What is coaching and how does it promote your professional and personal growth

Do you know what coaching is and how it can support you in your professional and personal development? Is it difficult for you to take the first step towards achieving the goal you have in mind clearly and concretely?

There are times in your life when you feel like you want to make a change and look for resources within yourself, even though you often don't know how to use them. The coach is the person who can help you along this path.

Changing your attitude towards life is the first step you must take to focus on your goal and achieve the change you want. This short article will make you learn more about coaching, understand how it can help you and deepen the benefits you can obtain with it.

• Related article: "The 6 types of Coaching: the different coaches and their functions"

What is coaching?

The English word coach means both coach and counselor.; the first stimulates you to give the best of yourself, using all your energy and qualities, the second accelerates the journey from a starting point to a finishing point.

Coaching is a combination of both: on the one hand, the coach supports and stimulates you, and on the other, provides you with the tools to accelerate that "journey" that starts from the perceived present and reaches the desired future.

A facilitating relationship is established between the coach and the patient, but it is up to the patient to take each step, consciously, along their journey of change. Coaching is a collaborative relationship with the aim of helping you obtain optimal results both in the work and personal sphere.

• You may be interested in: "Psychology of work and organizations: a profession with a future"

Personal and business coaching: the essential differences

You may have noticed that there is always another word next to the word coaching: personal, business, corporate, executive... This is just one way identify the topics and contexts in which coaching is carried out.

When talking about personal coaching, reference is made to its use when dealing with issues related to personal life: family relationships, carrying out personal projects, health ...

On the other hand, when the subject is work, if the coaching is carried out in a company, we speak of business or executive coaching; If it is carried out outside the company, we speak of career oaching (when the objective is to find, change or improve the job).

Finally, In the company, if the figures involved are the so-called C levels (Entrepreneurs, CEOs, CFOs and COOs), we are talking about executive coaching. For the rest of the figures we talk about the company.

Examples of personal coaching goals They are:

• Realize a dream that is in the drawer because "the right moment never comes".
• Improve relationships with others.
• Have a support, a comparison, during the realization of the project itself.
• Improve time and / or stress management.
• Face changes in your family life with more confidence.
• Work on your approach to problem solving.
• Better manage conflicts.
• Improve personal endurance.

Business / corporate coaching, for example, it is useful for:

• Develop personal leadership.
• Learn to motivate employees.
• Work on your own approach to problem solving.
• Develop your own skills.
• Facilitate the assumption of new responsibilities.
• Face a role / job change with greater confidence.
• Improve interpersonal relationships.
• Facilitate on-the-job transfer of concepts learned during a training course.
• Improve time and / or stress management.

The benefits of coaching

At this point, after explaining what coaching is and its objectives, let's talk about the benefits you will experience when you decide to go the coaching route.

The true benefits of coaching are:

• Have a partner that you can work with to achieve your goal, who supports, sustains, encourages you.
• Save time. It will help you not to fall into distractions, digressions, once you start the path you are sure of "reaching the goal".
• Limit the possibility of making mistakes because you will have done a thorough analysis before implementing the action plan.
• Reach the goals you set for yourself.

In addition, the training path favors:

• Greater awareness of your own behavior and the dynamics of your relationships.
• The use of personal talents and strengths in different areas of life.
• The regulation of your emotions and moods.
• Stress reduction
• Identification of own resources and development of recovery capacity.
• The departure from fixed schemas and limiting mentalities.
• The process of analysis and creative problem solving.
• The ability to decide and manage changes and projects.
• The rediscovery of the center and the balance of oneself.
• The alignment between values, decisions and behaviors.
• Autonomy, self-confidence and self-esteem.

In short, with coaching you can improve your performance, your relationships and your quality of life.