What professional coaching really is, and how to tell what you’re being offered.
By Jana Kurtova · 3 min read
Career coach, executive coach, wellbeing coach, sports coach, even dating coach. The same word, and often a completely different job.
A council might advertise a “career coach” role that turns out to be a careers advice service, offering help with your CV, job search tips and a few options to consider. That can be really useful. But it’s advice, not coaching as the profession understands it.
A sports coach, on the other hand, tells you what to do, and it’s the right model for building a physical skill.
What coaching borrowed from sport
One of the biggest influences on modern coaching came from sport. In the 1970s, tennis coach Timothy Gallwey found his players improved faster when, instead of giving instructions, he helped them notice what they were doing. His book, The Inner Game of Tennis, influenced John Whitmore, whose Coaching for Performance went on to shape modern executive coaching.
So career, executive and wellbeing coaching did take something from sport. Just not the instructing. In coaching aligned with the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the coach’s role is to help you explore what’s going on and find your own way forward. A good coach may offer an observation or a different perspective, but the decision stays yours.
I’ve spent more than twenty years in executive search, interim management and HR leadership, across three continents, watching career decisions from the hiring side. Then I trained as a coach with The Coaching Academy, an ICF-accredited programme. The difference between coaching and advice shapes everything about how I work. In practice, that means I’ll ask far more questions than I answer.
A largely unregulated industry
Coaching isn’t regulated in the way medicine and law are. You don’t need a licence to call yourself a coach, and what a coach offers might be coaching, mentoring, consulting, or a mix of all three.
Coach training is one way to tell the difference. ICF-accredited programmes teach a defined set of core competencies and the ICF Code of Ethics, covering confidentiality, conflicts of interest and professional responsibility. Training doesn’t guarantee a good coach. But it does tell you they’ve been trained to draw out your thinking.
So what are you paying for?
A client once came to me wanting help with her job search, specifically which roles to target and how to position her CV. As we talked, it became clear that wasn’t really the question. The question was why she’d started looking in the first place. So that’s where we began, with what mattered to her and whether the roles she’d been chasing reflected any of it. That wasn’t something I could tell her. She had to work it out.
When the answer isn’t obvious, coaching gives you something advice can’t:
Space to think out loud. A confidential conversation with someone who listens properly and has no stake in what you decide.
A deeper understanding of yourself. You get clearer on what you value, what drives you and what you’re good at, including strengths you may have stopped noticing. That gives you something solid to test every option against.
Assumptions, challenged. “I’m too senior to change direction.” “I can’t afford to leave.” A good coach helps you check whether beliefs like these still hold.
A plan you’ll act on. When you’ve reached a conclusion yourself, you’re more likely to follow it through. Coaching also builds the confidence to do it, especially during a career move, a new role or a period of change.
You’ve stepped into a bigger role and aren’t yet sure how to make it your own. Redundancy has forced a decision you’d been putting off. You’ve been planning your own business for years and still haven’t taken the first step. That’s where coaching earns its place.
It won’t give you a faster answer. It helps you reach one that’s yours.
What to ask before you hire a coach
What coach training have you completed, and is it accredited? By which organisation?
What kind of coaching do you practise?
Are you offering advice, or helping me think it through myself?
And ask yourself whether you could be completely honest with this person.
You don’t need to know everything about the coaching profession before choosing a coach. But it helps to know what you’re actually being offered, because “coach” only tells you the title, not the method underneath it.
If you’re facing a decision where the answer isn’t obvious, book a discovery call and we can talk it through.
Jana
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