Coaching Terms
Remember, coaching is only coaching if it’s asked for.
Accountability: A commitment your coach will hold you accountable for. Ultimately, you are responsible for your own success. The coach can help in many ways, including holding you accountable, if that is helpful to you.
Acknowledge: A simple recognition of progress.
Challenge: A request (see below) on steroids. At times your coach will challenge you to do something. This is different than a request in that the challenge is mostly given to have you “think out of the box.”
Deepening the Learning: The other primary objective of coaching. This is where coaching becomes truly rich and is about you learning more about yourself and how you work best or limit yourself.
Designed Alliance: The relationship that is consciously created between the coach and the client. It can be redesigned at any time; just ask.
Forward the Action: One of the primary objectives of coaching. Forwarding the action is getting you into action around your goals or a change you want to make in your life.
Holding the Focus: Part of a coach’s role is to keep the conversations on topic so the coach may bring you back to the main topic if the conversation begins to get side tracked.
Intrude: Your coach may sometimes interrupt a story you’re telling. Your coach is not interested in the details of what happened. Your coach is interested in your understanding of what’s important about the details and may ask questions like: “what’s the bottom line?” or “what’s important about that?” This will have you look at what’s important about the story, speak the bottom line essence of it, and in doing so move out of a focus on circumstances and into learning.
Inquiry: A broad, thought-provoking question to spend some time with between coaching sessions.
Intuition: A coach may use their intuition to see if there is more to the story below the surface. Sometimes the intuition will be helpful and sometimes it may not.
Meta-view: It can be helpful to pause, take a step back and view a situation from a more global view (some call it the 10,000-foot perspective).
Powerful Questions: Questions are the primary tool that coaches have to help you think something through.
Reframing: The ability to see a situation or circumstance from a different perspective (frame) can help you see things in a whole new ways.
Request: A request requires one of three responses from you – yes, no, or a counter offer. This empowers you to accept complete responsibility for actions to be taken.
Saboteur: A term coaches use to describe the “inner critic” or voice of self-doubt.