

Defining Performance Coaching
How many flavours of coaching have you heard of? We have life coaching, business coaching, executive coaching, career coaching, personal coaching, corporate coaching, sports coaching, and coaching psychology, to name just a few. They all have the positive purpose of skilfully enabling someone to change and achieve valued goals but it seems almost everyone who coaches invents a new title for himself. So what are the distinguishing characteristics of Performance Coaching? Sir John Whitmore, in his book Performance Coaching, states that: ‘Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.’ Performance Coaching means: _ Accessing potential _ Facilitating the individual to make the changes required _ Maximising performance _ Helping people acquire skills and develop _ Using specific communication techniques
Introducing Performance Coaching
The Performance Coach works with people, often colleagues, using coaching methods to enhance their existing behaviours and develop new ones central to personal and professional success and, in business situations, the success of the organisation. Performance relates to effectiveness in terms of leadership, decision-making, relationships, creativity, stress, time management, meetings, and dealing with day-to-day tasks and aims to significantly increase your colleague’s effectiveness. Performance coaching uses many models and theories from business and psychology as well as from general management approaches. Put simply, Performance Coaching is all about making an individual more effective and efficient. Coaching can be useful in the following situations: _ Something going right – a success is a good opportunity to build confidence and guarantee repeated success _ Something going wrong – mistakes and failures create opportunities for development _ Planned delegation _ A new job, or a new role within an existing job _ Talent management _ Special projects _ Attending meetings Information about all these scenarios is included in this book.
Seeing how it all started
Sports coaching usually gets the credit for having started the whole coaching business. If you suffered through school PE lessons, however, you may wonder if sports coaching ever made it further than the elite sportsmen and women of Olympian levels. Tim Galwey, writer of the Inner Game book series, applied cognitive psychology techniques to the sports field, working on the thought processes of players in order to increase their skill at the sport of their choice. Athletes who trained this way took their skills out into a variety of other applications where they thought coaching may transform performance, and Performance Coaching was born.
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