Coaching: more than just a trend?
As a coach, I’ve caught myself finding it difficult to be taken seriously. I always tend to emphasize that I’m first and foremost a lawyer and an economist. So, I asked myself: why is that?
Well, mostly I believe, because coaching is relatively new and has become very trendy. So, the expression goes: well, everyone’s a coach nowadays. But in order to understand the trend, let’s analyze its history.
Nowadays, coaching is defined as a conversational process, between a coach and his client, with the purpose that the client can move to a desired situation and outcome. The latter must have an objective that he wants to achieve, something that worries him, something that anguishes him or something that blocks him and so he seeks the help of a coach to accompany him in this process, define new options, transform his state of mind, identify your limiting beliefs and move forward. Coaching is a process of growth, personal and professional development that must be started voluntarily.
The first historical precedent that we can find of coaching goes back to Greek philosophy with Socrates and his maieutic, with Plato and his idealism, his disciple Aristotle and his realist philosophy will also be of great importance.
However, the first source from which coaching draws, which refers to its origin and its essence, and which all currents or schools of coaching recognize, is the maieutic of Socrates. We can say that in Socrates an important base of what is known today as coaching arises. Although obviously what Socrates did in those times is very different from what coaching is today; he defined it as maieutic, the art of illuminating people's minds. The Greek word maieutic means "delivery", "to give birth" or "to give birth", which refers to the technique of assisting in childbirth, typical of midwives as was the mother of Socrates. Therefore, this technique or Socratic method consisted of "giving birth to the truth."
The origin of the word coach (car) comes from Hungary, specifically from the city of Kocs, where the word kocsi was formed. Said term kocsi passed to German as Kutsche, to Italian as cocchio and to Spanish ascoche. Therefore, the word coach derives from car, which had the function of transporting people from one place to another. Likewise, the word coaching is currently used to refer to the phenomenon of "transporting" people from the place where they are to the place they want to be, through a conversational process, accompaniment and assistance, showing paths and options discovered by the client himself, that offer possibilities that he did not consider before.
When we investigate and understand the history of coaching, we realize that there are many thinkers, philosophers, trainers, neurologists, psychologists and researchers who have contributed to the birth and development of coaching in which numerous theories and practices come together with one common objective: to favor the development of the human being, from a completely new and unprecedented approach and point of view. The accumulation of knowledge related to the human being has given rise to a new methodology with a different approaches.
Coaching has been gaining popularity over the past 30 years. It developed in the United States with the aim of increasing the individual (later came groups) performance of athletes. The first edition of "The Inner Game" by Timothy Gallwey lays down some of the foundations of the paradigms on which coaching is based today: "...by the word learning, I am not referring to an accumulation of information, but the discovery of something that changes your behavior...". Timothy Gallwey was an emblematic tennis coach of the 80s. Gallwey maintains that the main enemy for achieving goals in tennis is the mind of the player himself and that there is always an inner game in mind, no matter what is happening in the outside game. Depending on how much the player is aware of this game, he will be able to make the difference between success and failure.
Who’s ready to challenge their inner game?
