COACHING & MENTORING

There has always been a lot of confusion between and coaching and mentoring because so many practitioners have different definitions for these roles. In fact there are many times, people also mix the roles of coaching with counselling and mentoring with teaching.

I explain the roles as follows:

Coaching is a relationship between a coach and a coachee where the coach facilitates the coachee to improve their own performance and learning to achieve a specific personal or professional goal. Coaching focuses on the here and now rather than the past or the future. The coach does not require to be an expert or have any experience in achieving the coachee’s goal. The coach believes and helps the coachee develop and realise their full potential.

Counselling on the other hand is a tool that helps the client(s) come to address and accept past negative experiences and any resulting underlying negative thoughts and emotions that they are carrying about those experiences that is affecting their present and possibly their future. You do not use counselling for improving performance but in some instances counselling may still be needed alongside coaching as the negative emotion could be preventing the achievement of the coaching goal. Some examples of where counselling is used are overcoming things like bereavement, rape, bullying, phyiscally/mentally abusive up-bringing, martial breakdowns, work related stress etc.

Teaching/Training is simply when knowledge is being transferred from the teacher to help the student gain wisdom.

Mentoring is at most times focused on developing a specialised area or skillset of a person (rather than just a specific personal or professional goal) and can use any combination of all of the above techniques, but is not limited to any of the above techniques to achieve this goal. The mentor is an experienced guide and role model in the area to which they are mentoring.