Health Coaching?
In a similar way as how sports coaches can help individuals develop athletic or sports excellence, a health and wellness coach can help people excel in living a fit and healthy life. This may be especially important if a person has health risk factors or established chronic medical conditions. The coaching process is similar to life, executive and organisational coaching described above, but the focus is on any of a broad array of health issues, such as weight management, stress reduction, dealing with chronic conditions, improving diet and exercise, adjustments to life-altering health events and maintaining general fitness and wellness. The specific issues that are worked through depend on the individual client’s specific needs.
A Health Coach is a partner in an individual’s behaviour change process. This process involves supporting clients as they set goals, unearth values & strengths, and access intrinsic motivations and resources to encourage the development of sustainable behaviours and attitudes that support good health and wellness.
Often health issues impact wider areas of a person’s life such as careers, personal and professional effectiveness and relationships, so health coaching can be an essential component of personal, executive and organisational coaching.
What is Mentoring?
Traditionally, Mentoring has been defined as a professional relationship in which an experienced person (the mentor) assists another in developing specific skills and knowledge that will enhance professional and personal growth. Mentoring has traditionally been characterised by the domain expertise and knowledge of the mentor who brings to bear organisational and personal experience, to offer relevant career advice to a junior in his own or similar line of activity. Mentoring can be open-ended and sporadic. Thus a senior doctor would mentor a junior doctor, or a senior banker a junior banker, etc.
But the concept of Mentoring has been expanded to become an adjunct to Coaching in a powerful chimeric concept whereby all the best evidence-based concepts and methods of modern Coaching are enhanced by aspects of mentoring, not in a domain-specific sense, but bringing to bear the Coach-Mentor’s own accumulated work and life experiences and wisdom to enhance the coaching process. Coach-Mentors must be well trained and have demonstrable qualities of personal leadership, a wide variety of successful work and life experiences and sound wisdom and common sense for every circumstance, to be able to challenge and inspire clients with powerful options and scenarios relevant to their own growth and renewal.
Why Do High Performing, Intelligent People Need Coaching?
Even high-performing, intelligent, and competent individuals can benefit from executive coaching for several reasons:
1. Self-awareness and personal growth: Executive coaching helps individuals gain a deeper understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots. It allows them to reflect on their behaviors, beliefs, and values, and identify areas for personal growth and development. Coaching can help individuals become more self-aware, which is a key trait of effective leaders. People are often “too close to themselves” to be able to acquire deep insight into themselves without help.
2. Leadership development: Executive coaching focuses on developing leadership skills and competencies. It helps individuals enhance their ability to lead and inspire others, make strategic decisions, manage conflicts, and navigate complex organizational dynamics. Coaching can provide valuable insights, tools, and techniques to improve leadership effectiveness.
3. Overcoming challenges and obstacles: Even high-performing individuals face challenges and obstacles in their professional lives. Executive coaching provides a safe and confidential space to discuss these challenges and work through them. Coaches can offer guidance, support, and practical strategies to overcome obstacles and achieve desired outcomes.
4. Transitioning to new roles or responsibilities: Executives often face transitions, such as moving into a new leadership role, taking on additional responsibilities, or transitioning to a new organization. Executive coaching can help individuals navigate these transitions successfully by providing guidance, support, and tools to adapt to new environments, build relationships, and manage expectations.
5. Work-life balance and well-being: Executive coaching recognizes the importance of work-life balance and personal well-being. Coaches can help individuals manage stress, set boundaries, and prioritize their well-being. They can also provide strategies for maintaining a healthy work-life balance and preventing burnout.
6. Accountability and goal setting: Executive coaching provides a structured framework for setting goals, tracking progress, and holding individuals accountable. Coaches can help individuals clarify their goals, break them down into actionable steps, and provide ongoing support and accountability to ensure progress is made.
7. Perspective and feedback: Executive coaching offers a fresh perspective and unbiased feedback. Coaches can provide objective observations, challenge assumptions, and offer alternative viewpoints. This can help individuals gain new insights, challenge their thinking, and make more informed decisions.
Overall, executive coaching is not a sign of weakness or incompetence. It is a proactive approach to personal and professional development, helping high-performing individuals reach their full potential, overcome challenges, and become even more effective leaders.
Common Objections to Embarking on Coaching & Why You will benefit even if you say:
I am an intelligent, high-functioning, competent person who doesn’t need coaching:
Self-awareness is essential for personal growth, and is a key trait of effective leaders; Coaching enhances your ability to lead and inspire, make strategic decisions and navigate complex dynamics; High performing individuals also face challenges and obstacles where Coaching can offer guidance, support and practical strategies.
