Kelsall Coaching
Kelsall Coaching
Coaching FAQs
2. What’s the difference between
workplace coaching and life
coaching?
Life coaching can cover any of a broad spectrum of life issues, including family relationships and challenges (parenting, supporting elderly/infirm parents), navigating major life changes (moving house, town/country), living with chronic illness, or generally managing multiple activities, responsibilities and challenges.
Workplace coaching focuses on your workplace and/or career challenges and aspirations. Whilst I’d recommend including work-life balance in workplace coaching conversations and recognising the impact of (e.g. family) responsibilities and challenges on your ability to achieve what you want and need to at work, the primary focus remains on your work.
3. What’s the difference between
workplace coaching and
executive coaching?
Both terms describe coaching with a workplace/career focus and the same general coaching approach. “Executive” coaching may be taken to imply that clients would normally be employed at executive level. Consequently, I’ve chosen not to use this term, because I want to offer coaching to anyone in need of this type of support, whether you’re in (or seeking) your first job, first promotion, mid-career or senior management/leadership.
1. What’s the difference between
workplace coaching and
workplace mentoring?
Mentoring is typically the support given by a senior, experienced practitioner in a particular field to a more junior, inexperienced employee. Mentoring majors on advice-giving.
Workplace coaching, in contrast, deliberately downplays advice-giving: coaches work, instead, by asking pertinent questions to help clients see their situation more clearly and/or from a different perspective, in order to identify undiscovered or untried ways forward.
4. So is coaching just a “talking
shop”?
No: coaching conversations are purposeful and have focus. A good coach will create space for an open-ended conversation that doesn’t shut down perspectives, options or creative thinking, but will ultimately define direction and focus to support the client in achieving their coaching goals.
5. What’s the difference between
coaching and counselling?
Perhaps the simplest way to define the difference is that coaching is generally about looking forward in time, whilst counselling is generally focussed on looking back. In other words, coaching involves defining a current workplace challenge (or challenges), detailing the scope of these, and then focusing on actions to achieve positive change.
Counselling, in contrast, involves ‘unpacking’ past events, such as bereavements and other losses, family/childhood histories, personal assaults and trauma of any kind, in order to make life manageable now.
There are clearly overlaps between the two. Challenges that are explored in the context of coaching may in some cases be exacerbated by our back-stories: conversely, the ultimate aim of seeking counselling is generally to achieve a better future, albeit that the remedy lies in exploring the past.
However, a good coach will become aware if a perceived coaching need transpires – sooner or later - to be a counselling need, and will advise you accordingly.
6. Can’t AI do this instead of a
real-life coach?
You can try it if you like! AI tools can certainly ask you questions, and ask follow-up questions based on your responses. And AI tools have access to large databases, so they are informed of coaching theories.
Good coaching is, however, much more about practice than theory.
AI tools do not have true “intelligence”; they are not sentient; they don’t possess discernment, perceptiveness, compassion or empathy (although they can simulate some of these), and they have no experience of human relationships – which are at the heart of almost all workplace challenges.
If this interests you, we can certainly explore ways of using AI to support coaching, but I wouldn’t trust an AI engine as a substitute for a human coach, just as I wouldn’t trust it as a substitute for any other form of meaningful human interaction.