Coaching 101

As individuals continually change and develop, coaching helps them address the major issues they will inevitably face in their personal and/or their work lives. While there is no standardized definition of “coaching,” one possible description could be: “a partnership where one partner (the coach) provides structure and guidance while seeking to elicit solutions from the other partner (the client), so that the client can formulate actions that will help her realize her goals.” This description assumes that the direction of coaching is completely determined by the nature and needs of the client, and that coaching helps persons to find their own solutions, rather than prescribing a solution from the coach’s point of view. Based on what the coach hears and observes, s/he can design an approach tailored to each individual client’s needs. The coach’s role is to assist in the enhancement of skills, resources and creativity that the client already possesses.

The wide application of the practice of coaching has produced a variety of coaching types, descriptions and terms, but each describes fairly well the individual coaching purpose. There is personal life coaching, executive coaching, health and wellness coaching, and career coaching, just to name a few. Each coaching approach has features that may be able to help you in some way to improve, develop, achieve aims, and/or to manage your life change and personal challenges. 

Personal life coach: helps you to realize success, manage changes, and address challenges within your personal life. The personal or life coach aims to draw out your potential, allowing for some personal, individual transition. The focus is on your self-fulfillment and your life decisions.

Executive coach: a professional relationship between a coach and client with the goal of enhancing the client’s management performance and development. There is a strong emphasis on leadership, strategy, relationships and politics within an organization. Depending on the type of coaching services desired, executive coaches can also guide you in developing your leadership brand. You’ll learn how to project your voice and how to maintain the right posture and presence when speaking. You’ll also be coached on areas from a stylish haircut to fashionable attire to making sure you have read the latest industry news, all of which help to convey whether or not you will be perceived as being a good fit for any occupational role.

Health and wellness coach: the focus here is on your physical fitness and on wider well-being issues such as diet, exercise, and lifestyle. Many clients will choose to work on specific nutrition and exercise goals, since being a good leader can definitely take a toll on your health.

Career coach: the major goal is to support clients in making informed decisions about their career development and trajectory, as well as to offer them various tools to use—résumés, cover letters, and the appropriate use of social media—to help meet those goals. Its core virtue is partnering with people to help them assess their own professional situations with a greater degree of honesty, curiosity, empathy and compassion. The successful career coaching relationship results in the client gaining career confidence, insight, encouragement and inspiration. 

Why is a Career Coach Quickly Becoming a Key Strategy for Success? 

Let’s take a closer look at career coaching. Career coaching can be helpful at every point of a nurse leader’s professional path. Working with a good career coach in the early years of one’s career can put individuals on more solid footing—not just with a well-crafted resumé and strategies to broaden one’s network, but also by laying the foundation for those who want to develop an actionable leadership-career management plan. For example, consulting with a career coach can be extremely valuable when trying to determine the best type of graduate degree program to complete in order to help further one’s career goals. We all know how confusing and daunting it can be for a nurse to decipher and understand the myriad of features, benefits and options available in graduate school. Nurses often express frustration with how little formal guidance they ever received on this important (and costly) investment in their career. 

Who Benefits the Most from Career Coaching? 

Someone who is open to new ideas, is willing to step out of his or her comfort zone, is motivated to embark on the challenge of thinking differently about job search and career change process and is willing to take risks. Thinking differently about one’s career is an active process, requiring introspection, honesty, networking and challenging the status quo. The ability for a trusting relationship to be built between a coach and client is essential because the career transition journey can be ego bruising, enlightening and exciting, and all in the same day. Such a trusting relationship enables the coach to be a true partner in the process to challenge one’s thinking and assumptions, to support the client when things aren’t going as planned and to celebrate successes. Nurses should reach out to their career coach for as much guidance as possible, as well as seek help from everyone else in their personal or professional networks—in order to succeed. Some can end up inadvertently sabotaging their own success by not heeding the good advice they have received. 

Career coaching can help a nurse to be better “empowered by what you bring to the table,” build your confidence, as well as provide tools that can help convey an accurate description of why you will be a “good fit” when preparing for one of the new roles in the transforming industry we call health care.