The Context of Coaching

The highest calling of coach/mentors today is to become guides to a transient culture—including a transient corporate culture:  to grow strong persons, committed work teams, dynamic work systems, and sustainable communities that function from the grass roots up. Effective mentors model the future because they are willing to invent it, design it, and insist on it. As for change, they see change as an asset for getting the job done, not a cramp in the tummy.

To model mastery

Much is being written about the fragmentation of our culture today, with many self-interest groups and culture-wide anger, violence, and cynicism. Mentor/coaches are not a social solution to this, but they represent one mature resource that can make a difference. Coaches work in small but deep ways to anchor people and human systems in a public philosophy of trust, vision, strategic thinking, conflict management, and collaboration. Effective coaches inspire coachees with a sense of self-reliance and deep-seated determination much needed in these uncommon times.

People need to learn how to grow themselves in our kind of world—turbulent, fast-moving, unpredictable—and that requires personal maturation and mastery. Coaches facilitate the development of radar and gyroscopes in people and in human systems, so coachees can master their own lives, careers, and the flow beyond.

• Radar is the ability to decipher your best choices within the rapidly changing environment you move through, day by day, month by month. Coaches facilitate pathways for journeying ahead even when destinations are not clear.
• A gyroscope is a perpetual balancing mechanism moving through environments of constant change and unanticipated interaction; gyroscopic ability is a central capacity coaches develop in their clients—redefining identity, ego strength, and personal commitment. Mentor/coaches enable clients—individual and organizational—to anchor themselves to their own values, confidence, compelling visions, and emerging plans.

If individual adults can develop dependable radar systems for guiding themselves in and out of the never-ending maze of daily life, they can sustain confidence, self-esteem, and hope. If individual adults can develop dependable gyroscopes for guiding themselves through the indefiniteness of their social experience, creating sufficient inner stability and outer constancy for living their beliefs, they will have surplus energy and courage for designing work and communities in our kind of world.