Who needs a coach? (2)

THE Valentine has come and gone, but the pains it brought along will linger for a long time. I really can’t remember how we got into this Valentine groove over here, but I see that the younger generation is determined to make us all become willing or unwilling celebrants of this event, which origin is still very much unclear.

There are three St. Valentines recorded in Catholic history and it’s difficult to say to which of them the day is dedicated. The adherents have convinced themselves and would want to convince the rest of us to celebrate the day because it is dedicated to the celebration of love. No problem, we all need love and once presented this way, it becomes a major attraction.

However, love or no love, going through the traffic pains in the city of Port Harcourt every Valentine Day is no attraction. We are not normally good with managing ourselves on the road in Nigeria, but on this day year in, year out, the god of love seems to overwhelm vehicle drivers in a chaotic frenzy. This last Thursday, all we needed to do, to be a part of the celebration was sit tight in our cars on any of the major roads in the city watching young people do their own thing either on the side walks or in their cars blaring out loud music.

The way the music blared, it was as if many of them were angry for not being able to get to their love nests or pre-assigned valentine celebration venues. It was that bad. Those of us who were lucky spent at least five hours on that chaotic traffic. But for others, depending on the route, it was the whole night.

But there is a more attractive reason why the day has become important – for its commercial value. For this reason alone, Valentine is going to be more heavily celebrated and if its value must appreciate, the adherents are going to have to get more innovative. Already, there are spectacular strides being made in this regard.

You have heard about Relationship Coaching – although I confess that not much of that is happening in Nigeria. There is a greater need for coaches who can teach on the tenets of love in our society. The younger people certainly need some more guidance in how to manage and express their love. In the United States of America and some other developed countries, the services of Relationship Coaches are readily available and people are ever willing to pay for those services. However, things are moving far beyond this level now.

The new thing in town is love contracts. It is not marriage, but like every contract, it has its obligations and liabilities and it is not just being organizations are being charged to consider and resolve the limits of their liability in the case of a love contract between two employees. On Valentine’s Day, I received an invitation to attend a seminar in the USA in the weeks ahead on this subject. I am still considering this invitation, not because I do not see its relevance, but simply because I am not opting for love coaching as an additional responsibility. This is the extent to which employees have now stretched their demands for coaching.

In our previous write-up, we established the fact that coaching is mainly focused on helping others achieve results. This focus may be on improving skills or meeting specific performance goals. In this way, coaching helps the individual to achieve his potentials, but plays less on the personal side of things. When the need is for greater attention on the personal, coaching at that point is crossing over to becoming mentoring.

We will be exploring the major differences between coaching and mentoring in our next write-up. In the meantime, it is proper to also say that coaching is different from psychological therapies, because coaching does not seek to resolve the deeper underlying issues that are the cause of serious problems like poor motivation, low self-esteem and poor job performance.

Coaching makes the basic assumption that the clients are self-aware and only require coaching for a short period of time to address surface issues that impact their performance. Therefore, it is possible for someone who has underlying issues to experience success within a coaching context even if the underlying issues are not resolved.

However, a coaching process can get stuck because the client has these underlying issues. When this occurs, a psychologist should be brought in to take charge, because coaching cannot help much in such a situation. Basically, we can summarise the key responsibilities of the employee coach as:

Encouraging clients to continually improve competencies and to empower them to be able to identify solutions and actions

Supporting clients in setting appropriate goals and methods of assessing progress in relation to these goals

Teaching the creative application of tools and techniques, which, in most cases, will include one-to-one training in the work place.

Facilitating the exploration of needs, motivations, desires, skills and thought processes to assist the individual in making real, lasting change.

Transferring skills to the clients and opening them to share in the experiences of the coach