In Praise of Coaching

“Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change” (Jim Rohn)

It has been a long eight months. Little did we think when we started our Diploma in Life and Workplace Coaching last October that it would have made a difference to our lives and how we viewed ourselves and others. Since May 21 st we are qualified coaches!

When I started on that journey, I thought I knew a lot about coaching. I thought that I had been coaching most of my life – as a teacher, deputy and a school principal. I thought I would find it easy. What I thought might be difficult was giving up a full weekend once a month to spend time with others learning to coach. I did not relish the idea of answering questions, reading books and doing pro-bono coaching at night and at weekends.I dreaded the thought of writing the essays at the end of the course. I firmly believed that the best person to coach a school principal like myself was another school principal who understood my job, as they had walked in the same shoes as I had.

I was wrong on many counts. I thoroughly enjoyed that weekend every month and began to really look forward to meeting up with a group of people who were on the same journey as myself. They were almost all younger than me, worked in a variety of different jobs and they came from many different countries around the globe. Such diversity really enriched my experience and it began to dawn on me that almost all of my professional learning in the past 21 years in school leadership has been in the company of other school principals and educators.This is probably why I enjoyed the course so much.

Some fellow students came from international companies that promote coaching within their organisations. In schools we do not as yet have a coaching culture and I believe we have a lot to learn from successful companies who offer regular coaching to their employees and who support a number of employees to train as coaches each year. I very much enjoyed reading the books throughout the year. “The Four Agreements” (Don Miguel Ruiz), “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” (Deepak Chopra) and in particular “The Power of Now” (Eckhart Tolle) all resonated with me and I learned a lot from their simple messages. The skills training particularly in the areas of listening, questioning, observing body language and summarising was especially useful in both my professional and personal life. The numerous peer –coaching practice sessions helped me to self-reflect and set new goals for myself.

The opportunity to have four coaching sessions with a qualified professional coach was an excellent learning experience .I am now convinced about the power of coaching. I have learned that what I thought I was doing as a school leader was definitely not coaching. Coaching is more about “unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance” (John Whitmore: “Coaching for Performance”) and thus enable individuals to learn and reflect rather than giving them solutions to their problems.

So we have come to the end of a very enjoyable journey. We, in CSL, undertook this coaching course, not to practise as coaches but to gain a better and clearer understanding of coaching and its potential in the world of education. CSL is tendering for a professional coaching service to provide coaching to principals in the education centre regions around the country. This service will be invaluable to all principals but particularly to those who can identify a challenge which they are facing. Principals should not expect to find solutions to their problems/challenges from the coaches but they can expect that they will have the time and space to reflect on those challenges and come up with new solutions that will help them, not only in one particular situation but in similar circumstances in the future. They can also expect to learn more about themselves.

This will be a confidential service and access to the service will be by direct contact between the coaching provider and the principal. We expect to launch this service in the autumn – so keep an eye on our website over the next few months.  I now know that if I was back in school as a leader, I would really like to avail of this service. I also would not expect the professional coach to have experience in school leadership as the inclination to give the solution can be very strong when you are familiar with a particular profession. Coaching is not about the coach – it is all about the client coming to their own realisations and conclusions and learning more about themselves. The clients can then take pride in how far they have come and have faith in how far they can go.

I saw this sign yesterday – “Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life. Tiptoe if you must but take the step” Be open to the all the possibilities that coaching can offer!


CSL is funded by the Teacher Education Section (TES) of the Department of Education (DE)
This service is managed by Clare Education Centre.