The Handbook of Coaching

What Professional Coaches Do

The conventional wisdom used to be that if you worked steadily and strived to do your best, gradually everything in your life would improve. Your journey would lead to a happy, secure destination. By adhering to cultural norms, you would have a sense of belonging.

Most adults believe learning is for kids. Once out of school, they think, life is less about learning and more about working. But the lives of modern professionals resemble chapters more than long books. Adult development runs in cycles: as you finish one, you begin the next. In today’s business world, you are likely to have a number of jobs or even switch career paths. To adjust to such ongoing change, you need to know how to renew yourself. Continuous learning a crucial part of that process, but you are responsible for devising your own curriculum. That individual, personal challenge is also a challenge for teams and organizations.

That is where coaches come in. A coach is a teacher, but coach’s relationship with the client - whether the client is an individual, a team or a company - goes deeper than that. A coach’s function is to relate particular successes to a whole...