As many of you know, Krishnan and I are certified executive/life coaches. Coaching is a calling in our life because both of us love to transform people’s lives and have spent all our corporate years helping people unleash their potential. Yesterday, we were participating in the 11th session of our level 3 coaching training and one of our fellow coaches asked a question about “executive” coaching and “life” coaching, the differences and the craze for executive coaching while being disinterested in life coaching.
While Peter Reding our Master Coach explained it beautifully, I commented saying all executives are living beings …. and thats really how I think. The same person that goes to office comes home and vice versa. If your family life sucks, you aren’t going to be a great manager or even a good manager. Likewise if your manager sucks, then you will take out all the pent up anger and frustration on your family. So executive coaching can’t be different from life coaching.
I know there are a dozen or more prefixes to coaching, and yet another thin slice will come by tomorrow, but you can’t fix anything for a person till the person takes the responsibility to fix it for him/herself. An executive’s results at work are a result of his attitude, skill and capability. A hugely skilled executive will deliver results once, twice, five times but without the right attitude, he won’t succeed everytime and as we have seen, great capable leaders without the right attitude finishing off great organisations.
Here’s a simple example of the power of coaching. Krishnan and I were speaking to a friend and her daughter …. infact Krishnan was coaching her daughter to deal with her father who was a control freak. Krishnan told her not to make her father the focus of her life and that she has tremendous talents that will take her places. My coaching input was to look at where she wanted to go rather than where she was at that point in time….. while the daughter benefitted tremendously, a collateral benefit was her mother, my friend who started living a little more freely !! Her husband was a control freak with her too.
Coaching is often a beautiful process of reminding the coachee about his/her amazing gifts and what her unique purpose is. Its humbling to see someone try out his wings for the first time.
Feeling blessed.