What is coaching and what is it not?

Coaching is a series of conversations that you can have with someone who's going to listen, ask questions and help you to explore your thinking and ideas.

Quite often people will use the word 'coaching' when they're actually they’re referring to mentoring. So, mentoring is very different because in a mentoring relationship, you're expecting to get some advice and guidance from somebody that knows more about a topic in a situation.

A coach will not have necessarily the skills and experience that you have from your role. They won't have that kind of knowledge and they certainly won't be giving you advice.

Coaching uses a range of frameworks and tools to enable the conversation, and the coach will use open-ended questions to allow the individual to do a lot of the thinking and the talking within the conversation, to enable them to come up with a set of actions that will help them to achieve the goals that they've brought to coaching.

How can coaching help progress my career?

Coaching can help you progress your career in so many different ways. It might be the fact it gives you more confidence, but you become more self-aware about the successes that you've had in the past, or you become more confident about your ability to handle a whole range of different situations.

Coaching can help you progress your career by just really helping you to understand where you are now, where you might like to be, how to build on the strengths that you have, and maybe working on some of the challenges or things that you're less strong at.

Coaching can help you progress your career by helping you to set the goals that you want to go for. We can help you to identify the strengths that you already have and the areas of improvement to help you get to where you want to go to.

One of the things I love about coaching is it gives you time to stop and to think and to reflect so that you can consider what your career goals and aspirations are and discuss those with somebody.

How can coaching help build my confidence?

So, undertaking coaching at Warwick has really helped me gain confidence, help me develop my leadership style.

Coaching can help build confidence by really helping somebody to understand not just what they need to work on, but really celebrating the things that they are good at and recognising them as well, and hopefully giving them a bit of assurance that no problem is really insurmountable.

Coaching develops a bit of a safe space, I think, for you to be able to talk confidentially to people about the problems that you're having.

Coaching gives you the chance to focus on yourself, to think about your strengths, your weaknesses, your successes and the challenges that you've overcome. And it really helps you to build your self-esteem.

When is a good time to look into coaching?

You can come to coaching at any point, and we'd like to think that coaching could be helpful all the time. So it doesn't necessarily have to be for a particular reason. But what I would say is we tend to find the most success for people who have a goal that they really want to achieve, and they can be common goals that you might hear: getting a new job, being more noticed at work, finding a better work-life balance.

I'd say that there are lots of different times when coaching could be really beneficial. Might be when you're going through a period of change, might be when you're starting something new or facing a particular challenge that you'd really benefit from just talking through with somebody to explore your ideas and your thinking.

For me, the most important thing is that everybody knows that coaching is available within the University. It's there for everybody when they need it.

Why is supervision important to the internal coaching scheme?

Supervision is a really important part of coaching, predominantly because it gives coaches an opportunity to improve on their practice by working with somebody else who’s qualified.

All coaches receive coaching supervision that ensures that the coachee gets the best possible quality coaching that they can.

So that we're continually learning, so that we can then pass that on to our coachees.

It means that I can be sure that I'm following the right professional standards and I'm doing things in a quality way which really helps the people that I'm coaching.

So it's supporting the ongoing professional development of our coaches.It's creating a safe space for the coaches. But the overall aim of making sure that we are creating a high quality, trusted service for anybody who engages with the internal coaching scheme. It's the kitemark of standards.

How can I prepare for my first coaching session?

I think it's a really important thing with coaching to remember. It's not something that is done to you and it will require you as a coachee to put in the work.

So the most important thing that you need to have when you're coming into a conversation is actually what am I wanting to get out of this conversation? What is my goal? And that goal can be just having clarity.

And most of all, I guess that if once you come to the coaching room, you need to have an open mind and be prepared to be open and transparent as much as you can be and to challenge your own thoughts and ideas, really.

So I suppose what we're looking for people is to have done that thinking in advance, to really value that coaching relationship, really value the time they're going to get from a coach to make that first session and every session that follows as impactful as possible.