The Coach Approach: The Four Stages of Awareness

Coaching is a highly effective way to move past the barriers that hold you back in your life instead of getting stuck in a pattern of hoping to succeed.

Success in life is not about hope or luck or wishes. Success in life is about breaking through the barriers that hold you back by expanding who you are so that what you do and how you do it is effective and, at the same time, totally you.

Why Choose the Coach Approach?

The coach approach can help you do just that. You no longer have to live a life waiting to succeed or holding back because of fear. You can use the coach approach to move to higher and higher levels of who you are in this world and have unequaled success in your life.

Life does not have to be hard. We are trained to think that it is. Success in business does not have to be hard. We are trained to think that it is elusive. When you apply the coach approach to your life and business, the world becomes a softer place where you achieve everything you desire and deserve.

A Great Coach: More Than Just Guidance

A good coach is someone who can guide you to achieve your dreams. A great coach is someone who gives you the tools to guide yourself to achieve your dreams. My objective in creating this post is to give you the tools you need to apply the coach approach.

The Four Stages of Awareness

When we talk about the coach approach, the first thing we have to look at is your come-from point. What is your overall perspective on life? Is it hard, is it difficult, is it fun, is it impossible? The coach approach starts with an overall perspective or come-from point that problems are actually opportunities for personal growth and positive change. Any come-from point with a negative perspective will not serve you in your quest to move forward in your life and business.

There are actually four general stages of awareness, or come-from points, that you might fall into. As we go through them, be honest with yourself as to where you are so that you can create a new possibility for your life.

1. Commitment to Powerlessness

During this stage, you believe that life and your experience of it happen to you. You feel powerless and get caught up in blaming others or the world for your circumstances.

2. Commitment to Overcoming Challenges

In this stage, you believe that you can play a role in creating your life. You seek to improve your experience by changing your external circumstances. You get caught up in working hard to create external change.

3. Commitment to Power via Ownership

Now we are getting somewhere. In this stage, you believe that reality is a reflection of the inner self. You seek to create change by taking responsibility for your choices, beliefs, and emotions, and cultivating a more loving relationship with yourself. You discover the resources of your inner power.

4. Commitment to Receiving for No Reason

This stage is available to all of us. During this stage, you awaken to the knowing that you are completely loved by the source of all love. Rather than seeking to improve your experience, you allow yourself to love and be loved. You receive, not because you earned it, but simply because you are you, and that is enough.

It is important to note that moving through the previous three stages, no matter where you start, prepares you to receive in the fourth stage. How can you know light if you have never known dark? How can you know what you want if you never experience what you don’t want?

Identifying Your “Come-From” Point

So, where are you? What is your come-from point? Are you powerless in your life and a victim of your circumstances? Or are you constantly overcoming life’s challenges? Are you owning your own responsibilities in creating the life of your dreams, or are you receiving for no reason?

Through the process of coaching, you can identify and move to any stage that serves you.

The Key Elements of the Coach Approach

Beyond your current come-from point or stage of awareness, there are several different elements that combine to create the coach approach. There is a skill set, a state of being, and several key distinctions of what coaching is and what coaching isn’t. For our purposes today, let’s start with what coaching is and what coaching isn’t. In the coming months, we will look at the tools and distinctions that create the coach approach.

Coaching is a tool used to develop people and organizations to identify their purpose and to create a life or business that allows and supports that purpose. As cliché as it might sound, coaching really is about you achieving your full potential and living with integrity and purpose.

The coaching relationship is inter-developmental, meaning that both the coach and the coachee develop and grow throughout the process of coaching.

In a healthy coaching relationship, there is no dependency upon the coach, and the coach is not dependent upon the client.

What Coaching Is and Isn’t

Coaching is Not Mentoring

A mentor tells you how they did it. A coach asks you the questions you need to explore to find your own path.

Coaching is Not Therapy

A therapist is someone who digs into your past in order to help you process the negative emotions that might be holding you back. A coach keeps you focused on what you are doing right now so that you create a compelling future for yourself or your business. The therapist approach is to assume there is something wrong that needs to be fixed. The coach approach is to assume that you are perfect exactly as you are, given everything that you have been through, and that your beliefs might not be supporting your vision. There is certainly a time and a place for therapy, and coaches will refer someone to a therapist if there are issues from the past that need healing. A coach works with healthy people who may be standing in their own way.

Coaching is Not Management

A manager or director is a person who is in a position above the person and who tells the person what to do and what not to do. A coach is a person who is objective in the situation and asks the person to find the best, most personally aligned way to do something. A coach has nothing to lose or gain by the success of the coachee (except knowledge of a job well done). That is not to say that if you are a manager or director, you cannot use the coach approach, as it is a profound, useful, and extremely effective way to move people toward their goals.

Coaching is Not Consulting

A consultant is a person who has a certain expertise in a specific area and tells people or companies what to do and how to do it. Consultative sales is an effective way to sell, but combined with the coach approach—in other words, making sure you understand the needs of the customer by asking questions and supporting the customer in their own problem resolution—is an even more effective way to sell products and services.

Coaching is Not About Motivation

External motivation of any kind pulls people off their path. A coach is in the business of guiding their coachees to find their own internal motivation for achieving their purpose.

A coach keeps every aspect of their coachee in mind while in the dance of the coach approach.

The Role of a Master Coach

As you may know, I was on faculty at Coach U for 20 years, and one of the first ICF-certified training school for coaches and the first school to publish college textbooks for the teaching and learning of coaching. In the Coach U textbook Personal and Corporate Coach Training Handbook, there is a brief and powerful description of what the coach does in terms of developing all areas of a coachee.

A master coach seeks to develop the coachee in every sphere of influence and every part of their being and doing.

In developing the whole person, a coach works with the coachee in all five of the following areas:

Areas of Development in the Coach Approach

1. Mind – The Ability to Think

   • Improve their good judgment

   • Reduce reaction time to events

   • Give the new ways to make decisions

   • Expand ways of thinking

   • Increase their capacity to learn quickly

   

2. Heart – The Ability to Feel

   • Improving their ability to distinguish between a feeling and an emotional reaction

   • Increasing their ability to give and receive love

   • Expanding their ability to relate and connect with others

    

3. Spirit – The Ability to Enjoy

   • Providing expanded perspective

   • Increasing the capacity for inner peace

   • Helping them become more aware of self, others, and life in general 

4. Business – The Ability to Succeed in Business

   • Adding value to their customers faster than their competitors

   • Increasing their ability to enjoy their work

   • Improving their innovative and creative abilities

   • Assisting with the balance of life and work 

5. Environment – Awareness and Control of Surroundings

   • Increasing the awareness of surroundings and the ability to control them

   • Improving available resources and network

   • Upgrading home and office environments

   • Improving health and wellness through the environment

There are several other areas that coaches work on with their coachees on a regular and objective basis as well. These include personal responsibility, relationships, developing and maintaining a healthy body, eliminating stress, creating a vision, attraction principles, building wealth and reserves, living in their purpose, living in integrity, and staying focused in the present.

Anyone who calls themselves a coach who does not work in all of these areas with their coachee is not really a coach. They may employ coaching skills, but unless the process is holistic, chances are they are being a consultant, director, mentor, or manager.

With Love,
Jille