So What... Is Coaching Becoming Corporate Therapy?

All right, well, let me sort of try and frame this, don't I? There is an entire coaching industry out there.

It's a relatively new industry.

And it was a way of, you know, helping people get the support that they need to work through you know, goals and it could, I don't know, everyone takes the mick out of life coaching and stuff like that, but it's like, you know, setting a personal goal could be a career goal and then your coach would help you go through it.

But I just want to, you know, before we go into coaching, I just want to say there was a world before coaching wasn't there.

And I don't know, I think I might like that world a little bit more, which is where you just had a good boss or where you had someone who, you know, you could talk to about, you know, you know, problems or your career and coaching to me sort of feels like a very much a, a sort of like a city problem, if you know what I mean, it's like solving a city problem.

Whereas before people just used to talk to each other about stuff.

Whereas now we actually actively have to buy a service to talk to people about this stuff.

So I, I think there's, so yeah, maybe i think there's something about what is coaching what are we actually talking about i think is is the the first the first place to go so in my head people conflate two things together which is coaching and mentoring um mentoring i think is when you're working basically this is where your boss helps you or somebody helps you because they've done something before and they're then helping you think through that you're doing something similar to them They then help you through it with some benefit of their experience.

So it's like your CFO, you're in a finance team, you've always said, yeah, yeah, I've experienced that problem before.

And then they help you sort of mentor you through dealing with it.

Different, as I understand it, and the definition of coaching is you don't need to be an expert in the thing that you're coaching about necessarily, because all you're doing is being the conscience of the person that you're talking to and asking them open, probing questions.

not topic related, not giving advice, but to get them to think about the thing themselves.

And I think that that difference is really important.