Understanding Coaching and Mentoring - and the difference is?!

Coaching creates improved performance, increased personal impact and greater self-confidence.

Although directed at success, coaching also develops learning in mental skills and so transforms the individual from then on.

Coaching develops independence - the coach should become unnecessary. Classical mentoring, in contrast, creates dependency. Our mentoring schemes are designed to improve on that classical experience!

Mentoring provides quick solutions and our model offers the best chance of the mentee developing their own motivated solutions. Mentoring develops solutions quickly but has less impact than coaching in the learning of new, effective mental skills (please link to the 'Coach All' logo on the www.angusmcleod.com website)

In short-term contracts we provide an integrated mix of coaching & mentoring to provide win-win for effective change.

QUESTIONS IN COACHING

Questioning is one of the three Principal Instruments of Coaching (these include challenge and silence as well). Questions are used in coaching to:

Provide more information for both coach and coachee
Assist the coachee to explore available realities

Questioning can be used in a way that the coachee explores their issue and reaches motivated targets without the coach having to understand anything about the situation. For example, the people involved and the time or place to which the issue relates. This type of questioning is sometimes called 'context-free' questioning/coaching (see later). Questioning supports coaching in many ways. Here are just some examples:

Developing understanding of the issue and its context
Exploring historical situations with positive outcomes
Defining what is in the control and what is out of control of the coachee
Redefining the target(s) and the time-scales to success
Encouraging new perceptions
Helping the coachee to fully associate (experience) their situation/state
Helping the coachee to disassociate from their situation and be more objective
Re-evaluating value-judgments
Revisiting limiting beliefs
Recognition of patterns
Evaluating behaviors in the context of the coachee's identity and values
Defining the level of certainty the coachee has about their success (motivation)

Questions can help define the boundaries of the coachee's world-view. Questions can also assist them to re-evaluate those boundaries and extend what is possible. Remember coaches, you cannot coach all the people all of the time. Sometimes you may need to say, 'so, may I offer you some mentoring ideas?'