What I love about coaching, loved it from the first moment the penny dropped, was the turned on its head approach to working with people.

I had spent almost 25 years working with people with acute difficulties like addiction, suicidal depression and all kinds of mental health challenges. And I, like many many other people had been skewed to thinking almost exclusively about the problem. All the time. The approach was based of course on what we call the medical model. Get the data, diagnose the likely problem and offer a cure, treatment, solution. And certainly there is much to like about this when it it used in the right context. But approaching people with breaking lives in this way is very much a limiting and in some cases destructive approach. 

So when it was proposed to me that I simply stop looking for what is wrong and start looking for what is right, positive and useful my jaw dropped! It dropped even more when I was coached by people who coached me from that place. What did I like? What did I like doing? What made me laugh? How strong was I? These kinds of questions and the principles behind them truly changed my viewpoint about how people come at each other in so called helping professions.

Coaching though is much much more than a problem solving tool. Something that is constantly being forgotten in many coach training schools. Coaching is focussed around fulfillment of human life. What is possible. Not mending the broken but inspiring the broken to heal themselves and then step into a life of ongoing engagement with all that life has to offer. 

We are scripted and conditioned, some say evolved, to be able to quickly focus on a problem. This makes evolutionary sense. This ability to recognise and act quickly on a threat ensures a greater chance of survival. But we use this mechanism obsessively in our cultures so that we see the world only in terms of the threats, real or imagined, in it. That is how we sell newspapers after all!

But this approach is out of balance when all we can bring to bear on any relationship is a problem solving and solution swapping dialogue.

Coaching offers us a new foundation stone to stand on. One that starts with what is positively present that we can celebrate. Not so that we can ignore the difficulties but so that we can balance them and their energy. It is the glass half full approach if you like. It is a simple idea but one full of potential for people. And in the end hanging around with someone who is biased to seeing first only your difficulties, your broken parts, where you are not succeeding is frankly unappealing. I prefer the opposite!