I don’t have time for coaching:
Doing too much for too little, leaving no time to invest in your own development sounds like an issue ripe for coaching on its own! Coaching is your best investment of time when you have aspirations to fulfil or challenges to overcome, and you are not making the progress you want. Think of the savings in time and the rewards that come, when Coaching helps you achieve your ambitions and solve your problems better and more quickly.
I don’t want to spend the money on coaching:
Money, you can recover, whereas time, you never get back. Your investment is for a whole new way of thinking and ability to respond, leading to breakthroughs, innovative options, new success strategies and new life. This is money well spent and the rewards from your future success will more than compensate.
I have had bad experiences with coaching previously:
I understand. The big problem that I solve in Coaching is that most conventional generic and formulaic coaching methods focus on process and performance, assuming wrongly that clients are mostly uniform in their perceptions, values, motivations and responses. Hence, conventional coaching often leads to misdirected strategies, delayed success, frustration, time wastage and financial loss. I offer a radically advanced paradigm of coaching that develops insight into cognitive and emotional connections with world-views, responses and thinking, modifies perspectives and enables novel responses that lead to success. This is different.
Coaching versus Therapy
Coaching is not and cannot replace Therapy. While the majority of Coaching clients are mentally “healthy”, clients’ mental states exist on a wide spectrum with sometimes unclear thresholds beyond which Therapy from mental health professionals becomes necessary. In general, mental health issues span the range from appropriate and understandable responses to life and work situations (which are well within the realm of Coaching to help), through problems such intellectual, emotional, psychological, social and behavioural maladjustment (in the realm of Clinical Psychology), to frankly psychiatric illnesses such as Psychosis, e.g. Schizophrenia or Bi-polar Disorder (requiring medical Psychiatry).
Coaching does not and should not aim to cure significant mental health problems. While it is hoped that most candidates for coaching are mentally robust, research such as by the University of Sydney has shown that between 25% and 50% of those seeking coaching have clinically significant levels of anxiety, stress or depression. Coaching those who have unrecognised mental health issues can be counterproductive or even deleterious to these clients. Clients may not even be aware of the severity of their issues and have not sought therapy or treatment.
Coaches need to be able to identify signals or signs in clients that may indicate a need to have the client take a break from coaching and refer the client to a mental health professional for significant mental health issues to be dealt with before coaching can continue. It is equally important that potential coaching clients try to discern whether they may need help from mental health professionals more than from coaches.
The top ten indicators (non-exhaustive) for coaches to consider referring a client to a mental health professional, or for potential clients to realize that they may need mental health therapy, are:
- Feelings of sadness, hopelessness, helplessness and decreasing ability to experience pleasure
- Intrusive, often negative thoughts preventing concentration or focus
- Insomnia, persistent tiredness, exhaustion or lethargy
- Change in appetite, decrease or increase in appetite
- Feelings of guilt for hurting others or because others have suffered or died
- Feelings of despair, hopelessness or futility
- Being hyper-alert or excessively tired, or both
- Increased irritability or outbursts of anger or belligerence
- Impulsive and/or risk taking behaviour
- Thoughts of death and/or suicide (this may constitute an emergency)
(Adapted from Lynn F, Meinke, Life Coach)
Metanalytic Coaching Roadmap
The client journey takes the form of a sequence of engagements that, at a pace comfortable to the clients, go deeper into the clients’ lives and experiences to achieve deep insight into themselves, before examining how their cognitive and emotional frameworks have shaped their current worldview and responses to people and situations. Then, embarking on an adventure of making conscious choices to reorganise and internalise new thinking and behaviour, clients are enabled to face their issues with novel responses, innovative options, new success strategies and new life.
Entry and Contracting, Situational Analysis
Understanding why the clients have come to coaching, the key issues they are facing, the most pressing questions and the deepest concerns they have. They describe the situations in which they find themselves and where their dilemmas lie.
01
Developmental Frames
Embarking on a journey of self-discovery through the use of the INSPIRE Self- Appraisal Protocol, clients achieve deep insight into their deepest motivations and values and the cognitive and emotional connections they have formed. The NBI Thinking Preferences Assessment gives further insight into the different ways clients like to think.
02
Developing New Regenerative Frameworks
With realisation comes the option to reorganise habitual thinking patterns and reflexive responses shaped by affinities, aversions and identity needs, to conscientiously break free to forge new thinking, innovative options, new success strategies appropriate to values driven purposes.
03
Options and Strategy Development
Internalising and strengthening new thinking processes, coaching proceeds to address the key issues, questions, dilemmas and decisions that clients are facing.
04
Appraisal Learning, accountability
Putting plans into action, reviewing outcomes, obtaining feedback, making honest appraisals to facilitate continued learning, and being accountable for continuing forward movement and results.
05
"Dr Tan made me realise how impactful coaching can be. He not only guided me in specific areas, gave me insights but made me feel comfortable to explore my reflections freely without judgment. I am truly grateful for his support, encouragement and guidance.”