How personal does professional coaching get?

Intentional change requires getting personal for the change to be sustainable. The ability to integrate professional and personal growth is a major benefit of working with an external professional coach.

While the coaching focus is professional, with an external coach it is safer for a client to disclose personal information in confidence. This is one of the reasons why managerial coaching often doesn’t work. In professional settings, there are limits to how personal an employee can be with a manager, mentor or internal coach.

These boundaries exist for good reason. It is dangerous for managers or colleagues to delve into personal issues they are not trained for. Deeply personal issues revealed in a work setting often rebound with shame or embarrassment later on, but there is no one trained to identify what is happening and who knows how to help.

Professional coaching almost always starts with a business or professional challenge. But sustainable solutions require deep work in the personal realm. The goal is to explore and reshape unconscious patterns set earlier in life so that intentional change can be made more effectively. While this is somewhat similar to therapy approaches, a professional coach has more permission to suggest and direct than is typical in therapy. With people who are fundamentally well, this can create faster growth and progress towards goals.

For example, learning how to be assertive but not aggressive in a professional setting is an important professional skill. But a professional who is not proficient with this skill at this point in their career means there are likely other personal factors involved. The pattern for how people manage conflict is set long before they start their professional lives.

The coaching process is usually triggered around a professional goal. This leads to a deeper exploration of the person. The result is the client becomes a more congruent human being. A congruent person is someone who is in harmony with who they are, what they say and what they do, no matter where they are. It is simply not true to believe someone is a different person at work and at home. People are not so easily fooled.

If your intuition says that there are personal factors contributing to disruptive behavior, trust your gut. But don’t try to fix it yourself. Provide a person who wants to improve a legitimate resource. Invest in a professional trained to help them personally and professionally.